At a Lower Manhattan nursery school the other day, some of the 4-year-olds were outside scooping water from a tub when a helicopter whipped by overhead. Such unplanned interruptions are part of the design at the British International School of New York, a new academy just off the FDR Drive on the East River that is adding SMART boards and global conference calls to round out its fast-forward curriculum.

“A child can look outside our windows, they can see sea planes, barges, tug boats. They see bridges spanning between two land masses,” the school’s director of finance and administration, Allen Wechter, said. “Ultimately we feel that it is an international world. The children should be able to share in that.”

The school is one of a growing number catering to the sons and daughters of the modern international business class. Whereas the last generation’s top executives might have left their children at home when posted abroad, today many are taking everything with them.

Schools such as British International are responding to the portable, pick-up-and-go work schedules with lessons that not only mirror the executive lifestyle — Mr. Wechter described as “interfacing” the conference calls his children conduct with children at a sister school in Britain — but also are calibrated to international curricula.

“Let’s say you’re a parent and you’re living in London, but you’ve been asked by the company that you’ve worked for to spend three years in Hong Kong,” the founder of for-profit public school operator Edison Schools, Chris Whittle, who is launching a new chain of schools called Nations Academies, said. “Literally you just pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m coming to Hong Kong,’ and you’d be guaranteed admissions in Nations Hong Kong.”

A mother who moved to Lower Manhattan from a London suburb just four weeks ago, Sallie Floyed, said she decided to come last April, after her husband’s firm offered him a position in New York with a minimum two-year stay. A generation ago, Ms. Floyed said, the couple might have put their children in boarding school. Half her peers at the English boarding school she attended were in that boat, she said.

She never considered it for her own children. “It’s quite old-fashioned, the whole boarding school thing,” she said. “I think parents just want to be with their children.”

For a modest request, it is often difficult to realize. The London school the Floyeds’s oldest child attended recommended finding a New York school with a matching curriculum. Options were scarce; by the time the move was set, admission at nearly every private school in the city had long since closed.

Finding the British International School, which in its second year has not yet reached full enrollment and, like other schools in the city that serve international clients, has a rolling admissions cycle, was “a real relief,” Ms. Floyed said.

Elizabeth Perelstein, the head of a company that helps families relocating to other countries find schools, School Placement International, said competition is so intense that even schools that have added rolling admissions to accommodate international families are often overbooked.

To surmount such competition, Ms. Perelstein’s clients are willing to pay: School Choice International charges $1,200 for a four-hour consultation; a full placement costs $2,750.

Businesses whose expanding operations are sending families all over the world also seem hungry for help. An investment bank, Lehman Brothers, shouldered half the cost of a recent report that explored the shortage done by the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong; four other financial firms, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Société Générale, covered the rest.

In New York City, investors seem to sense an opportunity. Borrowing an idea popular in Asia, groups are forming for-profit companies to start schools. The British International School is for-profit, as is another new Lower Manhattan school that attracts international families, Claremont. So is the Dwight School, a Central Park West academy that was the first in North America to offer the International Baccalaureate curriculum. Mr. Whittle’s company is a partnership with Dubai-based Global Education Management Systems.

The schools’ models are all similar; most follow the International Baccalaureate curriculum. British International and Nations also tout communications technologies that include SMART boards — interactive computer screens that act as digital chalkboards.

At the British school, administrators say the experiment is working. Although the school is not fully enrolled, the number of pupils has doubled this year, reaching 115.

Most of the British International mothers interviewed said the school was one of their only options because their husbands had been transferred at the last minute, but all said they were pleased. One, Lucy Cornell, who moved her children from Paris, was turned off by other schools’ requirement that her children take an intelligence test. “We would have had to fly three children over with jet lag,” she said. “It seemed ridiculous.”

Another bonus is that, if families leave the city in two or three years — as many said they plan to do — their children can transfer smoothly to any of dozens of British International Schools around the globe. Manhattan is also proving to be a point of attraction. Describing weekends she and her family have spent so far enjoying New York City’s parks, restaurants, and cultural venues, Ms. Floyed weighed her move.

“London just doesn’t compare,” she said.