Yesterday’s piece looked at who owns Asia’s international schools. The answer, in short, was Canadian pensioners, Swedish private equity, and Swiss family offices. The schools are an asset class, not an educational sector.

Today’s question is a follow-on. If parents are paying £25,000 a year per child, and the schools have 800-1,500 children each, and the buildings were built 20 years ago and the curriculum has not fundamentally changed, where does all the money go?

A meaningful answer requires looking at the people actually doing the teaching. Their salaries are the largest single cost in any school’s budget, and the gap between what parents assume teachers earn and what teachers actually earn is one of the most consequential, and least discussed, features of the international school economy.

This is the teacher pay gap. Across three tiers, in three currencies, with some uncomfortable maths.

The school revenue, in plain numbers

Let’s anchor on Bangkok Patana. It’s one of the better-known international schools in Southeast Asia, with a published fee structure. Annual tuition for senior school students in 2025-26 is approximately 945,000 baht (£22,000), with primary tuition around 540,000 baht (£12,600). On top of that, there’s a one-time entrance fee of 250,000 baht (£5,800) and an annual building levy.

Patana educates roughly 2,400 students. Most other major international schools in Bangkok run 800-1,500 students. A school of 1,000 students charging an average of £18,000 per student generates £18 million in annual fees. Some larger or more expensive schools, the BISs, Shrewsburys, Harrows, generate £25-40 million per year.

Salaries are the largest single cost line in any school. The widely-quoted industry benchmark is that staffing accounts for 55-65% of total school operating expenses. For a £20 million school, that’s £11-13 million on staff. Total staff headcount at a school of 1,000 students typically runs 150-200 people (teachers, teaching assistants, administrators, support staff, security, catering, maintenance).

If you do the maths naively, you might assume each staff member earns roughly £55,000-£85,000 on average. That number sits comfortably in a parent’s head. It sounds like what a “premium institution” should be paying.

The reality is different. Because that £11-13 million is not distributed evenly. It’s distributed across three radically different tiers.

Tier one: the foreign expatriate teacher

This is the teacher most British parents picture when they think of their child’s school. White, British or American or Australian, qualified back home, here on a multi-year contract with a housing allowance.

The 2026 pay for a foreign teacher at a top-tier Bangkok international school (Bangkok Patana, International School Bangkok, Shrewsbury, Harrow, NIST) is 120,000-170,000 baht per month, with the higher end reserved for senior teachers with 10+ years of experience or specialist subjects like physics, A-level mathematics, or IB Diploma coordinators. That’s £33,500-£47,500 per year in base salary, with additional benefits including:

  • Housing allowance of 25,000-45,000 baht per month (£7,000-£12,500 per year) or provided housing
  • Annual flights for the teacher and dependants
  • Tuition discount or free places for the teacher’s own children
  • Health insurance
  • End-of-contract gratuity payment

The all-in package value is therefore approximately £45,000-£65,000 per year for a top-tier school in Bangkok. That sounds reasonable until you compare it to two reference points.

Reference one: a UK experienced teacher in 2025-26. An M6 teacher (top of the main pay scale, six years’ experience) earns £43,815 base salary in the rest of England, £49,781 if they cross the upper pay range threshold. Add the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, which has an employer contribution rate of 28.68%, and the total compensation for an experienced UK state school teacher is effectively £56,000-£64,000 per year, with a defined-benefit pension that pays out for life.

Reference two: an Inner London teacher in 2025-26. UPS3 in Inner London is £58,500 base, plus the same 28.68% pension contribution. Total compensation: roughly £75,000 per year, again with a defined-benefit pension.

So a Bangkok international school teacher at the top tier earns roughly the same all-in as a UK state school teacher in Manchester or Newcastle, but with no defined-benefit pension, no job security beyond a 2-3 year contract, and no UK National Insurance contributions accruing toward their UK State Pension. They’re earning a slightly better headline number in exchange for taking on significantly more financial risk in their long-term planning.

This is the foreign expatriate teacher’s deal. It’s not a luxury package. It’s roughly equivalent to staying in the UK, with worse retirement security and better weather.

Tier two: the “local hire” Western teacher

Now it gets more interesting. Many international schools in Bangkok and across Asia operate a dual hiring track: “overseas hire” and “local hire.”

The same school, the same classroom, the same children. But two parallel pay structures based on whether the teacher was recruited from abroad or from within Thailand.

A “local hire” Western teacher (someone who applied for the job while already in Thailand, perhaps because they had been teaching at a smaller school or had married a Thai national) typically earns 55,000-90,000 baht per month at the same schools where overseas-hire foreigners are on 120,000-170,000.

