Schools & universities in Chaiyaphum.

Chaiyaphum Rajabhat University

This is the province's only institution that actually carries the word university in its name — which is not the same thing as being its only degree awarder, a distinction this page previously blurred and now corrects in the two sections below. It sits on the Khao Sa Hong hills in tambon Na Fai, Mueang Chaiyaphum district, about 12.5 kilometres north of the town centre with its front boundary on the Chaiyaphum–Tat Ton road. The land is worth a sentence of its own: 1,439 rai of public land donated by the Na Fai tambon council, plus more than 42 further rai donated by villagers of Na Fai and Huai Chan, for a total of over 1,480 rai. The institution began as a project in 1994, operating from a temporary office at the Chaiyaphum Physical Education College before moving to the current site on 12 August 1998. Two official-side sources disagree on the cabinet approval date — one gives 29 April 1997, the other a 15-million-baht budget approval on 9 April 1997 — and we print both rather than pick one. A Royal Decree established Chaiyaphum Rajabhat Institute with effect from 12 July 2001, which the university treats as its founding day, and the Rajabhat University Act, signed on 10 June 2004 and published in the Royal Gazette on 14 June 2004, elevated it to Chaiyaphum Rajabhat University with full juristic-person status. It carries faculties of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Business Administration, Nursing, Education, Engineering, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Political Science, plus master's-level study.

The second campus, twenty-one street numbers from the first

Chaiyaphum has a campus of Thailand National Sports University, and it is not a satellite office — it is a degree-awarding campus with three faculties, each running one bachelor's programme. The Faculty of Sport Science and Health awards a Bachelor of Science in sports science and exercise; the Faculty of Liberal Arts awards a Bachelor of Arts in sports mass communication; the Faculty of Education awards a Bachelor of Education in physical education. Its vice-president for the campus is Assistant Professor Dr Kosol Rodma, and it sits at 239 Moo 4, tambon Nai Mueang, Mueang Chaiyaphum, on 044 812 088. Note that address, because Chaiyaphum Technical College is at 260 Moo 4 in the same tambon — twenty-one street numbers apart on the same village lane, and neither page nor prospectus mentions the other. The institution is older than the Rajabhat: it began teaching as Chaiyaphum Physical Education College in the 1983 academic year, was folded into the Institute of Physical Education when that Act took effect on 5 February 2005, and became a campus of a full national university under the National Sports University Act. It also appears, unnamed as such, in this page's own account of the Rajabhat: the temporary office the Rajabhat project worked from in 1994 was the Chaiyaphum Physical Education College. We had the entity on the page for a year and filed it as a footnote to somebody else's history.

Ramkhamhaeng is here too — but in two southern districts, not the town

Ramkhamhaeng University runs twenty-three regional campuses across Thailand, and Chaiyaphum has one of them: the Chaiyaphum Regional Campus at Moo 9, Suranarai Road, tambon Khok Roeng Rom, in BAMNET NARONG district, on 044 056 703. It has taught since the 2003 academic year and offers study at bachelor's, master's AND doctoral level, delivered by satellite broadcast, live internet lecture, course-on-demand and e-learning — which is how a province with one conventional university nonetheless has a route to a postgraduate degree without leaving it. Two practical points that a prospectus will not tell you. First, Bamnet Narong is roughly the far southern end of the province, not the provincial town, so a Chaiyaphum-city resident registering in person is making a real drive. Second, the campus is NOT the province's examination venue: Ramkhamhaeng's regional exam-centre list gives Chaiyaphum as centre 32, building code CK, at Jatturat Witthayakarn School on 044 851 163 — which is in CHATTURAT district, a different district again. Most provinces that have a regional campus sit their exams in it. Chaiyaphum's Ramkhamhaeng footprint is split across two southern districts and touches Mueang Chaiyaphum at neither end. If you are studying with Ramkhamhaeng from here, check which of the two you need before you set off.

