Bilingual & EP schools in Thailand: how the system works

Between Thailand's fully Thai private schools and its international schools sits a large middle segment: private schools that teach the Thai national curriculum partly in English. They are called bilingual schools or English Programme (EP) schools, they educate far more children than the international sector, and they are almost invisible in English-language school guides. This guide explains how the segment actually works — its licences, its tracks, its calendar and its money.

There is no “bilingual licence”

A bilingual school is an ordinary private school licensed by the Office of the Private Education Commission (OPEC) under the Private School Act. What makes it “bilingual” is permission to deliver the Ministry of Education's Thai curriculum in English under the English Programme framework, first allowed in 1995. The first three adopters — Bangkok Christian College, Sarasas Ektra and Udomsuksa — are still operating. Ministry orders in 2001 and 2003 split the framework into EP (English-medium for most subjects; Thai language and Thai-specific content stay in Thai) and MEP / Mini English Program (fewer English-medium subjects, often taught by Thai teachers).

Because the licence is the standard private-school licence, there is no public register of “bilingual schools” — OPEC publishes no programme-level list. Any directory of this segment, including ours, is built school by school from the schools' own publications.

One school, several tracks

The defining feature of the segment is the track system. A single campus commonly runs two to four parallel programmes at different prices — for example a regular Thai track, an ASEAN bilingual track, a bilingual track and an intensive English (IEP) track. Sarasas Witaed Bangbon, the largest campus of the largest network, runs four. When you compare schools, compare tracks: the bilingual track of one school may cost twice its own regular track, and the headline name of the school tells you nothing about which track a quoted fee belongs to. That is why every CredRadar page for this segment prices per track, not per school.

The Thai calendar runs everything

The school year runs from mid-May to early March, in two semesters (a few schools invoice three terms). Admissions, entrance tests and fee deadlines all follow this calendar: the main intake is in May, and application rounds typically open the preceding autumn. Documents are dated in Buddhist Era years (2569 BE = 2026 CE) — a fee PDF labelled “2570” is the current one, not a document from the future.

Fees: per semester, split up, rarely published

Fees in this segment are usually quoted per semester and split into tuition, meals, activities and insurance, with refundable deposits on entry. Where schools publish annual figures, the band is roughly ฿99,000–302,000 per year — a fraction of international-school prices, with the bottom of the band overlapping the cheapest international schools. The hard part is finding any figure at all: in our October 2026 census of this segment, only about 1 in 11 schools published a readable fee figure on its own website, and 58% published nothing about fees. A 2026 University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce survey put the average term-start outlay per child at private bilingual schools at about ฿52,660 — a reminder that much of the real cost sits outside the headline tuition line.

Teachers and quality signals

EP teaching is typically split between Thai teachers and foreign teachers working side by side. The framework expects foreign teachers to hold an education degree, or a degree plus at least 15 credits of teaching coursework, licensed through the Teachers' Council — but staffing is rarely published in comparable form, and “native speaker” claims are unstandardised. The public quality signal that does exist is ONESQA, Thailand's external quality assessment, which evaluates every school in rounds; schools also cite their O-NET national-test averages (P6, M3, M6). Treat both as the school reports them — O-NET figures on school pages are school-published, not independently audited.

What to ask any bilingual/EP school

• Which track is this fee for — and what does the same school charge for its other tracks?
• Is the figure per semester or per year, and what sits outside it (meals, activities, insurance, deposits)?
• What is the school's latest ONESQA assessment round, and will they show the report?
• Which subjects are actually taught in English, by whom, and with what qualifications?
• What were the school's O-NET averages at P6/M3/M6 last year — in writing?