Bangkok at a Glance

Education in Bangkok

Good medical and recreational facilities are also available in Bangkok.

Living in Bangkok will be a unique experience for you. Indeed, Bangkok is a city of contrasts and diversity, which offers its expats lots of opportunities. If you are interested in living in Bangkok, you will find helpful advice on health care, education, transport, and more in this short guide.

Education System

The Thai education system includes twelve years of free education, nine of which are mandatory. Around the age of three, lots of Thai kids start attending pre-school, which is not a part of obligatory education in Thailand, though. Parents also have to pay for nurseries or kindergarten themselves.

From age six to eleven, children in Thailand go through six years of primary education or prathorn. This is both free and obligatory, just like the following three years of lower secondary (mattayom stage one). During nine years of compulsory schooling, children receive education in eight core subjects (maths, Thai, science, social studies, religion and culture, health and PE, arts, career and technology, foreign languages).

After that, many Thai kids go on to upper secondary school (mattayom stage two) until the age of 17. This often prepares them for university entrance exams. Other students simply go for three to five years of vocational training instead, learning, for example, about home economics, commerce, or business and tourism.

Educational Policies

Thailand’s government is taking out measures to ensure the highest literacy rate possible among its population (right now, less than 8% of the adult population are still illiterate). Furthermore, efforts are made to strengthen especially poorer rural schools outside the Bangkok Metropolitan Region.

In 2009, the government invested 4.1% of its GDP into the educational sector. It might be trying to raise that share, now that the worldwide financial crisis is dying down and Thailand itself has overcome its worst period of civil unrest. However, many public schools in Thailand suffer from underfunding and a bad student-teacher ratio as a result. This disadvantage, combined with the language barrier of having Thai as the only language in the classroom, leads to most expatriates selecting an international school for their children.

International and Private Schools

There are a number of fee-paying private international schools with usually good to excellent academic standards and modern facilities in the city of Bangkok and its metropolitan region. Unfortunately, the only official list provided by the Thai ministry of education is horribly out-of-date.

However, there are indeed quite a few schools catering to various expatriate communities and nationalities. Your choice of school is most likely to be influenced by the language of instruction, the curriculum, and the diploma course it offers. The availability of international schools should influence your choice of accommodation as much as the location of your workplace.