Understanding the motivations for folks choosing to move abroad is probably a challenge because I think my own motivations have only really started to become clear recently. There are definitely people close to me who don't understand the motivations that clearly. I know some of my in-laws don't comprehend the reasons for the risks. They see a well paid job in the United Kingdom with reasonable prospects and a decent pension and can't understand why the need for a change that gives up on some of those items.
Over the past couple of years Sally and I both noticed work eating ever more into homelife. Time and pressure of work began to gnaw away at weekends until work was the dominating aspect of life. I suppose that there comes a realtisation that the treadmill you're on could possibly continue ad infinitum. If I get a promotion we may well be able to move house, possibly change the car, but ultimately we will still be working long hours to pay the bills to buy the house, the car and the other luxuries life affords us. For what purpose? Partly then one of the motivations becomes the need to step off a career ladder that brings lots of frustrations that cannot be changed - mostly due to the political climate in the United Kingdom, of which more later. Recognising that working hard to one day own a house and pull down a much worked and saved for pension is not a really valid way to live. There is a need to enjoy and taste life on a daily basis and not trudge away for years trying to achieve something by the time we reach sixty five years old.
Politically this country is changing too and that is reflected in all public sector work. The lack of trust in teachers' abilities to do the job has been clear since this government came to power in 1997 and the continuous erroding of the profession has led to in, my opinion, a stagnation. There are now teachers coming into the profession who have only known strategies for teaching that all research proves as a failure. Why the need for these strategies? The centralised control of education in the United Kingdom is stifling any creativity in the classroom and consequently creating a huge 'tail' of pupils labelled as Special Educational Needs. These pupils don't have (most of them) Special Needs at all. They have simply got bored by school at a young age and switched off. Being a part of this state run destruction of the education of an entire generation is painful and frustrating and wanting to opt out and use my teaching skills elsewhere is a big motivator.
Am I ranting - maybe. My wife and I have just started taking our Spanish exams at the end of six months of tuition. This is a result of realising that relocating to another country is made far easier if you have some command of the language. The examinations are a similar style and standard to the current language GCSE examinations. I was shocked to see how easy it is to prepare for the exams and even to abuse the procedure if you were so inclined. A written exam where not only are you allowed to take in the dictionary but are also given the topic a couple of weeks before the exam for example. It wasn't many years ago (1988) when I took my GCSEs and then the exam content was a mystery until you opened the paper. Never mind - standards must be rising because so many more pupils are passing the exams at a higher level!
Other motivations for moving abroad surround the lifestyle that a move to a mediterannean climate offers. Here in the United Kingdom we spend what little money we have left after taxes trying to entertain the family on wet weekends. This usually involves parting with a little money to purchase indoor entertainment. The notion of 300 days a year of sunshine and a life far more focussed to outside living is another big motivator. It is particularly so for my wife and I when we look at the way our daughter, now six, is absorbing television and fast becoming a part of the 'must have' consumer culture. Opting out of that as much as possible is certainly a big motivator.
If the relocation delivers on some of our aims then it will be successful. We aim to have more time together as a family, unpressured by the reams of paperwork demanded by the United Kingdom education system. We aim to have a lifestyle involving more outside time - time around the pool as opposed to time around the television. We aim to opt out of the consumer culture as much as possible and start valuing what we see and our time together as opposed to the trinkets of modern living. We aim to have a bilingual daughter who,by the time she completes school, has more confidence than her parents had at her age, in her abilities to live and work anywhere in the world. Any aspects of these aims being fulfilled will qualify the reasons for moving and find us satisfied that our motivations for relocating were correct.
