What Is an Education Landscape Assessment?
An education landscape assessment is a report on the schooling available in a destination, researched for a specific group of relocating children and a specific company’s policy. It can serve as a road map for families, or as the evidence behind a budget decision, and the first step is always deciding which of those it needs to be.
When a company plans to relocate employees with children, one of the first things we often recommend is an education landscape assessment. HR and Global Mobility teams sometimes know the term; more often, they know the problem it solves. They need to understand, before making commitments, what schooling will realistically be available to the children who are coming.
What We Ask First
Every education landscape assessment starts with a conversation. We’ll ask about the move: who’s going, how many children, what ages, and what you know about them. Sometimes the families are known; sometimes they’re still completely unknown because the company hasn’t yet decided who will go.
We’ll also ask about your policy. Will you support private or international school tuition? Preschool? Are you expecting employees to use public schools? A company that plans to encourage public schools doesn’t need pages of research on private schools, while a company that supports preschool needs information on preschools, which are among the hardest schools to research. In many places they’re entirely non-standardized: a program in a church basement, one run by a large commercial chain, and everything in between.
And then we ask the most important question: what are you going to do with it?
Two Very Different Purposes
The same kind of document can do two quite different jobs.
For some companies, the assessment is a general road map. It’s given to families so they can orient themselves before they speak with a consultant, and it answers the questions they’ll inevitably have about how schooling works in the destination.
For others, the assessment needs to answer a business question. We’ve prepared assessments where the company ultimately needed to know whether it should pay for international school in a destination. In that case, the research is the justification for a recommendation, and it’s written to support a decision rather than to orient a family.
Both contain information about education. But one is written for a family deciding where to apply, and the other is written for a company deciding what to fund, and a good assessment is clear from the start about which one it is.
What an Education Landscape Assessment Covers
The size and depth depend on the location and the client’s needs. A report on Greater New York, where families might compare districts in New Jersey with schools in the city, is going to be vast. A report on international school options in a city with only a handful of them may be much shorter. Typically, an assessment includes:
- An executive summary of what we found, written around the company’s brief, with the key findings and a recommended timeline
- An overview of how schooling works in the destination: the age school becomes compulsory, how the system is run, and the language children will learn in
- International and local private schools: who each type of school is designed for, how admissions work, when to apply, and the documents families will need
- A representative sample of schools, with ages, curriculum, admissions notes and current fees, so families and the company can compare like with like
- Local public schools, where appropriate: how places are assigned, how schools can be evaluated, and how to register
- Maps of the sample schools, so families can weigh schools against neighborhoods and commutes
- Sections shaped by the group, such as preschool options, resources for children with special education needs, or language support
- An appendix of guides to each curriculum families will meet, from the local system to the IB, British, American and French curricula
If you’d like to see what that looks like on the page, you can look inside a sample assessment. It covers Zurich and was written for a fictional company, and every school in it is fictional too. For a taste of the appendix, our article on how the IB, British, American and French curricula compare draws on the same guides.
Research With Your Population in Mind
You could find some of this information online. What’s harder to find is the right lens.
Consider a group of children coming to the United States from several European countries. They’ll be using American public schools, where they can enroll easily, and we can’t assume they’ll speak English. For that group, the critical question is the quality of English language support in each school. Is support given in the classroom, or at another site? Is it integrated with the rest of the school day? Are students grouped by language or nationality, as they are in some places? The research is still about high-quality public schools, but it’s done with an additional lens that changes which schools rise to the top.
That’s the difference between a list of schools and an assessment. You don’t always know the questions to ask, and we’ve been asking them for more than 35 years.
Where It Fits in a Group Move
An education landscape assessment usually comes at the very start of a group move, before the move is announced. As we explain in Planning a Group Move? Start the Education Research First, what it reveals affects the policy, the budget, hiring and timing.
It can also be the foundation for what comes next: the webinars, relocation fair presentations and school guidebooks that help employees decide, which we describe in Briefing Employees on Schools Before a Group Move. And when the question is narrower, such as whether a particular school or local system is “sufficient,” the work becomes a school assessment.
How Bennett Helps
Bennett’s consultants are former educators who know school systems from the inside, and many live in the cities they advise on. When we prepare an education landscape assessment, we research the destination with your company’s policy and your employees’ children in mind, and we’re clear from the outset about the decision it needs to support. You can see what’s included, and how an assessment fits with the rest of our support for relocating groups, on our group move education consulting page.
Need an Education Landscape Assessment?
Tell us about the move you’re planning and what you need to decide. We’ll suggest what the assessment should cover.
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Bennett International Education Consultancy works directly with hundreds of families each year across the globe. We support families by helping them make informed decisions about the best-fit schools for their children; with our guidance, they secure placement in preschools, private day schools, public/state schools, boarding schools, colleges and universities, including schools with particular programs, such as special needs support.
