Sarasas Witaed School

[JuniorExPat]

Heading out of town, just past the train station, on the right hand side is the new looking Sarasas Witaed School offering "Bilingual" and "Mini Bilingual" curricula.

Is there anyone here who works there, sends children there or has any experience or knowledge of the school that they would be willing to share here?

JxP

[tigerbeer]

i would be very interested to know as well.. thanks for taking note of the school JxP. Must be new?

[JuniorExPat]

i would be very interested to know as well.. thanks for taking note of the school JxP. Must be new?

It still looks shiny and new, they claim to take children from pre-school/kindergarten all the way through. There is plastic playground equipment set out in the grounds and apparently they have a swimming pool. The Bilingual stream is as it suggests with classes taught in English, the Mini-Bilingual seems to just offer ESL added on - at least that's what Mrs JxP and I were able to gather from a very quick visit to the security guard and a call to the school.

TB, if I find anything else out I'll let you know.

JxP

[moneyshot]

We were somehow given a brochure for this school, our little one wont be ready for a few more years but it looks interesting.

There is not too much on the brochure but none the less here it is...

If you have a tour of the school I would be interested to hear what its like.

[JuniorExPat]

I forgot to post this address:

http://www.sws.ac.th/eng/

JxP

[JuniorExPat]

We were somehow given a brochure for this school, our little one wont be ready for a few more years but it looks interesting.

There is not too much on the brochure but none the less here it is...

If you have a tour of the school I would be interested to hear what its like.

scans removed

Nice one moneyshot, thanks.

JxP

Edited May 29, 2008 by JuniorExPat

[tigerbeer]

thanks JxP, visited their website and it says the school is in bkk. they have a campus here as well i reckon. will talk to you about it anyways when we meet

[Gravelrash]

I found this quote from the brochure interesting:

"...aimed at fulfilling the need for a quality English Language Program while still maintaining Thai educational standards."

Most reassuring.

[PeaceBlondie]

As it says about the Chiang Mai school, this is the 22nd in a monstrous chain of Sarasas Schools, most of them in Bangkok. Reports from farang teachers in the system report big differences between various campuses. I spent several hours on a VIP bus with a 5th&6th grade social science teacher who told of big problems, yet teachers at other schools seem to like it.

The success of the Chiang Mai school will rest upon the administrators and teachers. Sarasas appears to be a for-profit enterprise.

[chiangmaibruce]

We visited the school office today to get some details. Just some observations to share:

1. school grounds appeared to be very clean and well-maintained. Some building and/or landscaping works are now underway.

2. Kids looked well disciplined and well-dressed (as were the teachers)

3. If you start during a term (for eg half way through) then you must pay for the full term

4. You cannot visit in the classrooms or go and look within school buildings except at the start of the term

5. You cannot attend part-time (ie. less than 5 days/week) even if you pay for full time. In other words if you wanted to get your child gradually used to the place over the first month or so then that is not possible.

No entry fee, just the normal tuition fee. The literature we were given was in Thai only but fees for the bilingual program were:

KG1: 15,000 term

KG2-3: 27,500 term

G1-6: 28,000 term

this includes lunches/2 terms per year

[tigerbeer]

thank you for the information chiangmaibruce.

[Mapguy]

I was also given a brochure for this school, and I am interested in it. The brochure is full of the usual cliches one finds in such publications of good, bad and indifferent schools alike.

I am not in principle against Thai for-profit schools, but I do worry about some of them. Here are a few reasons why.

Some such schools do not have qualified teachers from abroad; that is, teachers trained to be teachers. Appropriate certification is not a guarantee of good teaching, but it is the right thing to start with as well as proficiency in the discipline(s) being taught. In some cases, teachers do not have genuine baccalaureate degrees. This is somehow finessed by the administration by stating things like "all teachers have appropriate training or credentials." Wink, wink! Nudge, nudge! Happens in some respected government as well as private schools.

Another problem is class size. Not all, but a lot of Thai schools tend to have large classes; that is, more than 20-25 students in a class. Varee is a case where the goal for maximum class size is 30, but there is only one teacher in all rooms except "special needs" situations. I suggest that is not enough.

Schools are labor intensive. The tuition costs posted above are quite cheap. How do they manage that?

Swimming pools a good school do not make.

Another concern is that the school day is only so long. To teach proficiency in two languages in addition to the other important curriculum subjects is an extraordinary challenge.

Student retention rate? Graduation rate? Faculty turnover? University or other post-graduate admissions statistics? Established schools ought to provide this information.

I'd like to know what the answer is at Sarasas Witaed to these and other relevant questions.

