I returned to the UK after 15 years, fearing the worst. What I found shocked me | Gillian Harvey

Fifteen years ago, I moved to France with my husband and a growing baby bump. I was tempted by the low property prices and the chance to quit my job as a teacher. It was 2009, when Facebook was still a novelty, Twitter was only for birds, and you weren’t sure if you needed Wi-Fi in your new home. Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister, if you had to measure how long ago that was.

With the general election and the return of the Labour government looming, I recently returned to the UK. At first, I made the decision with some trepidation. After years of cuts, austerity and Covid, I began to worry that the place I was returning to would feel as alien as the France I had arrived in: a France with incomprehensible bureaucracy, shops that were closed on Mondays and a habit of drinking at lunchtime (and sometimes in the morning).

I worried about the poor state of public services (since 2010, local councils in England have absorbed a 27% real cut in core spending, who wouldn’t?). About school places: with 23% of secondary schools in England at or over capacity, I wondered where my five children would go. And then there were GP waiting times: one in 20 patients in England now waits four weeks for a doctor’s appointment. Above all, I worried that the character of the country had changed. I worried that Britain, too, might be broken.

But I'm glad that didn't happen after I returned home in April.

I taught in the UK and know how hard it is to start from scratch, even before austerity. Since returning, I have found that although schools are struggling with funding issues, there are also positive changes. My children’s school seems to care about their emotional wellbeing as much as their academic achievements. This would have been unthinkable when I left the UK in 2009. At the time, the word mental health was still taboo, and my doctor told me not to write the word depression on my sick leave certificate, which helped me avoid the stigma.

After a few weeks at a new school, my 9-year-old son Robert came home a little upset. He had been mean to a boy and was complaining that he had no friends. I thought I would write a note to the teacher and have her keep an eye on the situation. The teacher and the school did their best. He was moved to a new table and all the kids who sat with him cheered him on. He got lots of praise for his accomplishments and guess who got the star of the week? By the end of the week, he was full of confidence. The principal responded to my thank you note saying that she just wanted the kids to be happy.

French secondary schools are known for their educational passion, but they seem to lack this personal touch, and they value grades over emotional well-being. Everything is measured, graded on a scale of 20, and sent home almost every day (along with the average, top, and bottom scores of the class, so that you know exactly how your child compares to others). One of my sons had a Frisbee throw test.

Don’t get me wrong, schools in the UK need more money and more teachers. One of my children is being taught by a substitute teacher because they are struggling to fill a place at school. She is doing a great job, but it is a sign of the times that schools are struggling to keep teachers’ careers, which were once stable and attractive (and difficult). I have seen the old floors and peeling paint in the buildings my children attend and I can’t help but worry about the impact this is having on the morale of students and staff. But while the infrastructure is rotten, it has not yet reached the heart of the school.

I was also surprised to see the satisfaction of the doctors. When I arrived at the local hospital, I had 7 new patients registered and was worried that I would be neglected as the last thing the overworked staff needs is an increase in demand. However, we were welcomed, cared for and treated efficiently. For non-urgent cases, it can take 2 weeks to get an appointment in person, but when I needed to speak to a doctor, I got a call back the same day.

Of course, our problem was neither urgent nor dire, and my comment is not intended to belittle the many stories of patient conflict under successive cost-cutting governments, but I was struck by how patient and polite the staff were (and by the fact that I no longer seemed to know how things worked).

Using the medical app (which was unheard of in 2009, when no one I knew had a smartphone and in France it was still not common use) I had to ask several times for explanations on how to get repeat prescriptions. However, the staff were friendly, even in my incompetence, and never did anything that I would have done to annoy me. The NHS is under pressure, but the staff are doing a great job.

The cost of living has gone up since I last lived here. When we moved there were food banks (the Trussell Trust had 35 food bank centres in 2010) but not many. Now there are at least 1,300 and lots of collection points. The idea that so many people, even those who are employed, cannot support their families is devastating and hard to believe that this is relatively common in modern Britain. But surprisingly, most of the people I have met at the supermarket checkout who are screaming about their latest bill still have a sense of humour and hope that things will get better. A teacher at my child’s school collects leftover bread and pastries from the supermarket for parents to take home. People are looking out for each other and still optimistic.

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