Parents can sometimes feel hopeless when it comes to difficulties with their children’s education. The school mediator service, established in 2018, can help deal with issues such as integrating children from immigrant backgrounds, the inclusion of special needs’ kids, potential dropouts and more.

“Parents can come and ask for help if they’re having problems with school,” Lis de Pina explains. “It’s also important to note that this allows us to centralise problems, [be they] systemic or structural.”

But it’s important to note that, per the service’s website, the school mediator “can only act after all other appropriate administrative procedures established within the framework of the school community by law have been exhausted.”

De Pina gives a notable example of how student needs are centralised: when Brexit occurred, “there were a lot of English people coming and it was difficult at the beginning to find schools,” de Pina explains.

The school mediator adds that the service is “competent for all private international schools and for public private schools, but not for the European school.”

This article first appeared in Delano’s 2023-2024 Expat Guide