What individual teachers have to report might be useful. That varies depending on the dynamics and personalities within their schools. Some teachers are complainers; some heads are bad administrators. And so on. But it doesn't hurt to listen.

Edited July 11, 2008 by Mapguy

[PeaceBlondie]

If the main administration and faculty are Thai, educated in Thai schools with Thai degrees, using Thai curriculum, you are probably paying too much for too little. Are kids allowed to cheat like gangsters, bribe their way through school, get passing grades for doing nothing, given multipe-choice test questions with nonsense wording, not allowed to think critically or question their teachers? If so, save your money, move to some remote village, and raise your kid to be an idiot, because you may very well end up with the same result, in town. Of course, this is either understatement or hyperbole.

[chiangmaibruce]

All noted thanks. I started off thinking that one of the better Thai schools would be OK, but the more I read and hear, the more I think we will need to bite the bullet and pay for an international school if we want our child to have the right skill set to make it in the real world outside LOS.

With our brief visit today we only asked about kindergarten student/teacher ratios (10:1).

My tentative preference at the moment is the new NAPA facility being built beside Nakornpayap International School. They are meant to finish and open this month. We visited recently and they had plenty left to do. But this is very close to us and also no entry fee for kids who enrol this year (but there will be after that) - important to us as may possibly have to leave CNX this year. One negative there - we got the enrolment form and it contained spelling and grammatical mistakes - not a good look.

[Bill97]

Student retention rate? Graduation rate? Faculty turnover? University or other post-graduate admissions statistics? Established schools ought to provide this information.

Please let us know if you can get that complete set of data for any school in Chiang Mai.

[Mapguy]

Student retention rate? Graduation rate? Faculty turnover? University or other post-graduate admissions statistics? Established schools ought to provide this information.

Please let us know if you can get that complete set of data for any school in Chiang Mai.

Yes --- if I read you correctly --- that's also a point, isn't it? From time to time you see graduation lists in print with the future plans of graduates noted, but not often. If you do --- and you know something about schools --- these publicity releases can be revealing. Otherwise, if you are interested in a school, start by going to the schools themselves and asking. I would be very surprised if you got a straight answer to all questions from more than a couple of schools, but by doing so you will certainly learn something about the school, won't you? How do they respond to such questions, and what are you told?

There is some information on the internet posted by teachers and ex-teachers of international schools worldwide usually about conditions at a particular school, but such comments are limited in number and scope. Quite often angry ex-teachers let fly at "hateful" heads, and so on. As well, some favorable posts can be "planted." As of now on one well-known site:

<< https://www.internationalschoolsreview.com >> (You pay for access)

there are comments about Lanna and Prem. One quite negative report on Lanna (a couple of years old) and a couple of dated positive reports on Prem. There are many more Bangkok schools commented upon. Frankly, I think you get more useful information having miscelaneous chats with the school teachers in town. I am not aware of any such discussions of bilingual schools in Thailand.

Chit chat with parents, too. That takes some work, especially to meet them and gain confidence in their judgment as well as gain their confidence enough to speak about a school.

Then, there are shared comments on the forum. But I must say I worry about that because there are past threads on schools which have unfortunately gotten extraordinarily vitriolic. I hope that doesn't happen here. Gathering useful information about the new school is clearly of interest to some people.

[p1p]

If you are interested in bilingual Thai schools, I seriously believe you will not do much better than Wichai Wittaya at the bottom of Chiang Maiu Land. It is attracting more and more pupils from international schools and other bilingual schools.

[Bill97]

Student retention rate? Graduation rate? Faculty turnover? University or other post-graduate admissions statistics? Established schools ought to provide this information.

Please let us know if you can get that complete set of data for any school in Chiang Mai.

I would be very surprised if you got a straight answer to all questions from more than a couple of schools

What schools do you think would give you a set of straight answers?

[Mapguy]

Student retention rate? Graduation rate? Faculty turnover? University or other post-graduate admissions statistics? Established schools ought to provide this information.

Please let us know if you can get that complete set of data for any school in Chiang Mai.

I would be very surprised if you got a straight answer to all questions from more than a couple of schools

What schools do you think would give you a set of straight answers?

Probably Prem, NIS, CMIS and Grace. None of them a "bilingual school" per se. Two are private for-profit Thai-owned schools.

Edited July 12, 2008 by Mapguy

[Bill97]

Student retention rate? Graduation rate? Faculty turnover? University or other post-graduate admissions statistics? Established schools ought to provide this information.

Please let us know if you can get that complete set of data for any school in Chiang Mai.

I would be very surprised if you got a straight answer to all questions from more than a couple of schools

What schools do you think would give you a set of straight answers?

