Bangkok
Highgate Begins Its First Term Abroad After 461 Years in North London
The prestigious UK day school has opened its inaugural international campus in Chonburi, partnering with Siam Motors Group to pursue a market where local Thai families are increasingly choosing to keep children at home.
Highgate School has opened its first international campus, welcoming an inaugural intake of Pre-Prep and Junior students to a purpose-built site beside Siam Country Club in Chonburi province, according to the Bangkok Post. The school, founded in 1565 in North London, is consistently ranked among the UK's most academically selective co-educational day schools. The Chonburi opening is the first international campus in its 461-year history.
The project is a partnership between Highgate and the Phornprapha family's Siam Motors Group, which committed around 1.6 billion baht to build the campus. Facilities include an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a FIFA-standard football pitch, STEM and arts centres, and a 450-seat auditorium. At full capacity the school will accommodate up to 1,400 students aged 2 to 18.
What the phased plan looks like
The current first term covers Pre-Prep and Junior years only, for children aged 2 to 11. Senior School provision and a boarding programme are planned for August 2027, at which point Highgate Thailand will offer the English National Curriculum through to IGCSE and A Levels. Boarding will make it the first campus in Chonburi province to offer a full British residential option.
The location, roughly 90 minutes from central Bangkok near the Eastern Economic Corridor, is a deliberate calculation. Chonburi already has a sizeable community of international families tied to automotive and petrochemical employers, and school leaders have signalled they expect early enrolment to reflect both that expatriate base and affluent local Thais who previously considered overseas boarding schools. It is that second group that operators across Thailand have been focusing on as the expat market plateaus.
A crowded but differentiated market
Highgate joins Dulwich College, SPGS and Wycombe Abbey as a UK school opening its first Thailand campus in 2026, but it does so on different terms. The other three have concentrated on Bangkok. Highgate is the only one anchored in Chonburi, and the only one with a boarding commitment on the near-term horizon. Whether the provincial market can absorb a campus of that scale is a question its admissions team will begin to answer in earnest over the coming months.
For Highgate's leadership in London, the strategic logic mirrors what several other century-old UK schools have concluded in recent years: that a single well-resourced overseas campus, built with a local operator who understands land, regulation and community, is preferable to multiple lighter-touch franchise arrangements. Siam Motors Group brings exactly that kind of local anchoring, alongside a network that extends across Thailand's business and professional classes, the population most likely to fill Highgate's fee tier.