A New Chapter for
Educational Quality
Golden Index has reached a milestone worth marking. The first three preschools have successfully completed our certification process.
We are not naming them yet. We want to give each institution the recognition it deserves at the right moment, in the right way. What we can say is this: these first certifications represent something we have believed in from the beginning, that outstanding educational quality deserves to be visible.
Around the world, parents make one of the most consequential decisions of their lives when choosing where their children spend their earliest, most formative years. Yet there is no widely recognised international mark that helps families identify preschools assessed against clear, independent standards of quality.
This is where Golden Index comes in.
Our ambition is straightforward: to build a certification mark that means something. A mark parents recognise, educators value, and preschools are proud to display.
In the same way a Michelin star has become a widely understood symbol of excellence in restaurants, we want the Golden Index seal to become a trusted reference for quality in early childhood education. Not as a ranking or a competition, but as a clear signal that a preschool has met an independent set of standards.
The first three certifications are more than three certificates. They are the first entries in what we hope will become a truly international directory of educational quality.
We are proud of what has been achieved, and even more excited about what comes next.
Golden Index Is Now Open for Applications
If you believe your preschool represents a high standard of early childhood education and would like to be considered for certification, we would be glad to hear from you.
This is only the beginning.
The First Few Weeks.
We Were Not Prepared
for This.
We knew there was a need. That part we had been sure about for a long time. What we did not fully anticipate was how quickly, and from how many corners of the world, people would find us.
In the weeks since going live, we have heard from kindergartens in Malaysia and Singapore, nurseries in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, preschools in Bangkok and Tokyo, international schools in Vietnam, and early learning centres in places we had not even formally launched in yet. The emails kept arriving, and they were not template replies to a campaign. They were real messages from real people, directors who had been looking for something like this for years, parents asking whether a school they were considering was on our list, educators who simply wanted to know we existed.
We are still catching our breath. And we are deeply, genuinely grateful.
What the First Response Felt Like
There is a moment, early on in building something, where you stop asking yourself whether anyone will care and start wondering how you will keep up. We crossed that line sometime in the first two weeks.
The volume was one thing. The nature of the messages was another. People were not just enquiring out of curiosity. They were writing because they had a genuine problem that Golden Index might be able to help with. A director in Kuala Lumpur who had been trying to attract international families and had no credible way to demonstrate her kindergarten's quality to parents arriving from abroad. A mother in Singapore researching options for her daughter starting school in September, asking us point blank: how do I know if a school is actually good? A school owner in Bangkok who had spent three years building something she was proud of and simply had no way to show it to the world.
These are not edge cases. This is the gap we set out to address. Hearing it reflected back to us so clearly, from so many directions at once, was something we had to sit with for a moment.
"How do I know if a school is actually good?" That question, from a mother in Singapore, is the reason Golden Index exists.
We Are Working Through It, Carefully
We want to be honest with you: we have more incoming interest right now than we can process all at once, and we are not going to rush it. Every institution that reaches out deserves a considered response, not a form email and a payment link. That is not the kind of organisation we are building.
So we are working through the enquiries methodically. Some institutions are already in the early stages of their application process. Others are in conversation with us about what certification would involve for their specific context. A few are in markets where we are still putting the operational pieces in place, and we have been honest with them about where we are and what the timeline looks like.
Nobody is being ignored. Some people are simply waiting a little longer than we would like, and we appreciate their patience more than they probably know.
The Geography of It
One of the things that has struck us most in these early weeks is just how international the response has been. We expected interest from the markets we had actively reached out to. We did not expect to receive enquiries from countries we had not contacted at all.
That tells us something. It tells us that the need for a reliable, independent quality standard in early childhood education is not a regional problem or a Southeast Asian problem or a premium-market problem. It is a global one. Parents everywhere are navigating the same fundamental difficulty: they are being asked to make one of the most consequential decisions of their lives with very little reliable information to go on.
We have always believed that. It is why we designed Golden Index as an international standard from the start, rather than building something local and expanding later. Hearing it confirmed in the way we have over these past weeks is not something we take lightly.
