From one riverside site to two campuses in twenty years

Shrewsbury International School Bangkok opened in September 2003 on a 16-acre site at 1922 Charoen Krung Road, on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River in Bang Kho Laem. The school was founded by Chali Sophonpanich, a Thai businessman and grandson of Bangkok Bank patriarch Chin Sophonpanich, whose property company City Realty Co. owns the school. From the outset it operated under a formal affiliation with Shrewsbury School in the UK, a co-educational independent school founded by Royal Charter in 1552, and was overseen by a Board of Governors that included Shrewsbury School's own chairman.

Origins

The first principal was Stuart Morris. He was succeeded in 2005 by Stephen Holroyd, who had spent twenty years at Shrewsbury School in the UK, first as an English teacher and later as Deputy Master. Holroyd ran the Riverside campus for twelve years, during which the school secured Council of International Schools (CIS) accreditation and built a consistent record in Cambridge examinations. After stepping back from the principalship, he became Chief Executive Officer of Shrewsbury International Asia; the Sixth Form Commons in the school's 2023 Innovation Centre was named in his honour. Christopher Seal, formerly deputy head of Millfield School in Somerset, took over as Riverside principal in August 2017 and managed the campus through a major expansion programme.

Growth: a second campus

By the mid-2010s demand had outrun the Riverside campus. In 2016, plans were drawn up to expand capacity there from 1,600 students to 2,300, including a three-storey underground car park begun on Christmas Day 2017 to free up surface space. Simultaneously, the school announced a second campus entirely. In November 2017 Shrewsbury revealed a Bt 2.6 billion (US$78 million) investment to build a purpose-built primary school on a 2.4-hectare site between Sukhumvit Road and Rama IX Road in the centre of the city. The City Campus opened in August 2018 with 168 children enrolled, inaugurated by the British Ambassador and Sir David Lees, then Chairman of the Board of Governors. Amanda Dennison, who had been head of the junior school at Riverside since 2010, became its founding principal. The Riverside expansion, which added new senior school buildings, sports halls, all-weather courts, a grass football pitch and a strength-and-conditioning facility, completed in stages through to 2023, as reported by the Bangkok Post on the school's 20th anniversary.

The Sir David Lees Innovation Centre, opened at the 20th anniversary in 2023 with an investment of over Bt 1.1 billion, houses 16 mathematics classrooms, 18 science laboratories, and collaborative spaces built around the Harkness discussion method. Robert Millar, who had joined the school as Senior Academic Coordinator in 2010, became principal of the Riverside campus in 2022. City Campus has grown sharply since opening: enrolment rose from around 160 students in 2018-19 to over 540 by 2024-25, prompting a further expansion of its Early Years building, completed in late 2024.

Curriculum and accreditation

Both campuses follow the English National Curriculum. The Riverside school runs from Early Years through Year 13, with IGCSE examinations at the end of Year 11 and A Levels in the Sixth Form. The City Campus covers Nursery to Year 6, with all pupils offered a guaranteed place at Riverside for secondary. In 2025 the City Campus launched a Mandarin-English bilingual strand, the Hanqing Bilingual Pathway, running alongside its standard British International Pathway. The Riverside campus was re-accredited by the Council of International Schools in April 2019 and again in April 2025. The City Campus received its first CIS accreditation in January 2024. Both schools are members of the Federation of British International Schools in Asia (FOBISIA) and are affiliated with the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC). The school is also accredited by Thailand's Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (ONESQA).

Present day

Enrolment across both campuses stands at close to 1,900 students aged 3 to 18 from 40 nationalities, with Robert Millar as principal of the Riverside campus and Amanda Dennison heading the City Campus. Sixth Form leavers have secured places at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL, Stanford and Yale, among others. The school's motto, taken from its UK parent, is Intus Si Recte Ne Labora: if the heart is right, all will be well.

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