The holidays are almost over, and Thailand’s schools are about to return to their daily routine.

Traditionally, the new school year begins in mid-May, but this year the start has been brought forward slightly: May 12 is the official first day of the new academic year.

Six-year-olds will be entering primary school for the first time, while those approaching seventeen will be heading into their final, 12th year.

Like universities, Thai schools divide the academic year into two main semesters, with a short two-week break in October and a longer holiday of about a month and a half at the end of March.
And while education is no longer compulsory after Grade 10, most students stay on and complete the full school curriculum.

Thailand takes pride in its higher education system — which is precisely why the country’s officials have taken issue with some recent international rankings. In the overall ranking, Thailand landed as low as 107th, while among ASEAN countries it came eighth out of ten, ahead of only Myanmar and Cambodia.

The Office of the Education Council (OEC), however, believes the methodology behind the ranking deserves a second look. Its argument is that the results rely too heavily on subjective opinions rather than measurable indicators — such as Thailand’s claimed 99% literacy rate among school graduates.

Professor Prawit Erawan, Secretary-General of the Office of the Education Council, questioned the reliability of the results:

“The ranking is based on opinion surveys in 78 countries, rather than specific and measurable indicators of educational quality,” Dr. Prawit said.

At the same time, the professor acknowledged that the quality of education is closely connected to a country’s social and economic development, and that this is one of the reasons significant differences in educational attainment continue to exist across Southeast Asia.

So how does a country with a reported 99% literacy rate end up so low in international rankings?

There is a rather important catch.

The impressive literacy statistics measure the results of those who actually make it through the education system. A large number of children, however, never make it that far.

And that is the problem.

In 2023 alone, around 1.02 million Thai children dropped out of the education system.

Poverty is certainly one reason, but it is far from the only one.
The list also includes the distance to schools, teacher shortages, insufficient funding — with government subsidies tied to the number of students — and, finally, an educational curriculum that is not always adapted to Thailand’s cultural and linguistic diversity.

That last point is particularly sensitive.

Thailand is a multicultural and multi-faith kingdom in which everyday speech changes dramatically from north to south, moving from Lao-related dialects through numerous local varieties before reaching Malay-speaking communities in the far south.
Yet the national school curriculum is written in standard Central Thai.

This can create a problem even before a child opens a textbook. Many rural teachers — and Thailand already has a shortage of them — may struggle with the language used in official educational materials. And when a teacher arrives from Bangkok and speaks rapidly in Central Thai, a child from a different linguistic background may simply fail to understand what is being said.
By the second week of school, that child may already feel like an outsider in the classroom.

Religion adds another layer.

The Thai curriculum is deeply infused with Buddhist traditions, and students receive a substantial amount of information about Buddhist customs and rituals throughout their education. For families belonging to other religions, some of this material may be difficult to accept.

In some cases, parents simply keep their children away from school for religious reasons.

The same can apply to other aspects of Thai culture — even something as seemingly harmless as traditional food.
And then there is the problem of motivation.

Years of systemic difficulties have distorted the way some disadvantaged communities perceive education itself. Poor families are increasingly less likely to see literacy and schooling as a reliable escape route from poverty when, regardless of the circumstances, academic outcomes remain disappointing.

And Bangkok is hardly immune.

In the capital and its surrounding areas, 245,045 children and teenagers have dropped out of the education system, roughly a quarter of them preschool-age children.

Here, alongside low household incomes, the problem is largely infrastructural.

Bangkok is densely populated, and there simply are not enough early-childhood education centers. The capital has only around 300 such facilities, with a combined capacity of no more than 20,000 children.

There is little room to build more.

The result is a peculiar bottleneck: a child does not attend kindergarten, and therefore misses the very stage at which Thailand’s formal educational journey begins.

Clearly, the system has problems — and, to its credit, the system itself knows it.

That is why Thailand has recently introduced the “Zero Dropout” program, designed both to bring children back into school and to prevent them from dropping out in the first place.
After all, statistics show that even among children who successfully complete primary education, many eventually abandon their studies after the age of twelve.

The program has already established several key strategies.
The first is financial support for disadvantaged families, accompanied by practical assistance such as school uniforms, textbooks and meals.

The second is the introduction of fundamentally new educational programs that take regional differences into account.
The third is greater use of online education where physical access to schools is the main obstacle.

And the strategy also includes psychological support for children whose lives outside school can be anything but easy.
But if you happen to have been born into a reasonably well-off Thai family, practice Buddhism, speak Central Thai — and, importantly, don't vape — I have some good news for you.
The new school year promises to pay considerably more attention to another major problem facing Thai schools: electronic cigarettes.

The Education Council is seriously concerned about the growing number of clinical cases linked to the consequences of vaping among teenagers. As a result, a package of measures has been introduced to combat the spread of e-cigarettes among schoolchildren.

These include hefty fines for sellers operating in the immediate vicinity of schools, as well as an incentive scheme encouraging people to report those selling the poison.

If a student is found carrying an e-cigarette, it will be confiscated and destroyed, followed by an educational conversation with the student.

And this is only the beginning.

There is, however, some genuinely pleasant news.
In April 2025, Thailand finally abolished its regulations governing the appearance of schoolchildren — more specifically, the hairstyles students were required to wear in order to fit into the state education system.

The rules requiring boys to keep their hair short — either above the earlobe or with the sides shaved — and girls to keep their hair no longer than shoulder length and wear no makeup, dated back to 1975, when Thailand was under military rule.

The authoritarian measure was clearly ideological in origin and remained in force until 2020, when student protests finally forced a review of the rules.

Officials then allowed children to wear their hair somewhat longer than the 1975 regulations permitted, provided they maintained a neat appearance.

But the change was only partial.

Schools were still effectively telling young Thais how they were allowed to look, and the tension never really disappeared.
Only last year was the 1975-era military regulation finally declared unconstitutional.

So, in a way, Thailand’s 2025 school year marks a new beginning: freedom from nicotine devices on the one hand, and greater freedom of self-expression on the other.

Children can finally stop mourning the era of identical haircuts, gain a little independence from the vape, and — ideally — devote more attention to their studies.

One can always hope.

Original text translated by Claude