Corporate Education Policy Workshops

This spring and summer, Bennett offered complimentary policy workshops to its corporate clients. Many of our clients took us up on the opportunity to discuss education benefits, and we were happy to learn more about their specific goals and challenges as they try to do right by their relocating employees while remaining conscious of costs and other factors. 

Bennett’s role was not to advise on the best approach to different aspects of policy, necessarily, but to share our experience and perspective on the “pros” and “cons” of different ones.

Many of the questions were echoed by more than one client, and the topics of highest concern will likely be familiar to you:

WHAT IS “EDUCATION ASSISTANCE”

First, we needed to be sure that we were all discussing the same thing. For some clients, “education assistance” meant tuition coverage and even tutoring support; for others, it included the engagement of a third party to help a family with school finding in a new location.  So, we began by making sure that we were differentiating the different possible forms of "assistance" and were aligned in our conversation.

PRESCHOOL

The first question was how to define it, given that the years before the start of formal education in different countries are named differently:  preschool, kindergarten, reception, to name a few.  Some clients had suffered misunderstandings with their employees because of confusion over terminology.

The second question was if/when to offer preschool support; some clients were operating on a home-host location model, while others had chosen other criteria to decide the point at which they would provide tuition support.

INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL FEES

Yes, a big topic!  Virtually all of our clients expressed a desire to do right by their employees’ children but were concerned about the high cost of international schools and the human tendency to pick the option with the biggest price tag, especially if someone else is paying. Many questioned whether international schools are always necessary, and how to determine this.  Their goal, therefore, was to figure out a better way to approach international school fees, some clients focusing on particular locations and others considering tuition caps.

THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

Tied to the question of tuition support, there was discussion of how to maintain the employee experience, perhaps in the context of decreasing certain benefits.  This included concern over the experience of relocation for some employees, but also over a sense of fairness within a company at large—an attempt to avoid policies that would incur the “how come she got that paid for?!” reaction from different members of a team.

SPECIAL EDUCATION NEEDS

There was acknowledgement of how SEN can impact a possible relocation for a range of reasons; maybe a candidate self-selects out of an assignment because they have a child with Special Education Needs and assumes that the new location won’t be able to provide adequately for that child;  or maybe they accept the assignment, without disclosing their child’s need for support, and suddenly everything’s going pear-shaped.  There was talk of how to elicit more information from employees and a commitment to providing them with the appropriate support with which to make an informed decision about a relocation.

REPATRIATION

Granted, I was usually the one who raised this topic, but my pleas for it to be considered didn’t always fall on deaf ears!

In the coming months, we will be publishing a series of blogs that address each of these different topics, and we hope that you will find them helpful.  So please stay tuned on for our Fall Series:  Education Policy Conversations with Bennett!

Warmly,

Elizabeth

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.