Running one early-years curriculum across several campuses works when leaders agree on a small set of things that must be the same everywhere, such as the principles, the planning cycle, the way children are observed and the adult behaviours that define the approach, and then deliberately allow each campus to differ in everything that should follow its own children, families and spaces. Quality comes from shared understanding and regular professional conversation between campuses, not from identical rooms, identical displays or identical weekly plans.
This article is written for owners, principals and curriculum coordinators who already run, or are about to run, more than one site under one educational philosophy. It sets out what to hold constant, what to let go, how to notice when a campus is drifting, and the practical routines that keep a network of preschools speaking the same professional language without turning it into a chain of copies.
Why uniformity is the wrong target in early childhood
The instinct of many growing school groups is to standardise: the same room layout, the same lesson plans on the same day, the same wall displays photographed for the website. It feels like quality control, and in some sectors it is. In early childhood it tends to work against the very things a good curriculum is trying to achieve. A curriculum built on experiential learning and on following children's interests cannot be delivered identically in a campus with a large garden and one in a converted town house, or in a class of two-year-olds and a class of five-year-olds who have just discovered a snail colony after the rain.
Research on quality in early childhood education has long drawn a distinction between structural quality, meaning ratios, group sizes, staff qualifications and space, and process quality, meaning the interactions children actually experience with adults, peers and materials. The large English EPPE study, which followed several thousand children from the late 1990s, found that the quality of what happened in rooms mattered for children's later development, and that this varied between settings even where structures looked similar. Uniform paperwork does not produce good interactions. Teachers who understand why they are doing something do.
For a network running one philosophy, the useful question is therefore not "do all campuses look the same?" but "would a child, a parent or a visiting educator recognise the same approach at work in every campus, even though the projects, rooms and rhythms differ?" That is a harder standard to meet, and a more honest one.
What should be shared, and what should vary
Leaders find it easier to hold the line on a few non-negotiables when they are written down alongside the things each campus is expected to decide for itself. The table below is a starting point; each network will adjust it.
| Area | Shared across every campus | Decided by each campus |
|---|---|---|
| Principles | The three principles and the six dimensions of development, explained in the same words to staff and families | How the principles are shown in the campus's own projects and displays |
| Planning cycle | The rhythm of monthly themes, weekly project threads and daily reflection; the planning formats teachers use | The actual themes chosen in response to children, seasons, local places and events |
| Language approach | Vietnamese as the anchor language, English built through real experience, no drilling of isolated words | How the two languages are distributed across the day, given the team's strengths |
| Observation | How children are observed and recorded, what goes into development records, no scores and no rankings | Which moments are documented and how families are invited to contribute |
| Environment | Open-ended materials, child-height access, outdoor time every day, a calm and uncluttered room | Room arrangement, use of garden, kitchen or rooftop, local natural materials |
| Adult behaviour | Kneeling to child height, asking open questions, waiting, no shaming or comparison | Team routines and the way staff divide roles across the day |
The left-hand column is short on purpose. If everything is a non-negotiable, nothing is, and teachers quickly learn to comply on paper while practice drifts underneath.
Building one professional language across sites
The most reliable sign that a curriculum is shared is that teachers on different campuses describe their work in the same terms. When a teacher in one site talks about "extending" a child's idea and a teacher in another uses the same word to mean the same move, the network has a common language. When the same word means "adding a worksheet" in one place and "asking a follow-up question" in another, it does not, however consistent the documents look.
Common language is built through shared experiences rather than glossaries. Joint induction for new staff from every campus, cross-campus planning days at the start of each theme, and short video or photo sequences of real practice discussed together all help. In a bilingual network it is worth agreeing the key terms in both Vietnamese and English, because Vietnamese and international teachers will otherwise translate concepts in slightly different ways and talk past each other.
Leaders should also be careful with their own vocabulary. If senior staff talk about "outputs" and "deliverables" in front of teachers while the curriculum talks about wonder and inquiry, teachers will follow what leaders reward, not what the curriculum says.
Noticing drift before it becomes a different school
Planning that no longer starts from children. Weekly plans that could have been written before the children arrived, identical across classes, are a sign that the planning cycle has become a template. A quick check is to ask a teacher which observation led to this week's activity.
Worksheets creeping back. Pressure from families or from new staff trained elsewhere often brings back colouring sheets, tracing pages and flashcards. One worksheet is not a crisis; a cupboard of them is a direction.
English becoming a timetable slot. If English is heard only during a fixed English period and the rest of the day is monolingual, the bilingual approach has quietly turned into a conventional English lesson model.
Records that read like report cards. Development records full of ticks, grades or comparisons between children signal that the observation approach has drifted towards assessment by scores, which the curriculum explicitly avoids.
Teachers who cannot say why. The clearest signal of all is a teacher who can describe what she does but not why. That is a training and leadership gap, not a performance failure.
