Re:locate magazine, autumn 2006

Learning from school children: recent research in international schools

Education expert Richard Pearce explains

Children may be renowned for their adaptability, but recent research reveals that the real secret to their successful relocation is management of expectation.

As the art of relocation develops, the professionals deal with any problems that may arise using a mix of experience and research. The education of the expatriate’s children has always been a crucial issue. The whole move can founder if the child’s schooling disappoints the family, and recent research shows that individual monitoring is better than applying a blanket formula.

Since the 1960s, the development and expansion of International Schools has offered a standard answer for internationally mobile families. This has become one of the resources upon which companies and professionals rely, and schools have developed their own stores of expertise. Raising a cadre of young people with a wonderful breadth of experience – do they have all the answers?

Unfortunately, nothing is ever that simple. As globalisation becomes a two-way street, more and more employees from ‘host country’ nations are joining the multinational circuit, and they bring their own expectations of what, ‘a good education’ means. A school that’s designed by Brits for Westerners is unlikely to please all of the Europeans – let alone those from further away.

As Director of Admissions at one of these schools for 16 years, I became the confidant of many generations of uneasy expats, who unloaded their woes and fears in a safe, professional atmosphere. Sometimes the parents’ concerns followed national or regional patterns: from Southern Europe, parents took pride in their children going through school ahead of their age group; Nordic families more often asked for a repeat year to ensure solid learning. But, increasingly, there were families committed to lifelong expatriation who were exceptions to any national patterns. How could they be understood?

Transition – the story so far

In this field, there are some handy rules-of-thumb but little research. There are formulae, such as the Third Culture Kid or Global Nomad paradigms – ways of describing the child whose upbringing is neither in the home nor the host culture. These have been used widely to sketch the kind of sequence of events in a typical child’s mobile life, and to plan programmes that ease the stages they pass through – transition or induction programmes, for instance, for children, families and teachers. The limitation of these images is that they are expressed in terms of a particular country’s idea of what normal life is like. They work well for the people who devised them, but they do not necessarily transplant well between nations.

My research focused on the part of this process that all children in the world have in common: the way that they learn right from wrong. If we had a clearer picture of this, it might be possible to trace the adjustment of a group of teenagers over their first year in a new country, as they took on board new kinds of ‘right’. The outcomes were indeed rich, and give insights that help understand how their parents make the same adjustments.

How do we adjust?

First came the theory. Recent work on brain function suggests that we learn right and wrong by watching those people who mean a lot to us. Emotion is the ‘volume control’ that gives us strong messages of what is right or wrong, and it also helps us to take on new rules by telling us what messages matter more than others. In a new place, we meet a new set of people, and if these people come to matter to us, they become our new models of behaviour. If they don’t, because we are homesick or think only of those we have left behind, we will not adjust and will continue to judge the new place as a disappointment by our home standards.

Ideal method available

There happened to be a very suitable method for this research, which has developed in the field of Personal Construct Psychology. Known as Identity Structure Analysis, it allows us to find who and what really matters to a person, and to trace any changes that happen over time. Using this method, several generations of children were followed as they joined International Schools in The Netherlands.

Since the Dutch language is not widely considered to be as useful as English, families tend to rely on the numerous International Schools for a continuation of the English-medium schooling that their children will resume wherever they next relocate. Some are the usual well-equipped but expensive independent schools, and others – uniquely – are government-run, accommodating foreigners as well as repatriated locals, with very substantial subsidies.

Discoveries

The clearest message of the experimental results was the great skill that children have in solving their own problems. Although the schools offer a range of care and intervention for new students, the children themselves usually learn from their new classmates how things are done in the new place. They will certainly learn it faster than their parents, who look on anxiously with expectations dominated by their own childhood memories. Teachers, who hope to be important figures in the lives of their classes, were shown to have sometimes quite modest effects.

The next lesson was that each child arrives with his or her own personal experience of life, and this is what they use to adjust to the new chapter in the story. Part of this is to do with their nationality, and the things that ‘home-country’ schools and parents teach them. Wherever they are, an East Asian family will find public presentations uncomfortable, an Australian or Dutch child will aim to be average rather than outstanding, and an Italian family will perceive wet hair after swimming as inevitably leading to a cold. Another part is made up of school experience while the family was on the move. If the first international school is much-loved, its successor has a hard act to follow. But part depends on the community the family lived in at home. An Indian family of a minority such as Parsee or Jain may well be so used to minority life that it doesn’t matter much when they find themselves with strangers outside the front door. More subtle is the relative significance of the national and personal influence. An Armenian from a typically diasporic community was shown to have no difficulty in making contact with peers and locals, but those friendships counted for very little in the all-important emotional terms, so there was little adaptation.

One finding confirms a theoretical suspicion. The key to satisfaction in the new location is expectation, and while individual expectations can be helped by information or training pre-embarkation, there are some national perceptions that are very hard to shift. One of the most basic is that monolingual societies, like the UK, USA or Japan, have the greatest trouble dealing with different ways of doing things. We can waste a lot of effort seeking to impose our own ‘best practice’ in a world of diverse understandings.

The resolutions – a better concept than ‘solutions’ – were often purely individual. This research showed many different balances of family, extended family, national, historic, and new school influences contributing to the child's new standards. Increasingly the children of expats are finding expatriate life the most comfortable field for their own careers. For their sake, research needs to go on.