The Faculty of Nursing, and the province's nursing question

Chaiyaphum Rajabhat's Faculty of Nursing was formerly the Phraya Phakdi Chumphon Nursing College — named for the province's founding hero — and its Bachelor of Nursing Science curriculum was approved by the University Council at its fifth meeting of 2006 on 16 October that year, with institutional accreditation from the Thailand Nursing and Midwifery Council dated 8 February 2008. That matters because of what is NOT here. Thailand's Praboromarajchanok Institute network of Boromarajonani nursing colleges lists its Northeastern colleges as Khon Kaen, Nakhon Ratchasima, Sanpasitthiprasong, Udon Thani, Surin and Si Mahasarakham — there is no Chaiyaphum college in that network, and any reference you find to a 'Boromarajonani College of Nursing Chaiyaphum' is mistaken. Nursing education in this province is delivered by the Rajabhat, not by the national nursing-college network, and that is a genuinely useful distinction for anyone researching healthcare training or employment here.

Chaiyaphum Technical College — older than the university by sixty years

The province's vocational sector is deeper and much older than its university sector, which is common in Isaan and often overlooked. Chaiyaphum Technical College was founded on 20 December 1938 as the Chaiyaphum Carpentry School, moving to Non Muang Road on 20 June 1939. It became the Chaiyaphum Trade School in 1959, the Chaiyaphum Technical School in 1979, and was elevated to Chaiyaphum Technical College on 1 April 1981, relocating to Crown Property land in tambon Rop Mueang that had previously been a Royal Thai Air Force airfield. It now occupies 115 rai 1 ngan 58 square wah at 260 Moo 4, Provincial Administrative Organisation Road 2, tambon Nai Mueang, with 20 buildings and 150 rooms, and runs fourteen vocational-certificate programmes plus two in the dual system, eighteen higher-vocational-certificate programmes plus eleven dual-system, and six bachelor's degrees in the dual system. Those six are worth naming, because they are the province's only vocational route to a degree: mechanical technology, production technology, electrical technology, electronics, accounting and business computing, all awarded as a Bachelor of Technology. The college awards them as a member of the INSTITUTE OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION: NORTHEASTERN REGION 5, the degree-granting institute for the four Nakhon Chai Burin provinces, and the membership list is the useful part: nine colleges, of which four are in Nakhon Ratchasima, two in Buriram and two in Surin. Chaiyaphum contributes exactly one — this college. It is the sole Chaiyaphum institution inside that institute, which is why there is no second vocational degree route in the province. There is one further thread here. The college's own history records that in its first year, 1938, it had no premises and borrowed the provincial teacher-training school and the primary agricultural vocational school — and it names that second host as today's Chaiyaphum College of Agriculture and Technology. The province's two vocational colleges are not neighbours by accident; one was born inside the other. For anyone considering teaching English here, the vocational sector is where a large share of the jobs are.

What does not exist here

Three negatives worth stating explicitly, because each of them appears somewhere as a plausible-sounding claim. There is no Rajamangala University of Technology Isan campus in Chaiyaphum: RMUTI's own campus listing gives Nakhon Ratchasima as the centre plus Khon Kaen, Sakon Nakhon and Surin, with a project to establish a Roi Et campus at Thung Kula Ronghai — no Chaiyaphum. There is no Boromarajonani nursing college here, as above. And there is no international-curriculum school anywhere in the province, which is the one that will matter most to relocating families. We are stating that as a verified absence rather than a coverage gap, because it rests on a positive check: Wikipedia's province-by-province list of international schools in Thailand, which we read in full, contains no Chaiyaphum entry at all, while listing one school in Khon Kaen, four in Nakhon Ratchasima, one in Roi Et, one in Ubon Ratchathani and two in Udon Thani. One correction belongs in this section rather than buried: an earlier version of this page answered the question 'what universities are in Chaiyaphum' with the single word One. That was wrong, and the two campuses it missed are described above. The three negatives here are a different kind of statement — each rests on reading a national list in full and finding no Chaiyaphum row — but the university count was us mistaking a name for a category, and it is fair to know which of our claims came from a register and which came from an assumption.

The nearest international school, named because we checked it

The nearest international-curriculum school to Chaiyaphum whose curriculum we individually verified is Anglo Singapore International School in Nakhon Ratchasima, at 1688/18 Mittraphap Road in Mueang Nakhon Ratchasima — about 122 kilometres from Chaiyaphum by road. Its own site states that it fully meets the Singaporean curriculum framework while integrating key elements of UK and Cambridge curricula, and that the programme culminates in Cambridge IGCSE, AS and A-Level examinations. We are naming it because we read that on the school's own page; we did not verify its fee schedule and publish none. Nakhon Ratchasima has three other international schools on the national list which we did not individually check and therefore do not name. Khon Kaen, about 127 kilometres in the other direction, has one on the list; we found a Cambridge-accredited BILINGUAL school there, which is a different category, and we also found a third-party directory listing a 'Khon Kaen International School' with the same phone number and website as that bilingual school — so we treat the Khon Kaen options as unresolved and name none of them.

