SEN Education Benefits Policy Advice: It's Best to Be Direct

Continuing our discussion of education benefits policies and the workshops we recently offered our corporate clients, today our focus is on Special Education Needs (SEN); as we all know, families with a child with SEN often face additional challenges when relocating. 

In all instances, when a company relocates an employee + family, they are relocating an entire ecosystem, and in the case of children with SEN, that ecosystem is extra complex as it may include a network of tutors, therapists, and trained caregivers. 

In some instances, employees may self-select out of an assignment or a transfer because they assume that meeting their child’s needs in a new location is too complicated a proposition.

With this in mind, we encouraged the clients we held discussions with to address SEN explicitly in their policies so that employees with children with SEN might feel more comfortable raising the topic in a career-related conversation.  

What we learned: all of our clients acknowledged the need for additional support and were willing to provide it, but they had not necessarily thought to articulate that offer in policy. 

So, our recommendation would be a paragraph along the lines of the following:

'If an employee has a child with diagnosed Special Education Needs, Company will provide professional education consulting services, first to help the employee determine the viability of the relocation/assignment and second to identify the right-fit school for the student.'

Elizabeth presenting at the PARC Fall Summit

At a conference I attended recently, a seasoned global mobility professional pointed out that many corporate relocation policies were written a long time ago and have been “handed down” within companies, getting tweaked along the way by different staff members. 

For many companies, it has been a long time since they went back to the drawing board and started fresh, taking into account education-related topics that may not have been top of mind when the policy was first drafted. 

With the rise in SEN diagnoses in recent years, SEN would be one of those topics, along with homeschooling, for example. 

Few policies we looked at contained a reference to either SEN or homeschooling or support for online education programs.

Given the current climate of cost containment, many of our clients are more financially cautious in their approach to education benefits. Even so, the sample we worked with recently, in addition to those who engage us regularly through our relocation management company partners, agree that families with a child with SEN truly need fuller support when they consider a relocation, and they are eager to provide that support.

So, the issue wasn’t a reticence to provide professional education consulting; typically, it was that they hadn’t thought to address the topic explicitly and to articulate what they would provide.

Our advice:  most aspects of Education Benefits policy benefit from explicitness and clarity, and no topic deserves it more than Special Education Needs. 

So, it may be well worth looking at your education benefits policy with fresh eyes and considering a short, clear addendum!!

It’s the first step to increasing the likelihood of a successful assignment and the best outcome for all parties involved.

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.