Primary tutoring for international schools in Thailand

These are the only years on the international ladder with nothing to sit. No board examines a seven-year-old, so the evidence a family has is the school's own reporting, and the questions that bring parents to a tutor are correspondingly different: reading that has stalled, a child working in a language the household does not speak, or a move between two countries whose primary curricula do not line up year for year. Nursery and Reception sit at the front of this stretch and are folded in here rather than given a page of their own, because the work is continuous with Key Stage 1 and the exam calendar that would separate them does not exist yet.

Two calendars run side by side in Bangkok, and this is the stage where the mismatch costs the most. The international year opens in August and closes in June. The Thai national year opens in mid-May and closes in March. A family relocating in February joins an international school with most of the year already gone, while the national system has not started its year at all. Tutoring across that gap is not revision; it is closing the distance between where a child stopped and where the new class already is.

There is also a subject that the school cannot skip and the family often does not expect. Under a Ministry of Education directive, pupils holding Thai nationality must study Thai language even in an English-medium school, and foreign pupils spend at least an hour a week on Thai culture. For a Thai-passport child who thinks and reads in English, Thai becomes the one subject where they are behind their own cousins, and it is the single most common reason a family at this stage asks for help.