What Comes Next
The short answer is: a lot of careful work.
We are currently coordinating first evaluations across multiple markets. We are working with our assessors in the field to ensure that every on-site visit meets the standard we have set. We are refining parts of our process based on what we are learning from early conversations with institutions, because good feedback is worth acting on quickly.
We are also thinking seriously about our December visit to Malaysia, where we hope to hand over the first certificates in person to our founding partners in the region. That matters to us. A certificate sent by post and a certificate handed over by the people who built the standard it represents are two very different things, and we want to do it properly.
Alongside all of that, we are continuing to respond to every enquiry that comes in. If you have written to us and are waiting, we have not forgotten you. We will be in touch.
A Personal Note
Jan and I started this from a place of genuine conviction, not a business plan. We had both spent long enough working in and around early childhood education to know that the sector was missing something fundamental, and we thought we might be able to build it.
What we could not have known is how many other people had been thinking the same thing. The response to these first weeks has been one of the most moving professional experiences either of us has had. Not because of the volume, but because of what the volume represents: a real, widely felt need for something that simply did not exist before.
We are grateful to every single person who has reached out, shared the word, or taken the time to apply. You are the reason we are doing this, and you are the reason we are going to keep doing it as carefully and as well as we possibly can.
Thank you. Genuinely.
Why We Started Golden Index
and What We Believe
When we first started talking seriously about Golden Index, we were sitting in a small café in Bonn, frustrated. Not with each other but with a system that made it almost impossible for parents to know, truly know, whether a kindergarten was any good.
There were ratings on Google. There were word-of-mouth recommendations. There were government inspections that happened once every few years and stayed firmly behind closed doors. But there was no independent, internationally recognised standard that a parent could point to and say: this institution has been evaluated, and it passed.
That absence is not an accident. Building a credible certification standard requires a particular kind of expertise, a particular kind of stubbornness, and a willingness to do a lot of work before any of it becomes visible to the world. Not many people have wanted to take that on. We decided we did.
Where It Comes From
Both of us trained at the same institution near Bonn, the Technical School for Social Pedagogy and Diagnostics, and both of us graduated with the highest possible grade. That matters not because academic results are everything, but because the training we received was genuinely rigorous. It was built around the idea that working with children requires precision, structured observation, and the ability to assess quality in a way that is honest rather than reassuring.
That instinct stayed with us. When we looked at the global early childhood education sector and saw how little structured, independent evaluation existed, the response felt almost obvious: somebody needs to build this. We had the background to do it properly. We had spent enough time in and around the sector to understand what good practice actually looks like, and what it does not. And we both believed, with some force, that parents deserved better information than they were currently being given.
So we started building.
What We Are Not
We are not a government body. We are not an association with membership fees and a logo you can display in exchange for attending a conference. We are not a rubber stamp. We are an independent certification initiative, which means the only thing that earns a Golden Index certificate is meeting the standard we have set. An institution we know personally does not get a pass. An institution with a beautiful website does not get a pass. An institution that has been operating for thirty years does not get a pass. The evaluation is the evaluation, and it is conducted the same way every time.
That independence is not incidental to what we do. It is the entire point. If parents cannot trust that the certification means something, then the certification means nothing. We would rather certify fewer schools and have it mean something than certify many schools and have it mean nothing at all.
"Every child, in every country, deserves to grow up in an early learning environment that meets the highest standards of quality, safety, and care."
What We Are Building
The long-term vision for Golden Index is an international standard that parents anywhere in the world can recognise and rely on. A directory of certified institutions that reflects genuine quality, not marketing budgets. A certification process that makes the institutions that go through it better, not just more accredited.
We are at the beginning of that. We know it. But the beginning is also the most important part, because the decisions made now about how the standard is set and how evaluations are conducted will define what this becomes. We are being careful with those decisions, because we think that is the only way to build something that lasts.
If you run a kindergarten or early learning centre and you are reading this: we would be glad to hear from you. And if you are a parent trying to make sense of your options, we are building this for you.
