Parents need to analyze int'l schools

Rachel Davies, Sydney, Australia

Talking to a friend in Jakarta recently I was simultaneously impressed and rather disappointed for Indonesia. This friend is a successful business woman and along with her husband she owns a number of businesses both in Jakarta and other Indonesian cities. They can reasonably be described as belonging to the rich minority of Indonesia.

With two children growing remarkably quickly, to me it seems only yesterday that they were just toddlers, these professional Indonesian parents have understandably been putting there minds to the thought of where their children should be educated. They have been considering the present and future education of their children.

What impressed me about my friends was their determination for their children to have, what they described as, "the best possible education that will give them good prospects for their future careers". What seemed sad and disappointing was that they had concluded that this "best possible education" could not be accommodated and provided by the Indonesian schooling system.

This is why they had concluded that their son and daughter should attend one of Jakarta's many international schools. It is, I think, quite amazing how many international schools are available in Jakarta now. With recent terrorist attacks and threats on Jakarta, many in the expatriate community have in fact been leaving Indonesia and yet there are still many international schools that, one would have assumed, are designated and targeted more exclusively to serve the expatriate community.

But times have changed and international schools are no longer there to exclusively serve the international community. More and more Indonesians like my friends are choosing international schools for their children's education. But, of course, these are the relative few in Indonesia today because after all international schools do not come cheap.

However, no matter what school a parent chooses to send his or her children to, care needs to be taken to assess the type and quality of education that is being offered. When it comes to international schools this is probably doubly important because there is a great expense that can be incurred to parents who are choosing an "international" education for their child.

But we should take care when we think or hear of that "international" label. Many parents quickly and easily enter into the belief that the label "international" is an instant ticket to quality education and better and international education in the future at the ages of college life. But this is not always the case.

There are many "international" institutes and educators within those institutes that are highly capable and worthy of belief in them as providers of what might be considered a superior education. But at the same time there are those institutes that do not necessarily live up to such standards and they offer an educational "service" that is neither worthy of the name-tag "international" or the accompanying higher, if not extortionate, school fees.

For example, my friends who were exploring the international schools available for their son and daughter were wise enough to do some "shopping around" first before they settled on one school for their children. They visited a number of "so called", as they put it, international schools and were not always hugely impressed by what they found.

One of the "international" schools that they visited was based out of a reasonably large house in the south of Jakarta. They instantly saw that the building was in need of repairs and really lacking in sufficient facilities for what they saw their children's educational needs to be. They met with a representative of the school and listened to her explanation of the benefits of attending that school.

Though they found this person to be pleasant, they did leave with the feeling that they had simply been the recipients of "many promises but not very much content." They concluded that this was not the school for them and their children because it could not really offer anything well beyond a typical Indonesian school and yet would charge fees that were hugely in excess of a local school.

They ultimately settled on an international school with a more fully developed campus site and a depth of curriculum and teaching staff that impressed them. Of course, this was an even more expensive proposition for them but they are fortunate to be able to afford the extra expense and of course look to it as a way of setting their minds at ease that they have made the right choice.

This, though, is the key conundrum for any and all parents. What is really the right choice of school for our children? In some quarters, mainly in the worlds of sales and commerce, the phrase "reassuringly expensive" is used to express the idea that the more you pay, the more likely you are to get something good.

But another expression from the worlds of sales and commerce may also apply here and that would be: "Buyers beware". It is simply a reality that education in our twenty-first century is a business. Schools, colleges, universities and even language schools are vying with each other for enrollments. Parents become customers that the educational institute wishes to satisfy.

Sometimes parents have the attitude that the school knows best and so they practically handover their child and the child's education to the school and the school system. This is not right though because so much of a child's education is naturally, or really should be, evolving from the home. Parents that just handover the educational responsibility to the school are really failing.

But also they may be failing and blinding themselves to the reality of what is really happening in school. International schools offer an option for education for the more financially secure of Jakarta. But the "international" labeling of a school should not blind the parents and reduce their analysis of what they are paying for. For the greater part better quality education should be at hand but only scrutiny and continuous checking will guarantee this.

People have obviously been very frustrated with the state of education in Jakarta and beyond and so this has led to a greater consideration of an international setting for children's education. But that setting should not be accepted on face value alone; the customer must check and the buyer must beware.

The writer is Education Consultant.