Hasta Luego, I’m heading to Spain for the next eight months. It started with an email from an online jobsite, their weekly roundup. I wasn’t actively looking for a job, I’d just never unsubscribed because you never know when an interesting opportunity will present itself.
And, present itself it did. Auxiliaries de Conversáción. I’d ignored it a few times, but it kept appearing in the feed, so curiosity got the better of me. Graduates could apply to work as English Language Assistants in Spain and get paid a monthly allowance to cover living costs. Nice!
I was sure they’d be looking for young, graduate teachers not older, don’t want a real job people, but I was surprisingly wrong! Checking the fine-print I discovered all I needed was a degree of some description, check, and to be under the age of 60 years, check again.
What exactly is an Auxiliaries de Conversáción?
The main role of participants in the Auxiliaries Programme is to support teachers of English or of other subjects delivered in English, in primary, secondary or adult language schools. This is done under the supervision and guidance of a classroom teacher and as an assistant you are not responsible for any discipline or evaluation.
The weekly requirement for assistants is to work a minimum of 12 class hours (16 hours in Madrid and Valencia), four days a week. This can include giving talks about your home country and culture or participating in extracurricular activities, such as field trips, school exchanges, concerts and sports carnivals.
Prerequisites for Auxiliaries de Conversáción
To apply you need to be a current university student in your second year or more, hold a bachelor’s degree, postgraduate degree or higher. Additional requirements include:
- Being a citizen of the applicant country
- A native English speaker or have native-level English
- Be of sound mental and physical health
- Have a clean police record.
Applications are submitted via the government website, which isn’t as easy as it sounds because you need to navigate around a site that is, quite rightly, all in Spanish. After some trial and error and plenty of help from the lovely man at the Spanish Consulate in Wellington, my application was ready, sent and now just a matter of wait and see.
My experience with the process
After about a month, I received an email saying I had been provisionally accepted and that I could expect a letter of offer from my allocated school in the next two months. It also recommended I did not book flights until I had my visa. Visa’s need to be applied for in person at the Consulate in Wellington and can take up to one month to process.
Applications for the programme closed early April and I received my provisional acceptance email in May. The letter of offer and details of my placement arrived in July. Before I had received my letter of offer, I was invited to attend one of the orientations organised for participants. The one closest to me was to be held in Dunedin, a week after I was due to fly to Australia for my friends 50th birthday.
The dilemma, do I change my flight, drive to Dunedin to attend the orientation, while at this point, still not sure I was, in any reality, heading to Spain. Or, do I stick with my initial plans and then fly to Auckland later to attend the orientation being held there.
I chose the latter, for two reasons; it meant I didn’t miss JD’s birthday and it also gave me an opportunity to catch up with my bestie who currently lives in Auckland. At the orientation I did at least learn the provisional acceptance meant they were happy to take me if I was happy to accept the letter of offer from my designated school.
Once you do receive your letter of offer it’s a good idea to try and contact your school before arriving in Spain, if you’re lucky they will give you an idea what to expect and perhaps offer some assistance when you arrive. Just remember that by the time you receive your designated school, the holidays are generally in full swing so you won’t get a quick response to emails. Persevere and someone will get back to you eventually.
Back in Australia, by the time my letter of offer finally arrived, meant heading to New Zealand again to submit my application in person. Because we were about to settle on and move into our new unit, I couldn’t afford the time to be waiting in New Zealand for a month while my visa was processed, and passport returned. Time to put that Australian citizenship to use.
Dual citizenship is one thing, but an Aussie passport! It hurt but it had to be done.
The passport however didn’t arrive before I’d left. Then of course my Kiwi passport, replete with Spanish visa turned up after I gone back to Australia, so I ended up with passports chasing me both sides of the ditch.
What you get as an Auxiliaries de Conversáción
Aside from the opportunity to live and work in Spain, and let’s face it, at my age I’d never for a minute thought it a possibility, you receive a tax-free monthly allowance of €700 (€1000 in Madrid and Valencia), health insurance and paid school holidays over Christmas and Easter. This doesn’t even factor in the many other public and regional holidays.
Lodging, flight from and to the country of origin and meals are at your own expense.
Being able to speak Spanish is not compulsory but a little knowledge of the language goes a long way to making life easier once you arrive. I quickly learnt that my rudimentary Spanish was not as good as I thought it was and I was basically pronouncing EVERYTHING wrong!
The job itself is easy, you tend to just repeat what the teacher tells you. Don’t expect that you will be assisting in English classes though. Six of my 12 hours is spent in Physical Education, five in Art and only one hour with an English class.