That’s £15,300-£25,000 per year, often with no housing allowance, no flights, no tuition discount for their own children. Roughly half the package of the colleague sitting at the next desk doing the same job, because of how they were recruited.

This is well-documented in international teacher forums and recruitment guides. It’s not hidden. Most major chains operate this structure across multiple countries. The economic logic is straightforward: a “local hire” doesn’t need to be incentivised to relocate, because they’re already there. The school can pay them less because their alternative employment options are worse.

The educational logic is more troubling. Children at these schools are being taught by teachers of identical qualifications and experience who are paid wildly different amounts based on geography of hire, not quality of teaching. Parents paying £25,000 a year have no way to know whether their child’s teacher is on the £45,000 package or the £20,000 package.

Tier three: the Thai teacher

Here is the structural truth that’s invisible from the school’s marketing brochures. Most international schools in Thailand employ a substantial number of Thai nationals as teachers, teaching assistants, and support staff.

A qualified Thai teacher at a Thai government school earns an average of 431,000 baht per year, around £10,000. A Thai teacher employed at an international school typically earns more, perhaps 35,000-60,000 baht per month, but it’s still a fraction of what their foreign colleagues earn in the same building. £10,000-£17,000 per year for a teacher doing essentially the same job, in the same classrooms, with the same children, as a foreign colleague on £40,000+.

This isn’t just teaching assistants. Thai teachers carry full teaching loads in subjects like Mandarin, Thai language and culture, Buddhist studies, Thai history, and increasingly mathematics and science where qualified Thai teachers are available.

The pay differential between a foreign and Thai teacher in the same international school is typically 3-4x for the same role. It is one of the most stark structural wage gaps in any professional sector in Southeast Asia. And it sits inside institutions whose marketing emphasises diversity, international values, and educational excellence.

Across the whole staffing pyramid, the picture for a typical Bangkok international school of 1,000 students looks roughly like this:

  • 60-80 foreign overseas-hire teachers on £40,000-£50,000 packages = £2.4m-£4m
  • 20-30 local-hire Western teachers on £15,000-£25,000 = £0.4m-£0.75m
  • 40-60 Thai teachers and teaching assistants on £10,000-£17,000 = £0.4m-£1m
  • 50-80 support staff (catering, security, maintenance, admin) on £6,000-£12,000 = £0.3m-£1m

Total staff cost: roughly £3.5m-£6.75m, against £18-25 million in revenue. That’s 15-30% of fee income going to all teaching and support staff combined.

Set that against the 55-65% industry benchmark for total staff costs, and a question emerges. Where is the other 30-40% of fee income going?

The answer, as we established yesterday, is: senior management salaries, marketing budgets, capital projects, debt servicing, regional headquarters costs, and ultimately, returns to private equity owners. The teachers in front of your child’s class are getting a small slice of what you pay.

The Singapore parallel

The Bangkok numbers don’t exist in isolation. The same structure operates at higher pay levels in Singapore, the most expensive international school market in Southeast Asia.

A foreign teacher at Tanglin Trust School, UWCSEA, Singapore American School, or Stamford American is earning SGD 65,000-110,000 per year in base salary. That’s £38,000-£65,000, with the housing allowance often the same value again given Singapore rents. Total package value: £70,000-£110,000 for senior staff, including the housing allowance.

The local-hire Singapore Permanent Resident teacher at the same school: SGD 45,000-70,000 (£26,000-£41,000), often with no housing allowance.

The Singaporean or Malaysian Chinese teacher (Mandarin teachers, mathematics specialists): SGD 35,000-55,000 (£20,000-£32,000).

The same 3x ratio. Same school, same children, same classroom, three different economic universes for the people doing the work.

The Singapore numbers are higher because Singapore’s cost of living is higher. The ratio is the same as Bangkok. The structural gap between top-tier expatriate teacher and locally-hired teacher is roughly 3-4x across the region, regardless of the absolute salary level.

Why this matters for parents

There are three direct consequences of this pay structure for the parents paying the fees.

One: teacher turnover is structurally high.

Foreign teachers on 2-3 year contracts often don’t renew. They move to the next country, the next school, the next opportunity. A school where 25-35% of teaching staff change every year is structurally unstable. Your child’s relationship with a great teacher is unlikely to last more than two academic years.

The lower-paid local-hire and Thai teachers tend to stay longer because their options are more constrained. The result is that the most stable teaching relationships your child has are often with the lowest-paid teachers in the building. The high-prestige foreign teachers are the ones who rotate.

Two: the brand premium is paying for a small minority of teachers.

