Yesterday, Monday, 136,000 pupils returned to school in the canton of Vaud. The new school year began in Geneva on the same day. It was 17 August. For anyone who has just arrived from Spain or has just spent the summer there, this can be hard to take in at first.
In Switzerland, there is no national start date for the school year. Each of the 26 cantons sets its own school calendar. The Confederation does not set any rules. Some cantons in German-speaking Switzerland start in a different week in August, whilst others start later. If you move from Vaud to Bern, or from Geneva to Basel, the school calendar changes completely. There is no coordination between linguistic regions. Each one goes at its own pace, in the most literal sense.
This is precisely what throws arriving Spanish families off balance. In Spain, with its differences between autonomous communities, the start of the new school year always revolves around mid-September. Here, the discussion in August is very real: ‘Have they started in your canton yet?’ A friend in Lausanne might tell you they have, whilst one in Lucerne might reply that their children still have two weeks to go. It’s not a misunderstanding. They are completely different systems, with no mechanism for coordination between them.
In the first year, when you find out in the second week of August that school starts in three days’ time, people’s reactions tend to be pretty much the same all over the world. And by the second year, you know what to expect. But in the first year, there’s always someone who rings the school to ask if they might have got the date wrong.