Why Bangkok's International Teachers Rarely Stay Three Years

Two teachers introduced themselves to International Community School of Bangkok's student-run podcast this fall, and their résumés told a story bigger than either of them. Mr. Keith had just left four years teaching in Hong Kong after growing up between Florida, Virginia, and Michigan. Jessica Kastner had just left three years teaching high school English in Casablanca, Morocco, after seven years teaching middle school English outside Chicago. Their episode, titled "Fresh Faces Part 1," is Students Incorporated's annual ritual of interviewing that year's new hires, a ritual that exists because international schools like ICS churn through teachers at a rate few domestic school systems would tolerate.

A Market That Can't Hire Fast Enough

Thailand's international-school sector has been one of the fastest-growing corners of the country's education market for a decade. According to Kasikorn Research Centre, the business was worth more than THB85 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach THB95 billion in 2025, a jump the research firm attributes to demand from wealthy Thai families and a growing population of highly skilled foreign workers, according to a May 2026 Nation Thailand report on the sector. The number of international schools nationwide climbed from 207 in 2019 to an estimated 257 in 2025, even as the country's general private-school sector shrank from more than 4,100 schools to under 4,000 over roughly the same stretch, squeezed by falling birth rates. Put simply: Thailand has fewer school-age children overall, but a growing share of them are enrolling in international schools, and every new campus needs a full faculty to staff it.

That growth runs into a global supply problem. ISC Research, the consultancy that tracks the international-school sector worldwide, counts more than 713,000 staff currently employed across the industry and projects a need for as many as 158,400 additional teachers by 2028 if hiring returns to its pre-pandemic pace, or a more conservative 70,500 even if growth stays where it is now. Bangkok, home to more international schools than any other Thai city, sits at the center of that hiring pressure, part of why a school like ICS spends its opening podcast episode each year introducing an entirely new slate of faces.

The Two- to Three-Year Contract

The reason schools need so many new hires so often isn't only growth. It's churn. Research on international-school staffing has consistently found turnover rates well above what would alarm a domestic public school district. A 2022 study published in the journal Educational Research, drawing on a survey of 270 international schools and more than 22,000 teachers, found that roughly 14.4% of international teachers left their school within a single year, already comparable to levels of turnover that researchers describe as a "national crisis" in U.S. public education. More recent estimates, including work attributed to researchers Roberts and Mancuso, put annual turnover at some international schools between 25% and 30%, and one widely cited 2014 study found rates as high as 30% among schools in Dubai specifically. The practical result, researchers note, is that international teachers often stay only two to three years before moving on to the next posting.

Keith and Kastner's own histories track that pattern closely. Keith taught in Hong Kong for four years before returning briefly to the United States and then landing at ICS. Kastner taught seven years in the Chicago area, then three years in Casablanca, a stint that lands right inside the two-to-three-year window researchers describe as typical before a teacher's contract ends and they look elsewhere. Both described their second international move as far easier than the first. Keith said his family "kind of knew what we were getting into" this time, having already lived through the disorientation of the Hong Kong move once before. Kastner called leaving Morocco for Thailand a mix of "scary," "exciting," and "sad" all at once, a description that lines up with what researchers list as the biggest factors in whether a teacher renews a contract: not just pay, but administrative support and personal circumstances.

What Gets Left Behind

For Kastner, leaving Morocco meant leaving more than a job. She and her husband became known locally, in her words, as "the neighborhood Americans who loved animals," and over three years in Casablanca, people began leaving abandoned litters on their doorstep: a litter of puppies, three separate litters of kittens, and a rotation of street dogs the couple regularly brought in for veterinary care. Five months before she sat down with the ICS podcast crew, she said, the household had 12 cats at once, each on its own medication schedule. She placed nine of the kittens with new owners before the move by bringing them to school and running what she called "a big adoption fest" among her own students. It is the kind of informal problem-solving that keeps expatriate communities functioning, but it only softened the loss. She still described leaving the rest behind as one of the hardest parts of the move.

Language was its own kind of adjustment. Kastner had studied French in high school specifically hoping to someday live in French-speaking Africa, and Morocco delivered on that plan; she said communicating there "was so easy" by comparison. Thailand offered no equivalent head start. Neither she nor her husband speaks Thai, and she described the two of them learning the language together from scratch, a dynamic echoed in Keith's own account of adjusting to Thai driving habits, including a local parking custom he still hasn't figured out, after four years spent adapting to Hong Kong instead.

An Unexpected Freedom

The sharpest contrast Kastner drew, though, wasn't about logistics at all. Morocco, she said, is overwhelmingly Muslim, and at her school there she had signed documents agreeing not to discuss her own religion in the classroom. If a student asked directly, she said, "we were not allowed to answer." Moving to a Christian international school changed that entirely.

I feel so much more freedom and less fear coming here and being able to share who I am.

That kind of legal and cultural whiplash is an underexamined part of the international-teaching career. The same profession that lets someone teach English literature in Chicago, then Casablanca, then Bangkok within a decade also requires navigating wildly different rules about what a teacher is allowed to say about their own life. It rarely shows up in market-growth data or recruitment statistics, but it shapes which postings teachers accept, how long they stay, and how they describe the move once they've made it.

Why Schools Keep Betting on It Anyway

Despite the churn, both new hires described ICS's welcome as unusually effective at making the transition worth it. Keith said the school "does a good job in welcoming whole families," pointing to how staff looked out for his wife and sons. Kastner described a progressive dinner administrators hosted for new teachers, moving house to house for appetizers, dinner, and dessert, and said it left her feeling excited rather than nervous heading into her eleventh year of teaching, a rare reaction, she noted, this far into a career. Keith, comparing ICS to other schools he's taught at, called it a place with real "balance" between academics and community, rather than one leaning hard toward either.

That balance is precisely what the turnover research suggests matters most. Studies point to supportive school leadership, more than salary alone, as the strongest predictor of whether a teacher stays past a first contract. Thailand's international-school market isn't going to stop growing, and the global shortage of teachers to staff it isn't going away either, which means schools like ICS will likely keep introducing fresh faces every year for the foreseeable future. Whether this particular class of new hires stays two years or twenty may depend less on the size of the market than on the kind of welcome the research keeps finding actually works.

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