Probably Prem, NIS, CMIS and Grace. None of them a "bilingual school" per se. Two are private for-profit Thai-owned schools.

Please do let us know if you get any straight answers from any schools and what they told you because there has not been much quantitative data available.

Edited July 12, 2008 by Bill97

[Briggsy]

I know some Sarasas teachers from Bangkok. I can confirm little attention is paid to qualifications. I am talking about the qualifications of the farang teaching staff.

Edited July 12, 2008 by Briggsy

[Mapguy]

That's sad to hear.

Tonight, I happened to find a very, very interesting thread on qualifications to teach English in Thailand. I encourage you to go to: http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Unqualified-....html&st=50.

It isn't directly relevant to bilingual schools, but you'll see why it is worth reading when you read it. It centers on teacher qualifications, in particular those for teaching English, and the issues surrounding them.

[Mapguy]

If you are interested in bilingual Thai schools, I seriously believe you will not do much better than Wichai Wittaya at the bottom of Chiang Maiu Land. It is attracting more and more pupils from international schools and other bilingual schools.

p1p's point may be well-taken: "If you are interested in bilingual Thai schools." I believe p1p knows a lot about the school. Varee, of which I am wary (sorry!) might also be worth a long look.

[Mapguy]

Student retention rate? Graduation rate? Faculty turnover? University or other post-graduate admissions statistics? Established schools ought to provide this information.

Please let us know if you can get that complete set of data for any school in Chiang Mai.

I would be very surprised if you got a straight answer to all questions from more than a couple of schools

What schools do you think would give you a set of straight answers?

Probably Prem, NIS, CMIS and Grace. None of them a "bilingual school" per se. Two are private for-profit Thai-owned schools.

Please do let us know if you get any straight answers from any schools and what they told you because there has not been much quantitative data available.

Well, here's a nibble! From their press releases, the international schools in Chiang Mai are occasionally successful with second- and third-rate universities. Once in a while they get a real winner, but you don't see much of that. Also consider that these schools in some ways pretty much take all comers with sufficient tuition. They might be doing quite a decent educational job, a super job in some cases! You have to deal with children as they come through the door! This is not meant as a slam, but there simply aren't (demographically) a lot of bright kids in Chiang Mai headed for Harvard or Oxford. What counts hugely more is the educational and economic level of the family.

[Bill97]

Well, here's a nibble! From their press releases, the international schools in Chiang Mai are occasionally successful with second- and third-rate universities. Once in a while they get a real winner, but you don't see much of that. Also consider that these schools in some ways pretty much take all comers with sufficient tuition. They might be doing quite a decent educational job, a super job in some cases! You have to deal with children as they come through the door! This is not meant as a slam, but there simply aren't (demographically) a lot of bright kids in Chiang Mai headed for Harvard or Oxford. What counts hugely more is the educational and economic level of the family.

Prem this year had a class of 45 students and 15 of them were accepted to attend universities ranked in the top 100 universities in the world according to information published by the school. One out of three into the top 100. Is that what you would call "occasionally successful with second- and third-rate universities"?

And what city the size of CM does have a lot of bright kids headed for Harvard or Oxford?

[Loaded]

Send your kids to study in Singapore. Just 2 hours away and a government school system that's the envy of most of the world. The Times Educational supplement regularly ranks Singapore in the top 5 in the world for its standards and results in Math and Science. It's a bilingual environment: English and Chinese. Also, many reputable foreign universities have campuses in Singapore. Singapore's government universities offer large (up tp 80%) discount on study fees and Permanent Resident status (PR) on condition that after graduation the person works for a couple of years for a Singaporean company-sounds more like a benefit actually

The poor education system here means kids who graduate from a Thai school are going nowhere internationally. Thai degrees aren't recognised outside of SE Asia.

[Mapguy]

Well, here's a nibble! From their press releases, the international schools in Chiang Mai are occasionally successful with second- and third-rate universities. Once in a while they get a real winner, but you don't see much of that. Also consider that these schools in some ways pretty much take all comers with sufficient tuition. They might be doing quite a decent educational job, a super job in some cases! You have to deal with children as they come through the door! This is not meant as a slam, but there simply aren't (demographically) a lot of bright kids in Chiang Mai headed for Harvard or Oxford. What counts hugely more is the educational and economic level of the family.

Prem this year had a class of 45 students and 15 of them were accepted to attend universities ranked in the top 100 universities in the world according to information published by the school. One out of three into the top 100. Is that what you would call "occasionally successful with second- and third-rate universities"?

And what city the size of CM does have a lot of bright kids headed for Harvard or Oxford?

