Inside ICS Bangkok's Bet That Culture Beats Teacher Turnover

International schools have a staffing problem that rarely makes it into the glossy admissions brochure: teachers leave, often and fast. At the International Community School of Bangkok, the man responsible for keeping people from walking out the door says the fix isn't a bigger paycheck. It's making sure everyone in the building can answer one question, why are we here, the same way.

Stephen, ICS Bangkok's Head of School, made that case on the Students Incorporated podcast, produced by the school's own students. Now in his 16th year at ICS after starting as a high school history teacher, Stephen told co-hosts Maci and Tasia that the school's teachers and staff stay for an average of eight years, a figure he called "extremely uncommon for international schools." The claim is a specific, checkable one, and the research on international school staffing backs up why he'd bother making it.

An Industry Built on Churn

Teacher turnover in international schools has been studied for two decades, and the numbers are not flattering. A 2010 study in the Journal of Research in International Education, by Steven Mancuso, Laura Roberts, and George White, surveyed 22 school heads and 248 teachers across international schools in the Near East South Asia region and found an average annual turnover rate of 17% between 2006 and 2009, with some individual schools losing as much as 60% of their staff in a single year. The single strongest predictor of whether a teacher stayed wasn't age or even salary. It was whether teachers felt genuinely supported by their head of school. A separate 2022 study in the journal Educational Research, by Mary Ruzuvika of Seton Hall University, surveyed 281 expatriate teachers about why they left their schools after a first contract; administrative leadership topped the list, ahead of compensation and personal circumstances. The same paper cites a joint survey by the European Council of International Schools and the Council of International Schools covering the 2005-06 school year, in which 270 responding schools reported 3,193 departures out of 22,098 total teachers, a 14.4% turnover rate.

Run either number forward and an eight-year average tenure looks less like a nice-to-have and more like an outlier worth explaining. What both studies converge on, that leadership, not pay, predicts whether teachers stay, is also what makes Stephen's framing interesting: he isn't describing a compensation strategy. He's describing a leadership strategy, delivered as a job description.

If you want a positive tone or culture in a school, you have to set it every day personally yourself.

That's the standard he says he heard early in his time as an administrator, and the one he's tried to hold himself to since. Concretely, that means ICS keeps its mission and vision statement, built on what he described as biblical teaching in partnership with parents, physically posted on every classroom and office wall, reinforced through daily staff devotions, and treated as the filter for every decision the school makes. "If they're not [behind it], we don't do it," he said of proposals that don't tie back to the mission.

Diversity, in Stephen's telling, gets folded into that same culture-first logic rather than treated as a separate initiative. ICS drew students from 28 countries at the time of the interview, and Stephen framed that mix as a resource for what he called "diversity of thought" inside classrooms, reinforced through events like International Day and service trips into different socioeconomic settings around Thailand. The underlying claim is the same one behind the retention pitch: a culture holds up under real difference only if someone is actively building it, not assuming it.

Two Jobs That Taught Him What Not to Do

Stephen's case for mission-driven culture leans on two negative examples from his own résumé, the most concrete part of the conversation. Before ICS, he spent three and a half years at Merrill Lynch, the financial services firm. "I never knew the mission of the company at all," he said. "I knew exactly what I needed to do in my given department, but I never knew the connection it had with the overall success of the company." He described the job as functional but hollow, clock in, do the assigned task, clock out, and said he left without ever feeling a sense of fulfillment tied to the larger enterprise.

He described a second, more corrosive example from a public school where he taught before ICS: a shared teachers' lounge that became, in his words, "a breeding ground for negativity" against students and school leadership, with a widening divide between faculty and administration. Both stories point at the same underlying idea from organizational psychology: people disengage not from the work itself but from not knowing how their work connects to anything bigger. It's a pattern well documented outside of schools, too. In an August 2020 survey of more than 1,000 U.S. workers, McKinsey found that 85% of senior leaders said they were living their sense of purpose through their work, compared with just 15% of frontline employees and managers, a gap the firm argued directly predicts who stays and who leaves.

Two Campuses, One Culture, Through a Pandemic

The hardest test of Stephen's culture-first approach, by his own account, was logistical rather than philosophical: keeping one community intact across ICS's original Bangkok campus (roughly 1,100 students and three decades old) and a newer campus in Udon Thani that had grown from 150 to 200 students by the time of the interview. COVID hit while the second campus was still getting established, and Stephen said trying to "breed community" over Zoom, with travel between the two campuses restricted, was the toughest stretch of his tenure. "Our middle name is community," he said, "and it was hard to keep our community so tight in an online forum."

That challenge, sustaining a coherent culture across a distributed organization under pandemic conditions, turned out to be a live research question elsewhere in education, too. A March 2025 study led by Auburn University's David Marshall looked at which Alabama high schools recovered fastest academically after COVID-19 and found three factors that stood out: positive teacher working conditions anchored in a strong school culture, tight relationships with the surrounding community, and supportive school leadership. Those are close to the same three levers Stephen describes reaching for at ICS: daily reinforcement of shared purpose, community-building events like the school's annual Eagles Camp retreat, and a leadership team that treats culture as a job requirement rather than a side project.

Stephen offered one small story from that retreat that captured the stakes of getting it right. A colleague at the Udon Thani campus relayed that the school's students, badly outnumbered when the much larger Bangkok group arrived at Eagles Camp, found it "quite intimidating" at first, until the Bangkok students pulled them into small groups so no one felt left out. It's a minor moment, but it's evidence that a stated value of community is actually operating, rather than just decorating a wall.

What He'd Tell Anyone Else Trying This

Asked how listeners might build similar culture in their own organizations, Stephen didn't offer a shortcut. "Know first that it takes time to build culture," he said, arguing that the real starting point is hiring people who are "behind the mission and vision of an organization" rather than retrofitting culture onto an existing team. From there, he described it as building "a common story, a common history" and consistently choosing "a spirit of positivity and encouragement" that lets people feel safe being who they are at work.

None of that is unique to schools, or to Bangkok. It's closer to a general theory of why organizations hold onto people: not because the mission statement is well written, but because leadership keeps proving, in small and repeated ways, that it's real. ICS's eight-year average tenure, measured against a field where published research has found individual schools losing up to 60% of their staff in a single year, suggests that theory is, at minimum, not obviously wrong.

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