School Enrolment in Spain: the Points Race in March, the Capacity Queue in September
Expatronus Team3 September 20268 min read
A school place in Spain is guaranteed. The school is not. Admission is decided by a points score in a spring window that closes six months before term, and arriving later puts you on a different route entirely.
Term in Spain starts in the second week of September. For most of the families already here, the decision that put their child in one particular classroom was taken in March, six months earlier, in an application window that new arrivals rarely hear about until it has closed. If you are moving with children, that gap is the most useful thing to understand about the system: a school place is guaranteed, a specific school is not.
The part that is not a competition
Basic education in Spain runs from six to sixteen, and it is both compulsory and free. Educación Primaria covers ages six to twelve, and Educación Secundaria Obligatoria, universally shortened to the ESO, covers twelve to sixteen.
Article 9 of the Ley Orgánica 4/2000 gives foreign minors under sixteen who are living in Spain the same right and the same duty to that education as Spanish children, and it applies regardless of the family's administrative situation. In practice that means a child cannot be refused schooling because the residence cards have not arrived yet. What is not guaranteed is the school you had in mind. That is decided by a points score, on a calendar, and the calendar is what catches people out.
Admission runs on a regional calendar, months ahead of term
Education is devolved, so each comunidad autónoma runs its own proceso de admisión with its own dates, its own forms and its own scoring. The shape is consistent even where the details are not: one ordinary application window in spring, deciding places for the course that starts the following September, followed by an extraordinary phase for whatever is left over.
The Comunidad de Madrid calendar for the 2026/2027 course is a good model of the rhythm, because most regions run something similar a few weeks either side of it.
- Applications: 11 to 25 March 2026, online through the regional portal or in person at the school named as first choice
- Public draw to settle tied scores: 8 April
- Provisional lists of first-choice applicants: 14 April, with claims from 15 to 17 April
- Final scores published: 7 May
- Admission results: 27 May
- Enrolment itself, the matrícula: from 11 June, running to late June for primary and into early July for secondary
- Extraordinary process for remaining vacancies: from 25 June onwards
Two features of that timetable matter more than the exact dates. It closes long before anyone starts thinking about term. And it works on a single application that names your schools in order of preference, not on separate applications sent to each school in the hope that one says yes.
Filing is administrative rather than persuasive. There is no interview, no letter explaining why your child would suit the school, and no advantage in applying on the first morning rather than the last. You complete one form, rank your choices, and the points on that form do the rest. Madrid lets families authorise the administration to check their registered address directly, which removes one certificate from the pile but makes the accuracy of that registration rather important.
It is a points score, not a queue
The scoring exercise is called the baremación, and it splits into criteria that vary between schools and criteria that are common to all of them. In Madrid the two that decide most ordinary cases are siblings and geography.
- One sibling already enrolled at the school: 15 points. Two or more: 30 points
- The family home, or the workplace of either parent, in the same municipality as the school: 12 points
- In Madrid city, one additional point where that home or workplace sits in the same municipal district as the school
- Common criteria applied identically everywhere: minimum income support, large family status, recognised disability, single parent families and multiple births
Read that list again with a relocation in mind. A family with no siblings in the system and no Spanish address yet arrives at the scoring table with almost nothing on it. That is not a flaw in the process, it is simply what the process measures, and it is why the address you choose is a school decision as much as a housing one.
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Proximity points are calculated from your registered address, the empadronamiento. Whatever address you registered at is the address the system will use, temporary flat included. Registering in the wrong barrio in February can cost the twelve points that decide the place in March, and the workplace alternative only helps if a parent already has a Spanish employer.
Because the scale is coarse, ties are ordinary rather than exceptional. Madrid settles them with a public draw, held on 8 April 2026, which produces a random value used to order every tied application in the region for the rest of the process. There is nothing to appeal in a draw, which is the argument for scoring real points rather than hoping.
What happens if you arrive in September
Landing after the ordinary window does not put you at the back of the points queue. It takes you out of the points system altogether. The file goes instead to the comisión de escolarización, the schooling commission that operates at municipal or provincial level, and its job is to place every child from whatever capacity is left rather than to rank them.
Names differ by region, escolarización extraordinaria in one place and sobrevenida in another, and the door is sometimes the provincial education delegation and sometimes the municipal schooling office. The mechanism is the same everywhere. You will be offered a school with room in it. You will typically not be offered a choice, and the school with room in it in October is rarely the one that filled up in May.
