Sending Parents on Assignment? Address Concerns about Educating Children Abroad
When you relocate an employee you may encounter push back about their children’s schooling. But if you address their underlying concerns, education does have to be an obstacle to relocation.
Parents today DO want to move overseas and to exotic places with their children. The younger generation of parents has been exposed to the advantages of global competency enough that they would love to offer this to their children at an early age – but only under what they consider to be the right circumstances. Most of today’s parents have studied abroad for at least a semester abroad during college. They have traveled extensively and are worldly-wise because of the internet. They hire Mandarin speaking nannies and take their children to exotic places even before they are old enough to appreciate it.
However, these same parents are very child-centered and worried about taking risks when it comes to their children. They worry about whether their child’s education abroad will be as good as (often these are other words for identical to) the one they are leaving behind. They worry about their children fitting in socially when abroad and academically when they return home. They worry about being prepared for entrance exams to re-enter schools back home and they worry about university acceptances. This generation of parents has raised their kids in a bubble – remember, theirs are the first cohort of children sporting ubiquitous bicycle helmets, whose children attend daily organized after-school activities and who have nannies walking their kids back and forth to school until advanced ages. They are terribly worried about their children being emotionally damaged because of difficult transitions.
So, it is not surprising that often HR finds that parents are reluctant to move. But their concerns can be alleviated by providing an appropriate combination of the following. Parents want:
1) Information
- Through the internet and their peers overseas they have enough information to feed their anxiety. Accurate information about age-grade relationships, how “good” schools are overseas, how the various available curricula compare to their child’s current curriculum – both on the way over and on repatriation, and how to navigate the social/emotional transitions can make them more comfortable. They need answers to the questions that incomplete information have generated.
2) Reassurance that everything will turn out alright in each of the categories mentioned above
- They need to be able speak to someone who has gone through this personally with their own children and who understands the actual educational consequences of the decisions they are making. Someone who is empathetic but not emotionally involved with them is preferable.
3) Access to the schools that their colleagues are talking about – or ones that are equally suitable
- Most easily attained when facilitated by a professional who understands and is connected to the local education climate
- Curriculum that is comparable so that they feel knowledge and credits can easily be transferred to schools back home is key in helping parents understand that other alternatives can indeed be viable options
4) Someone to accurately sort out answers to their questions
Families moving internationally need to know whether or not there are international schools nearby, to what extent they these are full, and to what degree they are filled with locals versus expats. They also need to understand whether local schools may be an option at their child’s age and, if so, how to prepare their child for a local school experience, to supplement the education if necessary and how to ease reentry into schools when repatriating.
Discomfort when confronting the unknown is human nature. But if HR is aware of parents’ concerns about schooling it is possible to remove uncertainty that may be an obstacle to relocation and to give parents comfort when choosing the opportunity to educate their children in another country.
Source: School Choice International