When you choose Bangkok Patana over a less-prestigious international school, you’re partly paying for the perceived quality of the foreign teacher cohort. But that cohort might be only 30-40% of total teaching staff. The other 60-70% are local-hire Westerners, Thai teachers, and teaching assistants who are doing much of the actual classroom work, especially in primary years.

If you’ve chosen a school based on “the foreign teachers are excellent,” you should ask what proportion of your child’s classroom hours are actually delivered by foreign overseas-hire teachers vs the lower-paid tiers. The answer might surprise you.

Three: the bargaining position of teachers is weak.

A foreign teacher on a 2-year contract has very little leverage. Their visa, housing allowance, end-of-contract gratuity, and ability to remain in the country are all tied to continued employment. Schools know this. Teachers who push back on workload, raise safeguarding concerns, or advocate for educational standards against the business priorities of management can find their contracts not renewed for “fit” reasons that are hard to challenge.

The local-hire and Thai teachers have even less leverage. The cumulative effect is that schools can run on the cheap on the staffing side because the staffing side has no meaningful power. This isn’t a problem unique to international schools, but it’s particularly acute in a structure where teachers are recruited internationally, on short contracts, with limited workplace rights.

What good schools do differently

The picture above is the industry average. Some schools are notably better than others on teacher pay and treatment.

The non-profit independent schools mentioned yesterday (Bangkok Patana, Tanglin Trust, UWCSEA, Singapore American School) typically pay better, retain teachers longer, and operate less aggressive local-vs-overseas hiring splits than the private-equity-owned chains. They’re not perfect, but the structural incentive to extract value from staff salaries is weaker because there are no shareholders demanding returns.

Schools with stronger teacher unions or staff associations (rarer in Asia than Europe, but they exist) tend to have narrower internal pay gaps and more transparent pay scales. Ask the school about its pay scales. If they won’t tell you, that’s information.

Schools that publicly disclose teacher retention rates are signalling something. International schools with 90%+ annual teacher retention (i.e. less than 10% turnover) are unusual and usually high-quality. Schools that won’t disclose this number are usually hiding turnover in the 25-40% range.

What parents can actually do

The structural situation, again, is not something individual parents can change. The international school economy operates the way it operates, and one family’s choices don’t shift the model.

But individual parents can:

Ask the right questions. When you visit a school, ask: what proportion of teaching staff are foreign overseas-hire vs local-hire? What’s the average teacher tenure? What’s the published pay scale? What proportion of the staff budget goes to teachers vs management and operations? Schools that won’t answer these questions are telling you something important about how they operate.

Value the schools that get this right. When you find a school where teachers are well-paid, well-retained, and treated as professionals, that information should weigh heavily in your enrollment decision. Educational quality follows teacher quality. Teacher quality follows teacher pay and conditions, not headteacher rhetoric.

Be sceptical of the foreign-teacher marketing. When a school’s brochure emphasises its British, American, or Australian teachers, ask what proportion of total classroom hours those teachers actually deliver. If the answer is 30%, you’re paying premium fees for a 30% premium experience, not a 100% premium experience.

Recognise the structural advantage of the non-profits. As established yesterday, the non-profit independent schools (Bangkok Patana, Tanglin Trust, UWCSEA, Singapore American School) have a structural advantage in teacher pay and retention because there are no shareholders demanding returns. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for choosing a non-profit over a private equity-owned school when both options are available.

The takeaway

International schools in Southeast Asia generate £20-40 million per year per school in fee revenue. The teachers in front of your child receive somewhere between 15-30% of that revenue, distributed across three tiers with pay differentials of 3-4x for the same job.

Foreign overseas-hire teachers earn roughly equivalent to UK state school teachers, with worse pensions and less security. Local-hire Western teachers earn half that. Thai teachers earn one third to one quarter of their foreign colleagues’ base salary.

This structure is invisible to parents from the school’s marketing. It’s deliberately so. The schools want you to think you’re paying for premium teaching. The reality is you’re paying for premium institutional positioning, with the teaching budget squeezed to fund the premium positioning.

The non-profit independent schools are the structural exception. Their teachers tend to be paid better, retained longer, and treated more professionally because the surplus from fees doesn’t flow out as private equity returns. If you have access to one of these schools, the teacher pay structure is one of the strongest reasons to choose them.

In the next pieces in this pillar, we will look at where the fees actually do go (capital projects, debt servicing, regional headquarters costs, brand marketing). We will examine the £2 million Hong Kong school debenture story. We will run the full 12-year cost of British international education across Bangkok, Hanoi, and Singapore.

But the teacher pay gap is the moral foundation underneath all of it. When you write the next £25,000 cheque to your child’s school, know that approximately £4,000-£6,000 of that is going to the teacher in front of your child. The rest is going somewhere else.

Worth knowing where.