What Certification Actually Does
for Your Kindergarten
Most kindergarten directors we speak to say the same thing fairly quickly into the conversation: we know we are doing good work, but we have no real way to show it.
They have happy families. They have staff who stay for years. They have rooms that feel warm and lived-in, outdoor spaces that children actually use, routines that have been thought through carefully. But when a new family moves to the city and starts looking for a place, none of that is visible. What they see is a Google rating, a few photos on a website, and a price list.
That is the problem certification is designed to solve. Not for us. For them.
The Trust Gap That Most Kindergartens Do Not Know They Have
When a family is choosing a kindergarten, they are making one of the most consequential decisions of their child's early life. They visit once, maybe twice. They look at the rooms, they speak to a director for thirty minutes, and then they decide. Most of the time, they are going on instinct, because there is simply nothing more reliable available to them.
That instinct is not wrong. Parents are perceptive. But it leaves excellent kindergartens in a genuinely unfair position: an institution that has invested enormously in its practice, its staff, and its environment has no more credibility in that first conversation than one that has invested very little. There is no external signal that tells a family which is which.
Certification creates that signal. Not as a sales tool, but as a piece of honest, independently verified information that families can factor into their decision.
What the Evaluation Actually Looks Like
We are often asked whether the process is invasive or time-consuming. It is not designed to be either.
Our framework covers 30 criteria across six dimensions: the physical learning environment, pedagogical approach, staff qualifications and development, child wellbeing, safety and operations, and family communication. An independent evaluator visits in person and documents what they observe. There is no pass or fail pressure in the room. The goal is an honest, detailed picture of how the institution functions day to day.
Most directors tell us afterwards that the visit itself was useful, not just the outcome. Having someone walk through the environment with fresh eyes and structured questions surfaces things that are easy to miss when you work somewhere every day.
"We had been doing something particularly well for years and simply never thought to mention it to families. The evaluation made us realise it was worth talking about."
The Practical Benefits
Certification does a few concrete things that are difficult to achieve any other way.
It gives families a reason to choose you before they have met you. When someone is searching online, relocating from another city, or asking an international school for a recommendation, a recognised independent certification is a shortcut to trust that a website alone cannot provide.
It gives your staff something tangible. The people who work in early childhood education are often underrecognised for the skill and care they bring. A certification that has been earned through a rigorous process is a form of professional acknowledgement. Several teams we have worked with have said it shifted the atmosphere in a meaningful way.
It gives you a structured occasion to look at your own practice. Not as an audit designed to find problems, but as a regular, external perspective on what you do well and where there might be room to develop. Institutions that seek external feedback tend to improve faster than those that do not, and the evaluation process is designed to support that.
Why Independence Matters
There are various forms of recognition available to kindergartens: accreditations from pedagogical associations, membership in networks, quality seals from regional bodies. Some are meaningful. Some are essentially administrative.
What makes an independent certification different is that nobody in the process has an incentive to pass an institution that does not meet the standard. We are not funded by the institutions we evaluate. We are not affiliated with any government ministry. Our assessors are external. Our evaluation panel does not know which institution they are reviewing until the process is complete.
That independence is the thing that makes the certification worth something to families. And it is the thing that makes it worth something to the institutions that earn it.
For Kindergartens Just Starting Out
We are sometimes asked whether certification is only relevant for established institutions with many years of experience. It is not. Some of the most compelling applications we receive come from younger kindergartens with clear pedagogical identities and leadership teams that are deeply invested in what they are building.
If you are in the early years of running a kindergarten, the evaluation process can be particularly useful. It gives you a structured framework to benchmark yourself against, a professional external perspective at a stage when that kind of feedback is genuinely hard to come by, and a way to signal seriousness to families from the beginning.
If you would like to find out whether your kindergarten is a candidate, the easiest first step is simply to get in touch. We respond to every inquiry directly, and we are happy to have an honest conversation about where you are and what the process would involve.
No obligation. No pitch. Just a conversation.
and updates from our team in the field.