Approaching Preschool Support Policy

Continuing our series of blogs related to Education Benefits policy conversations that we’ve been having with our corporate clients, this week we turn to the familiar (and thorny) topic of preschool.   Yes, drum roll, it’s a topic you’ve been waiting for, one that is forever knocking on the door and demanding attention.  We hope that our perspective will be helpful.

The Riddle of Preschool

For many of our clients, one of the trickiest areas of education benefits policy writing is around preschool, and we’re often asked for input as they decide how to approach it. Some have traditionally operated on a home-host model, trying to provide in the host location what a child would have received “at home,” an approach that is understandable but complex.  For one thing, it leads to endless research into the norms of different countries and gets complicated by preschool related details like “Are we talking about full -day or half-day?  Two days a week or three? Preschool for the potty-trained versus the diaper-wearers?” Complicated!

Another question is how to define preschool since school is technically “preschool” if it exists before “regular” or state-provided formal education.  Often, our clients may be focused on an employee request in a particular country and inquire about the age at which children are legally required to be enrolled in school in that location; in essence, they use the age when children must be enrolled in school to determine when they, as a company, will begin to offer schooling support. 

In such instances, our advice to our clients has been to be careful of the “legally required to be in school” approach to policy because, as we know, what is typical, or what I like to call a “cultural norm,” is often very different from the bare minimum required by law; and it’s in the gap between what is legally required and what is culturally typical that assignee dissatisfaction festers.

Take the US as an example. In the US, the official start of publicly provided education is Kindergarten, when children are five years old. This is much later than when children in many other countries have access to state-provided education, and assignees relocating to the US are often horrified to discover that their children, who have been in public school for two years in home country, still don’t even meet the age cut-off for US Kindergarten. 

That said, we all know that in the US, the vast majority of children go to school, part-time or full-time, long before Kindergarten. Especially for professional families who can afford fuller, more “academic” programs, the fact that Kindergarten doesn’t start until five years old has little bearing on when their children actually begin their formal education. So, to use age five as the age at which education benefits might apply, simply because it represents the start of state provided education, is in some ways artificial--we all know that children in the US all attend school before this.

Likewise, we all know that nothing is more sensitive to internationally-mobile employees than the welfare of their children, and knowing that their children will receive a good education while in a new country is often what balances an employee’s concern over uprooting and relocating them.  As many of you have heard us say, there’s a complicated emotional equation that parents confront when they consider relocating their family, and it has to do with guilt over the hardship of dislocation versus the opportunity provided by a new experience.  When it comes to the kids, the quality and accessibility of education is a critical factor in the parental calculus.

So, what to do? Preschool support policy is a natural outgrowth of company philosophy and culture; it makes more sense and is easier to apply when based on something broader, something more coherent and compelling than a legal deadline that really isn’t that relevant. Our advice, therefore, is to keep it simple.  Pick an age that seems reasonable, based on your company culture and the countries where you operate, and go from there.

And if you need to think through it with someone, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Warmly,

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Sawyer CEO

Over the years, Bennett International Education Consultancy has worked with hundreds of corporations across the globe, many of them Fortune 500 companies, providing domestic and international school advisement & placement services - preschool through university - to the dependents of relocating employees. In addition to education placement, our team provides customized consulting for corporations with a range of education issues: education policy writing & benchmarking, tuition studies, group move advisement & planning, and remote education solutions.