Not quite the idyllic notion I had in mind...

This column first appeared in The Guardian on Friday April 28, 2006. You can read it in its original form here

Anybody British with a reasonable education always has a financial fallback when they travel abroad. When the money runs out, they can teach English. The demand for native speakers seems to remain insatiable. It was certainly a possibility that my wife, Barbara, had considered before we headed off for a life in Ibiza.

She was far better qualified than most ex-pats, having been a primary school teacher in Scotland before ill health forced her to quit. It was a job she loved and she'd long felt her skills and experience were being wasted.

Before we arrived on the island two years ago we had an idyllic notion of using those talents to help our Spanish-speaking neighbours with their English. We thought there would either be schoolchildren requiring additional tutoring or adults who wanted to add to their qualifications. In fact, she has found a call for her skills, but not from the sort of people we expected.

The demand has come from friends who are native English speakers and want some extra help for their primary school-age children. Barbara offers a partial solution to a dilemma that faces many adults who move abroad. It's alright for them to decide to change countries as often as they want, but is it fair for them to impose their nomadic lifestyle on their kids?

One way round their problem is to send their children to an international school where they will be taught in English. However, not only is this expensive, but it carries a built-in assumption that the family will return to the UK. That's fine for parents who have been posted overseas by an organisation, which will probably also pay the fees. It's not much use if you want to become part of the local community in a foreign country.

There are, after all, few better places to get to know your neighbours than at the school gates. Sending your kids elsewhere suggests you don't really want to be a full part of the community.

Houses and businesses can be sold. And, if the worst comes to the worst, family and friends in Britain are just a budget flight away. It may be difficult financially for adults to return to their roots, but it's surely much harder for their children to slot into an education system that uses what to them is basically a foreign language.

Their difficulty probably won't be speech. I've heard young children at play switching effortlessly between Spanish, German and English. But that doesn't mean they can write it down. Even when they study English at school the emphasis is conversational.

An added challenge in Ibiza is that a few years ago the local government decided Catalan would be the main teaching language across the curriculum. Catalan was banned under the Franco regime, so it's fairly easy for me to understand and even support this piece of cultural protectionism. But, I don't have kids.

If I did, I'd probably want them to at least have the option of British further education. It may not be superior to the Spanish system, but at least I have some understanding of how it works.

For those who do want their kids to keep up with the twists and turns of the curriculum in England or Scotland, every government document is posted on the web. Ploughing through them and making sense of the jargon is, however, another matter.

More useful are the lesson plans and teaching materials that are also available online, often for free. In fact, as so often with web-based information, the problem that Barbara has found is that there's just too much available. She's spent far more time online than actually with our friends' kids.

So for ex-pat parents with a web-literate former primary schoolteacher on tap, there is a way of avoiding the complete imposition of their lifestyle choices on their children. The rest, I suppose, will have to wait until Esperanto is universally adopted.