Frustrated parents resort to best of British as a solution

It looks like a swish riverside resort, but promises the best of British education. Its corridors and courtyards are shiny and new, but the boast is of a direct link to a 450-year-old heritage, and of old boys such as naturalist Charles Darwin and the poet Sir Philip Sydney.

Shrewsbury International School Bangkok is the latest in a line of 'franchises' of venerable English public schools to open up shop in Thailand.

It's a style of education which appears to be in big demand among both expatriate and Thai parents if the school's enrolments are anything to go by. Headmaster Stuart Morris, who 'defected' from rival school Harrow to take up the reins at Shrewsbury, said the 765 students who applied for seats ahead of the school opening its doors in September were a Thai record.

'This is an extraordinarily high number, given that the most successful opening of any international school in Bangkok in the last 10 years has involved fewer than 100 pupils,' he said.

Indeed, more than a year before the opening, hundreds of parents had already signed their children up, happy to fork out tuition fees ranging from 200,000 baht (HK$38,960) to 400,000 baht a year.

Property tycoon Chali Sophonpanich - the son of Bangkok Bank supremo Chatri Sophonpanich - believes an increasing number of parents are fed up with the country's ailing education system. He has pumped about two billion baht into building the school, which sits on around 10 acres of prime riverfront land off New Road near Sathorn Bridge.