Blog · international mobility

Relocation package: what about the children?

Visa, permits, housing, the move, tax: Luxembourg mobility packages cover the paperwork down to the last detail. Then the family arrives, and the hardest step of all appears nowhere in the package: a child starting at a trilingual school. If your real challenge is retaining international talent, this is where it is won or lost.

What a package covers, and what it misses

Luxembourg relocation agencies do their job well: immigration, housing, setting up utilities, sometimes the administrative school enrolment. But enrolment is not integration. The day a four-year-old walks through the door of the Spillschoul without ever having heard a word of Luxembourgish, nothing in the package has prepared them for it. And the local HR press noted it early in 2025: relocation packages tend to be shrinking, which makes every euro of the family side more strategic.

The school choice, seen from the calendar

International or public school? For a short posting, the international route keeps the curriculum intact. For a lasting move, the public school offers immersion, free of charge, with welcome arrangements for children from abroad. And the younger the child, the more obvious the public route: at 3 to 6, school from age 3 in Luxembourg exists precisely to help children get familiar with Luxembourgish. The real success factor is not the choice of school: it is what happens in the 2 to 3 months BEFORE term starts.

The language timeline of a successful relocation

• Move confirmed (D-90): begin the familiarisation, ten minutes a day: nursery rhymes, guided play. The child's ear does the rest.
• Settling in (D-30): enrolment with the commune, a visit to the school if possible, the first everyday words in shared parent-and-child play.
• First day (D-Day): the child recognises the melody, a few words, a "Moien": they think "that, I know", and the whole family can breathe.

Your questions