Why I now start with the school

A few years ago, school would not have been the first thing I considered when choosing a country. We moved often, the children were younger and family mobility seemed fairly straightforward. Find a place where everyone feels comfortable, look at the international schools nearby and choose the best available option.

That model worked beautifully for us in Thailand. Daily life is easy, the children speak English, there are plenty of international schools and families come from all over the world. When a child is seven or nine, it feels as if there is endless time ahead.

Then one day you look at your eldest daughter and realise she is already 13. In three years she will be 16, and in five she will be 18. University, the country where she may live on her own, her language, friends and sense of belonging are no longer distant questions.

We have three children. I increasingly think our next major move should be shaped by the paths available to them.

The two older children were born in the United States and are American citizens. Our youngest was born in Thailand and is a Russian citizen. When we chose to have the older children in America, I was not designing a twenty-year education plan. I understood the value of American citizenship and the freedom it could give them, but many consequences of that choice only become real years later.

America is not the same proposition for my daughter as it is for me. I still need to resolve my own immigration status before living there. She does not. She can study, live and eventually work in the country as a citizen, which gives her an entirely different starting point.

If an American university is a serious option, where should she spend her final school years? It may be that a strong IB school in Europe or Asia gives her excellent preparation. An American high school might offer better integration and a clearer understanding of the system. For a particular child, the school itself may matter more than the country. This is the question we now have to explore.

I love Thailand and could give a long list of reasons why family life works here. I do not want that affection to become the argument for why the children must finish school here. We can be happy in Thailand today and decide in a few years that their next educational stage requires somewhere else.

I used to interpret a move like that as evidence that a country no longer suited us. I no longer see geography in those terms. A place can do its job perfectly during one stage of family life, and the job can later change. Thailand has given our children years of space, sea, English, an international environment and calm. Moving to the United States or Europe next would not diminish any of that. I like the idea that our geography can grow with our children.

School research quickly leads into a beautiful world of campuses, swimming pools, tennis courts, theatres, laboratories and photographs of smiling children from twenty countries. I have visited schools in Thailand, Hungary and the United States and studied several education systems. The more I see, the less willing I am to choose a school for its facilities.

I care more about what happens to a child afterwards. Where do graduates go? How good is the college counselling? Who surrounds the child in the final years? What level of ambition feels normal inside that environment? Can the school support children who are already highly driven, as well as those who have no idea what they want yet? Even the ease with which graduates later move between countries matters to me.

These questions do not fit neatly into a comparison table. They are also why I want education consultants who know schools through actual children and outcomes, rather than websites.

At some point I tried looking at education from the other direction. Instead of choosing the next school, I imagined each child at 22 or 23. Guessing a future profession makes little sense when the world and the children themselves will change many times. I find it more useful to imagine the person, and the number of options available to that person.

I want my children to speak several languages, to feel at ease in America, Europe and Asia, and to understand people from different cultures without being psychologically trapped in one country because it is the only place they know. A strong university should be available to them, but university should not be the only path they can see. If one of them wants to build a business, make art or follow a profession that does not yet exist, I want the foundations to be broad enough.

Once I picture that 22-year-old, I can work backwards. Keeping both American and European university options open affects the curriculum, teaching language and environment at 16 or 17. At 13 or 14, we need to know whether the present school supports that path and when a change of system can still happen without unnecessary disruption.

That creates a more difficult family decision. A great school may justify moving everyone. We may instead remain in Thailand for several years and later consider boarding school. There may be a third route we have not yet seen.

This way of thinking puts the country later in the process. First comes the child and the range of choices we hope to preserve at the beginning of adult life. Then comes the educational path. Only then do we ask which geography supports it. I have started to call this approach School First Migration.

Strategic planning can still go wrong if it creates an excellent education plan and an unhappy family. The strongest school might be in a country where the parents do not want to live. A father may need to spend most of his time in Dubai for business while the mother and children live in Europe, until family life becomes a flight schedule.

Many international families work this way. The question is whether it works for yours. I want to spend substantial time with my children, so a school that separates the family for several years carries an additional cost, even if it sits near the top of a global ranking. Another family may decide differently.

This is why I resist universal lists of the best countries for families. They give one answer to people with different children, marriages, businesses and ideas of a good life.

As the children grow, I return more often to the American scenario. Ignoring it would be strange when two of them are citizens. The country also matters to me. I want to take my business further into the English-speaking market, I feel at home in the American entrepreneurial environment, and over the long term I can imagine a family base somewhere in Florida.

For now, it remains a scenario to investigate properly. The children's passports give them a wide range of options, but moving the whole family is more complicated. We need to choose a city, understand the schools, cost of life and health insurance, and decide whether to rent or buy. I need an immigration route for myself and statuses for my wife and youngest child. All of this then has to fit the US business and tax system.

Once those questions are side by side, the decision is no longer a simple choice between moving to America and staying away. The next few years might be better spent at an international school in Asia or Europe, leaving the United States for university. We might reach the opposite conclusion and decide that moving now gives the older children a more natural entry into the American system.

I do not yet know which route we will choose, and that no longer worries me. I would rather gather the right information, speak to people who genuinely understand American schools, immigration, tax and property, and visit several cities as a family before committing to one answer.

Education is close to the heart of Nomad Nova for this reason. A child's future cannot be designed separately from the parents' country, the business or the tax structure, with the hope that everything will later fit. Each decision changes the others until what lies in front of you is no longer a list of schools. It is a map of the family's next ten years.

That is the map I want to build for my own family, and eventually with other families who have reached a similar point in life.