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

FFifteen years ago, I moved to France with my husband and a growing baby bump, lured by the low house prices and the chance to quit our jobs as teachers. That was in 2009, when Facebook was still a novelty, Twitter was for birds and I wasn’t sure we’d need Wi-Fi in our new house. Gordon Brown was still prime minister, in case you needed another yardstick to know how long ago it was.

As we approach a general election and the potential return of a Labour government, I recently moved back to the UK. The decision was initially taken with some hesitation. After years of austerity, austerity and Covid, I was beginning to worry that the place I was returning to would feel as foreign as France had when I first arrived, with its impenetrable bureaucracy, shops that closed on Mondays and the usual lunchtime (and sometimes morning) drinking.

I was worried about poor public services (with councils in England having absorbed a 27% real-terms reduction in core spending power since 2010, who wouldn’t be?). About school places: with 23% of secondary schools in England at or above capacityI wondered where my children, now five, would go. And then there were the waiting times at the GP: in England, one in twenty patients now waits four weeks for an appointment. More than anything, I worried that the character of the country was changing; that the British people could be destroyed too.

But now that I have completed my journey home in April, I am pleased to say that this does not appear to be the case.

I taught in the UK before, so I know how tough life can be on the surface, even before the cuts. On my return, I’ve found that while schools are struggling with funding, there are positive changes too. The schools my children go to seem to care as much about children’s emotional wellbeing as they do about their academic performance – something I couldn’t have imagined when I left the UK in 2009, when the words “mental health” were so taboo that my doctor offered to leave “depression” off my note to help avoid stigma.

After a few weeks at his new school, my nine-year-old Robert came home a little upset. A boy had been mean to him and accused him of having “no friends.” I sent a note to his teacher, hoping she would keep an eye on him. She and the school did more than their best. He was moved to a new desk, where all the children he would be sitting with cheered him on when he arrived; he was given lots of compliments for his work, and guess who won “star of the week” that week? By the end of the week he was full of confidence. The principal replied to my thank-you note and said she just wanted the children to be happy.

Although French high schools are praised for their educational drive, they seem to lack this personal touch and place more value on grades than on emotional well-being. Everything is measured, graded out of 20 and given home almost daily (along with the average, highest and lowest scores in the class, so that your child knows exactly how they compare to others). One of my sons even had an exam in frisbee throwing.

Don’t get me wrong, schools in the UK need more funding and more teachers – one of my children is being taught by a substitute teacher because the school is struggling to fill a place. The teacher is doing a great job, but it’s a sign of the times that schools are struggling to retain teachers in what was once a stable and attractive (but difficult) career. I’ve noticed worn floors and thoroughly chipped paint in the buildings of my children’s schools, and I can’t help but worry about the effect this must be having on the morale of pupils and staff. But while the rot has set in at the infrastructure, it has yet to penetrate to the heart of the school.

I was surprised that I was also satisfied with the doctor. When I arrived at my local surgery to register seven new patients, I was worried that I would be shortchanged – the last thing overworked staff need is an increase in demand. But we were welcomed, looked after and treated efficiently. The time for a face-to-face appointment can be two weeks for non-urgent matters, but when I needed to speak to a doctor I was called the same day.

Of course, our problems were not urgent or desperate, and my comments are not meant to belittle the many stories of patient struggle under successive cost-cutting governments. But I have been amazed at how patient and respectful staff have been (and despite the fact that I seem to have forgotten how anything works).

Using a medical care app (unheard of in 2009, when no one I knew had a smartphone – and still not routinely used in France), I have had to ask for clarification on how to get a repeat prescription several times. But the staff have been friendly, even in the face of my incompetence, and I have never felt more of a burden than I probably am. The NHS is under pressure, but the staff are keeping things running admirably.

The cost of living has skyrocketed since I last lived here. Food banks existed when we moved (The Trussell Trust had 35 food bank centres in 2010) but not in huge numbers. There are now at least 1,300 and many collection points. The idea that so many people – even those who work – are unable to feed their families is devastating and it’s hard to believe that this is relatively common in modern Britain. What is surprising, though, is that I’ve also found that most of the people I meet at the supermarket checkout, exclaiming 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 surplus bread and pastries from the supermarket for parents to take home. People look out for each other and there is still optimism.