฿95 billion buying out

Thailand’s international school sector was worth ฿95 billion in 2568 (2025), up from ฿85 billion the year before.

That’s 11.8% growth, in an economy growing at 1.5% — the slowest in ASEAN, per article 09.

The sector is expanding roughly eight times faster than the country it operates in. Thai business reporting describes it flatly as going up while the economy goes the other way, with private Thai schools closing at the same time.

Now add the number that makes it strange: Thailand’s fertility rate is 1.18.

There are fewer children every year, and vastly more money being spent on educating them.

What it costs

At the top, Shrewsbury runs to roughly ฿1,156,500 a year. Several schools sit in the same territory — annual fees above a million baht for one child.

Below that, a broad market. Schools at the lower end of international pricing run roughly ฿60,000–95,000 per term.

Some perspective from elsewhere on this site:

One year of school fees at the top of the market is roughly 160 years of the state old age allowance, and nearly five times what a street food vendor earns in a year.

I’m not putting those side by side to be inflammatory. I’m putting them side by side because they are simultaneously true, in the same city, and a publication that reported one without the other would be describing a different country.

Who’s actually buying

The instinctive assumption is expatriates. It’s wrong, or at least badly out of date.

Thai families are the growth market. The sector is not expanding at 11.8% a year on the back of foreign postings — corporate expatriate packages have been shrinking for two decades. It’s expanding because Thai parents who can afford it are moving their children into it.

Meanwhile private Thai-curriculum schools are being squeezed from both sides: fewer children being born, and the families who can pay leaving for international schools. Thai reporting describes exactly this two-front pressure, with closures following.

That’s the story. Not a foreign sector growing, but a domestic exit.

What the market is voting on

Here I want to be careful, because it would be easy to slide into contempt for the Thai state system, and that isn’t a position I hold or one the evidence supports on its own.

What can be said accurately: parents with the means are choosing to pay very large sums to opt out, in growing numbers, during an economic slowdown, while having fewer children. That is a strong revealed preference and it’s worth taking seriously as data rather than as an insult.

What they’re buying is presumably some combination of English-medium instruction, international curricula and university pathways, smaller classes, and — I’d suggest, and article 39 is relevant here — a different relationship between institution and child than the one a generation of Thai parents experienced themselves.

Article 39 described a decade-long campaign that ended with a court ruling that school hair rules were an excessive violation of children’s bodily rights. Some meaningful share of ฿95 billion is parents deciding not to wait for that argument to work its way through every school in the country.

And the exit has a cost that isn’t on any invoice. Every family that leaves is a family with resources, influence and a strong interest in the state system, no longer inside it. Systems improve partly because people with options stay and complain. This is the money and the complaining leaving together.

The demographic squeeze underneath it

The fertility rate makes this stranger than it first appears.

Fewer children, more spending, means spend-per-child is rising faster than the market. A ฿95 billion sector serving a shrinking cohort is a much sharper concentration than a ฿95 billion sector serving a stable one.

Which follows directly from article 09’s argument: as families have one child instead of three, the resources available per child rise dramatically. Thailand is running the standard demographic transition — fewer children, each much more heavily invested in — and the international school sector is the most visible place it’s happening.

It also means the sector has a ceiling. You cannot grow a per-child market indefinitely against a declining number of children. At some point the arithmetic of 1.18 arrives here too.

Common misconceptions

“International schools are for expats.” Thai families are the growth market.

“It’s a small luxury sector.” ฿95 billion, growing at 11.8% while the economy grows at 1.5%.

“Thai private schools are fine.” They’re being squeezed by falling birth rates and by losing paying families upward. Closures are happening.

“It proves the state system is failing.” It proves that families with the means are choosing to leave it. Those are related and not identical, and the distinction matters if you care about the state system.

“Fees are inflated by foreign demand.” Corporate expatriate packages have shrunk for years. Domestic demand is doing this.