NLCS International to Establish a Boarding School in Phuket in 2028

North London Collegiate School's international arm has reached an agreement with VLC Group, a Thai hotel and resort operator based in Phuket and Khao Lak, to develop a co-educational day and boarding campus in Cherng Talay, one of the island's fastest-growing residential districts. According to The Phuket News, NLCS Phuket International School is scheduled to open in the third quarter of 2028 with capacity for around 1,000 students, with scope to grow to approximately 1,500 over time.

The campus will offer education from Early Years through Year 13, following the English National Curriculum to IGCSE and IB Diploma. Boarding is a core part of the proposition, designed for families across Thailand and the wider region who want an NLCS education without sending children overseas. Day places will be open to Phuket's resident international families. Planned facilities include a 50-metre swimming pool, sports hall, covered tennis courts, football pitches and dedicated junior and senior school spaces.

Beyond the Bangkok belt

Thailand attracted several major British school openings in 2026, with Wycombe Abbey, Dulwich College and Highgate School all entering the country, primarily through Bangkok campuses. Phuket has a different profile. Its international community has expanded considerably in recent years, partly through digital nomads and remote workers attracted by lifestyle and lower costs, and partly through affluent Southeast Asian families choosing to base themselves outside the capital. A boarding school in Cherng Talay is designed to serve that second group directly, providing access to a GCSE and A Level pathway without the disruption of relocation.

VLC Group's involvement is an unusual structural choice. The partner is a hospitality operator, not an education company, and it brings a different kind of operational expertise: the management of premium residential environments, catering and guest services. In a boarding school, those are not peripheral concerns. Whether this model produces a different operational culture from the education-company partnerships that have driven most UK school expansion in Southeast Asia will be one of the early questions for prospective families.

NLCS's international footprint

NLCS International has expanded deliberately. Campuses in Jeju (2011), Dubai (2017), Singapore (2020) and Kobe (2025) have each occupied a distinct local niche rather than replicating a standard franchise model. Hong Kong is planned for 2027. Phuket will be the sixth international campus for a group whose UK parent school was named Independent Secondary School of the Year in the Sunday Times Parent Power Guide 2026. That credential carries weight in the Phuket market, where the top fee tier is increasingly driven by local affluent families seeking British educational prestige rather than by corporate expatriate packages.

Families considering NLCS Phuket are looking at a founding cohort entry point in 2028, which means living with the uncertainties of a new school alongside the opportunity to shape its early culture. Whether the boarding offer fills in its first years will depend on how many families within Thailand, and across the Andaman coast more broadly, are willing to entrust a new campus with full residential responsibility for their children. The nearest comparable boarding schools are in Bangkok, several hours away; that distance is a problem NLCS Phuket is explicitly designed to solve.