Education abroad: schools, diplomas and where they are accepted

Schooling decides more relocations than tax does, and it is usually assessed by visiting three schools. The more consequential question is what the qualification does when the child is eighteen.

The curriculum question

• International Baccalaureate — recognised almost universally, portable between countries, demanding, and the safest choice for a family that may move again.
• British curriculum — IGCSE and A-levels, widely offered and widely recognised, with a narrower subject spread in the final years.
• American curriculum — high school diploma with advanced placement, which requires care when applying to universities outside the United States.
• The national curriculum of the country you move to, which integrates the child fully and is the hardest to transfer out of.

The rule that matters: changing curriculum in the final two years is very difficult. A move when a child is fifteen is a different decision from a move when they are ten.

Admission practicalities

• A transfer certificate from the previous school, obtained before leaving and frequently requiring attestation.
• Attested birth certificate and immunisation records.
• Assessment tests, and waiting lists at the schools everybody wants — applications a year ahead are normal.
• Registration linked to residence. In several systems a school place is checked against the family's status at each renewal.

University, which is the real question

• Fee status — domestic against international rates — follows residence and citizenship, not where the child went to school. The gap over a degree is frequently the largest number in a family's relocation arithmetic.
• Recognition of the school qualification in the countries the child might apply to, checked at the start of secondary school rather than the end.
• Language of instruction for the degree, and whether it matches what the child has been taught in.

The planning instruction

Work backwards from where the child might study at eighteen, and choose the curriculum and the country's status accordingly. Doing it forwards — choosing a school for its campus and discovering the fee status later — is how families end up paying international rates in a country they moved to for their children.