✅The realistic plan for an autumn arrival has two steps. Take the place the commission offers, so the child is in a classroom within weeks. Then file a proper application in the next ordinary window, from your real address, with the proximity points you now qualify for. Moving school at the start of a new course is ordinary in Spain. Waiting at home for a preferred place is not.
Three kinds of school, two of them on the same list
Público means a state school, free and allocated through the process above. Concertado means a privately run school funded with public money, very often with a religious foundation behind it, and the important point for a newcomer is that it sits inside the same admission process and is scored with the same baremo. Families are generally asked for voluntary contributions covering materials, activities, lunch and uniform, so free is not quite the same word it is in the state sector.
Privado, which includes the international schools, sits outside the whole apparatus. Those schools set their own criteria, run their own calendars, charge their own fees and are approached directly, usually a good deal earlier than the public process runs. If an international curriculum matters to your family, that conversation belongs near the start of the move rather than after it.
One more variable is worth naming early. In regions with a co-official language, Catalonia, the Comunitat Valenciana, the Basque Country, Galicia and the Balearics among them, a large part of the teaching happens in that language. Schools generally run support arrangements for pupils arriving without it, and how well those work locally is a fair question to ask before you commit to a barrio.
The recognition step that only starts after 4º ESO
Most families expect the hard part to be getting foreign schooling recognised. For compulsory education, there is no such part. The Ministry of Education states plainly that pupils arriving from a foreign education system into primary or secondary education do not apply for homologación: they are enrolled by age, with the school assessing what the child knows and where they fit. No credential procedure stands between a newly arrived ten year old and a classroom.
The procedure appears further up the ladder. Homologación and convalidación are required where a Spanish qualification is a condition of entry, which in practice means Bachillerato and Formación Profesional, since both are entered on the Graduado en ESO. A teenager arriving at sixteen is therefore in a completely different administrative position from a sibling arriving at eleven, even though they moved on the same flight.
The volante that lets a teenager start on time
Spanish administration has an answer for the waiting, and it is worth knowing by name. Article 15.2 of Real Decreto 104/1988 allows a school to admit a student conditionally while a homologación or convalidación file is open and unresolved. The proof of that is the volante de inscripción condicional, stamped by the registry where the application was filed.
Within its validity, the volante allows enrolment on the same terms as if recognition had already been granted, and regional education departments describe it as valid for enrolments and official examinations for six months from the date it carries. It is the document that keeps a September start possible while a file sits in a ministry queue.
⚠️Conditional means exactly that. Where a file is finally resolved against the applicant, the conditional enrolment and any examination results that followed from it are annulled. The volante buys time, not certainty, which is the argument for opening the recognition file early in the move rather than in the last week of August.
The documents worth preparing before you fly
- A recent certificado de empadronamiento for the family's Spanish address
- Passports, plus NIE or TIE for the parents and the child once you have them
- The child's birth certificate, apostilled and translated by a sworn translator where it was issued abroad
- The libro de familia, if your family has one
- The vaccination record, since schools generally ask to see it
- School reports from the previous school, and any leaving certificate it will issue
- For a Bachillerato or Formación Profesional entrant, the recognition application receipt and the volante de inscripción condicional
✅The apostille and the sworn translation are the slow items, and both are usually handled in the country that issued the document. Starting them before you move rather than after is often the difference between filing inside the spring window and missing it by a fortnight.
How to time the whole thing
- If you can choose when you land, arrive before the spring window, register at the address you actually intend to live at, and apply through the ordinary process
- If you cannot, go to the schooling commission on arrival, accept the place it offers, and treat it as a bridge to the next ordinary round rather than a permanent answer
- If a child is entering Bachillerato or Formación Profesional, open the recognition file first and ask for the volante, because that is the only part of this with a queue you do not control
- Check your own region's dates rather than Madrid's, since the same process can run several weeks earlier or later a province away
Almost all of the friction here is administrative rather than educational: a calendar you were not told about, an address that scores points, a certificate that needs a stamp from another country. If you would rather not learn a regional admission process from scratch while unpacking boxes, a relocation specialist working in your comunidad autónoma will know this year's dates and which schools still had capacity last autumn. You can start a free relocation assessment and be matched with one.
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Disclaimer: The information in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. Laws and regulations change frequently — always verify with official sources and consult a qualified professional before making any decisions. Contact our specialists or start your free assessment for personalised guidance.
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