Routines that keep campuses connected
Networks that hold together over years tend to rely on a few unglamorous routines. The first is a regular cycle of cross-campus visits in which teachers, not only managers, spend a morning in another site and then talk about what they saw using an agreed set of questions. Peer visits are less threatening than inspections and spread good ideas sideways rather than only from the top down.
The second is a shared review of documentation. Once a month, coordinators from each campus bring two or three pieces of documentation, a learning story, a project panel, a short sequence of photographs, and the group discusses what they show about children's thinking and about the adults' role. This keeps the observation approach consistent without a checklist. The third is a common calendar for professional development, so that a change in practice is introduced to every campus at the same time and in the same way.
Finally, someone has to own the curriculum across the network. Whether the title is curriculum director, pedagogical lead or head of learning, there must be a person whose job is to protect the approach, answer questions about it and decide, with others, when it should change.
Fitting the national programme into a multi-campus model
In Vietnam every preschool, whatever its philosophy, works within the national preschool education programme issued by the Ministry of Education and Training and within the regulations that govern preschools. For a network this is helpful rather than limiting. It gives every campus a common floor: the same broad developmental goals across physical, cognitive, language, social-emotional and aesthetic domains, and the same expectation that children learn mainly through play.
A bilingual curriculum such as Global Nexus sits on top of that floor rather than beside it. In practice that means planning formats should show clearly where the national programme's goals are being met through the project or theme, so that local education authorities, inspectors and quality reviewers can follow the logic easily. It also means every campus needs at least one senior Vietnamese staff member who knows the national programme well and can explain how the international elements fit within it.
Leaders should not assume that what satisfies the authorities in one district will look identical in another. Local education offices may emphasise different things in their visits. A network-wide folder of current regulations, with someone responsible for keeping it up to date, saves campuses from learning the same lessons separately.
Changing the curriculum without splitting the network
A living curriculum changes. Teachers discover that a theme works better in the rainy season, that the documentation format takes too long, or that toddlers need a different rhythm from the one written for older children. In a single school these adjustments happen informally. In a network they need a process, otherwise each campus improves the curriculum in its own direction and within two or three years the network is running several curricula under one name.
A simple approach is to separate experiments from changes. Any campus may try something new for a term and report on it; only the curriculum lead, working with coordinators from every campus, decides whether the experiment becomes part of the shared approach. When a change is adopted, it is introduced to all campuses together, with a short explanation of why, examples from the campus that tested it, and a date after which the old way is retired.
This sounds bureaucratic, but in practice it protects teachers. They know that good ideas will be heard, that they will not be asked to change everything every month, and that the version of the curriculum they are trained in is the one their colleagues across the network are using too. It also gives leaders an honest record of how and why the approach has evolved, which is valuable when explaining it to new staff, families or partners.
A note for networks that are still growing
Opening a second or third campus is the moment when a school discovers whether its approach lives in its people or only in its founder. Many founders find that their first campus works because they are physically present, answering questions, modelling interactions and correcting drift without thinking about it. A new campus without that presence quickly reverts to whatever the newly hired team knew before.
The practical lesson is to move experienced teachers, not only managers, into a new campus in its first year, and to treat the founding campus as a place where new staff spend time before they start. It is also worth delaying expansion until the approach has been written down clearly enough that someone who has never met the founder could recognise it. Schools interested in growing with the Global Nexus framework can find training for kindergarten owners and the Global Star campus franchise route listed alongside the curriculum; this site describes the educational side only.
Câu hỏi thường gặp
Does running one curriculum mean every campus follows the same weekly plan?
No. The planning cycle, formats and principles are shared, but weekly plans should come from observations of the children in each class. Identical plans across campuses usually mean the planning has stopped responding to children and has become a template.
How can leaders tell whether quality is consistent across campuses?
By watching interactions and reading documentation rather than counting documents. Cross-campus peer visits, shared review of learning stories and project work, and conversations with teachers about why they made particular choices reveal far more than checklists of completed paperwork.
What is the most common way a campus drifts away from the curriculum?
Worksheets and drills creeping back under pressure from families or from staff trained in other models, often together with English shrinking into a fixed timetable slot. Both are signs that the reasons behind the approach have not been fully understood.
Should each campus have its own curriculum lead?
A network benefits from one person who owns the curriculum overall and from a coordinator or experienced teacher in each campus who can answer day-to-day questions. The two roles need regular time together so that interpretations do not diverge.
How does a bilingual curriculum fit Vietnam's national preschool programme across campuses?
The national programme is the common floor for every campus. The bilingual curriculum is planned on top of it, and planning formats should show where national goals are met through projects so that education authorities can follow the logic.
What should a founder do before opening a new campus?
Write the approach down clearly, move experienced teachers into the new campus for its first year, and have new staff spend time in an established campus before starting. Expansion is easier when the approach no longer depends on one person being present.