Bangkok's wealthy and expat community will soon have yet another high-end international school to choose from as the US education company Basis International Education Holdings opens a new school in Bangkok this August.
With a tuition of 640,000 baht per year -- higher than the yearly salary of most Thais -- the school hopes to reach a capacity of 1,400 students in seven years.
The Basis International School of Bangkok plans to start with pre-K up to Grade 5, then add a grade each year up to 12, taking students from age 3 to 18. It will be the company's 37th school and first in Southeast Asia.
Chief executive Carolyn McGarvey said Basis was attracted to Thailand because of an enthusiastic local investor. The head of the real estate developer R2D1, Pensiri Thongsima, funded construction of the school for an undisclosed amount, completing the two-year project this year for the first phase of construction.
"We did not want our first students walking in to a construction site," Ms McGarvey said. "Our investors really built an amazing school, and since the family will be sending their own children here, they wanted it to be finished when they got there."
She said Ms Pensiri spent a few years shopping for schools around the world to bring to Bangkok and decided on Basis because of its curriculum and prestige.
The school sits on 25,000 square metres of land off Rama II Road and offers state-of-the-art facilities like a 25-metre competition swimming pool, a 1,600-sq-m indoor gym, a design kitchen with 3D printers and robotics, a soundproof convertible theatre, and over 19,000 sq m of sports fields.
The Bangkok school also intends to emphasise Thai language and culture classes, at a time when Ms McGarvey said many international schools in Thailand are starting to cut Thai classes due to lax government regulation.
"We want to make sure Thai children don't lose a sense of their Thainess," she said. "We want to make our students locally rooted and globally connected."
The Basis curriculum sees younger students taught by two teachers in the same class, a subject expert and a learning expert. The subject expert has a degree in the area of study, such as chemistry or history, while the learning expert has a degree in education. In later years, classes are taught solely by subject experts.
"Our No.1 goal is to get our students to love every subject," said Elizabeth Thies, head of Basis School Bangkok. "We get teachers who are really excited to teach a subject they are passionate about."
The school's selling point is as a pipeline to the world's top universities. In 2017, 28% of Basis graduates were accepted to at least one of the top 25 universities in the world. The school requires students to take advanced placement classes, highly valued by US universities.