Wow! The Prem results of this year sound very impressive indeed! Did the school publish a list? I'd be interested to see it. Other 2/3ds of the class? But I was a little harsh. I'll modify what I posted earlier to say that the international schools "generally are somewhat successful with second and third-tier schools" since I was writing of the CM international schools as a group and what results I've seen from Prem haven't matched their recent report. I hope Prem's results this year are ongoing and wish all the schools well.

Here are two popular "Top Ten" lists that are widely referred to. Keep in mind that when universities are considered, evaluation of the graduate programs, research (and things like the number of Nobel Laureates) are normally heavily weighted. U.S. News and World Report ranks different types of schools and educational programs in America, one being liberal arts colleges. It should be understood that there are indeed many, many good colleges other than those of the "Ivy League" where students are able to get a fine education. Lastly, there are various other lists, some country specific, some not.

http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2005/ARWU2005_Top100.htm

http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnew...index_brief.php

Chiang Mai and similar cities culturally probably don't vary demographically very much among themselves. Prem's demographics, of course, would not be at all similar. Educational research consistently shows a very high positive correlation between the educational and income levels of the parents and the academic success of their children.

With apologies I seem to have led this discussion off track. It should be about a new bilingual school in Chiang Mai. Learning more about Chiang Mai schools specifically is useful on the Chiang Mai forum, but it is probably more appropriate to use the educational forum to discuss broader considerations. There's a lot to talk about!

[p1p]

If you are interested in bilingual Thai schools, I seriously believe you will not do much better than Wichai Wittaya at the bottom of Chiang Maiu Land. It is attracting more and more pupils from international schools and other bilingual schools.

p1p's point may be well-taken: "If you are interested in bilingual Thai schools." I believe p1p knows a lot about the school. Varee, of which I am wary (sorry!) might also be worth a long look.

Misread your post. I thought you were implying I knew a lot about Waree, of which I am also somewhat wary. My children are studying at Wichai Wittaya after we did a lot of research into Bilingual Thai schools and I can honestly say we are extremely happy, much more so than we expected. (They previously attended an international school and had a host of problems.)

Witchai Wittaya is owned and run by people from Turkey. They are extremely concerned to make constant improvements and are investing large amounts in all aspects of the school.

It has frequently been misrepresented as being a Muslim school. About 10% of the pupils are from Islamic backgrounds, a similar amount, slightly more, are Christian. The rest are Buddhist with some Sikhs, Hindu's and others too. The teaching staff are about 50% foreign with most coming from England.

The school sets a very high regard on academic excellence, so if your child is lazy or not academically inclined, you may want to look elsewhere. (Although, having written that; One of my children was written off as having learning difficulties at his international school. After a year at Witchai, through careful nurturing by his teachers, he has risen to just over the average in all subjects except for Thai language. Yes, we are very happy there.)

[chiangmaibruce]

Just got the fee schedule for next term and thought I would post it here (before I lose it in the clutter), for the sake of anyone who might be interested.

The first figure is for the bilingual stream and the second figure (in brackets) is for the Thai only stream. The prices is per term (2 terms/year) plus cost of uniform and insurance.

Nursery 11,000 (11,000)

KG1 15,000 (12,500)

KG2-3 27,500 (12,500)

Grades 1-7 28,000 (13,000)

[davelygon]

Hi guys...

I worked as an English teacher for one of the Sarasas Bangkok schools in 2007, and I'd say they have good and bad points.

When I signed up with the school, they were extremely rigorous in checking my qualifications, insisting on letters from all universities involved to verify the authenticity of my degrees. At the time the Thai ministry of education was cracking down on "Ko San Road" degree-holders, and the school did a good job of weeding out those with shonky credentials.

There were Thai, Farang and Filipino teachers at the school, and I have to say that the Filipinos were probably the hardest-working and most effective teachers. All the Thai teachers were fully-qualified and worked long hours for a pittance. There were some very good Farang teachers, but not all had teaching qualifications. All in all, we were an interesting, but motley crew.

I agree that a teaching degree or diploma is no guarantee of quality, but having done a GradDipEd in Australia, I can say that it's a good start. Any schools that use trained teachers are bound to have the edge on those that don't. The Sarasas business model might not allow for a strong team of qualified western teachers, but at least some of their farang teachers are good, and they do employ fully-qualified teachers from the Filipines and other parts of the world.

I wouldn't say that the Sarasas schools are bad, and they're obviously not the best. They are what they are, which is a compromise between state schools and expensive International schools. They are filling a niche in the market for socially-aspiring Thais who want to do the best they can for their kids, and farangs on a budget.

I'm interested to learn how the Chiang Mai branch fares. If I learn any more I'll post it here.

Dave