The province's flagship school, now named and dated

This page used to confirm exactly one Thai secondary school by name. We can now add the one that actually matters most to a family weighing the public system: CHAIYABHUMBHAKDEECHUMPHON SCHOOL (โรงเรียนชัยภูมิภักดีชุมพล), at 19 Bannakan Road in Mueang Chaiyaphum — on the same road as Chaiyaphum Hospital at number 12, a genuinely useful orientation point if you are picturing the town. It is a government secondary school under the Office of the Basic Education Commission, Secondary Educational Service Area Office 30, founded on 25 December 1899 under King Chulalongkorn by Provost Charun Nirotkit, which makes it older than the technical college by nearly four decades and the obvious comparison point for the Rajabhat's own 1994 origin. Wikipedia's infobox, sourced to the school's own reporting, gives enrolment of 3,096 students across 79 classes in the 2009 academic year — an average class size of 49 — with 192 teaching staff and a 2013 revenue figure of about 93.6 million baht; we print the 2009 enrolment as the most recent figure we could verify rather than guess a current one. It teaches grades 7 to 12 (mathayom 1–6), is coeducational, and its colours are yellow and red. This is the provincial-capital equivalent of what Chaiyaphum Rajabhat is at tertiary level: the flagship, not a boutique option, and the realistic Thai-system choice for a family settling in the town itself.

A Mini English Program exists — at primary level, and it is not an international school

Separately, and worth stating precisely so it is not confused with the gap above: Anuban Chaiyaphum School (โรงเรียนอนุบาลชัยภูมิ), the province's leading state primary and kindergarten school under Chaiyaphum Primary Educational Service Area Office 1, runs a Mini English Program (MEP) — a track inside the Thai national curriculum, not an international curriculum, in which students get at least twelve hours a week of English, Social Studies and Physical Education taught by foreign teachers, alongside the standard Thai programme in every other subject. An academic evaluation of the programme surveyed its own administrators, coordinators, teachers and 60 parents, which is how we know the hour count and the subject split rather than from the school's own marketing. This is the right thing to know about if your honest need is 'more English than a standard Thai school, starting young' rather than 'an IGCSE or IB pathway' — those remain absent from the province, and MEP at primary level does not change the schools page's central finding that there is no international-curriculum school anywhere in Chaiyaphum. Treat MEP as a genuine, verified middle option between a fully Thai classroom and the 122-kilometre drive to Nakhon Ratchasima, not as a substitute for either.

Thai schools, and what we still have not checked

Chaiyaphum's Thai state system runs across sixteen districts, 124 subdistricts and 1,393 villages, and the two schools named above are the flagship secondary and flagship primary options in the town — not a complete survey. Specialist provision appears to exist — a Chaiyaphum School for the Deaf is referenced both on a property listing and in a web directory, which places it in Ban Lao, Mueang Chaiyaphum — but we want to be exact about the grade of that evidence: a directory is not a register, we have not found this school on the Bureau of Special Education Administration's own roll, and we are naming it as an unconfirmed lead rather than a checked fact. One further named Chaiyaphum secondary school on this page is confirmed because a university publishes it: Jatturat Witthayakarn School in Chatturat district, on 044 851 163, which Ramkhamhaeng lists as the province's examination centre. Beyond the three schools named across this section, BAANLYY has not verified individual Thai schools in the district towns outside Mueang Chaiyaphum — not their English Programme offerings, not their examination results, not their intake policies for foreign children — and we are not going to name any of them on the strength of a directory entry. That is a gap in OUR coverage rather than a claim about the province. If you are moving here with children who will attend a Thai school, treat this page as telling you what the town's two flagship options and the tertiary and vocational landscape look like, and go and visit the schools themselves before you commit.

Chaiyaphum education FAQ

Sources & References

• Chaiyabhumbhakdeechumphon School — Wikipedia (founded 1899, enrolment, address)
• Anuban Chaiyaphum School Mini English Program — CIPPIEST evaluation study (hours, subjects, participants)
• Chaiyaphum Rajabhat University — university history
• List of international schools in Thailand — Wikipedia
• Anglo Singapore International School, Korat — academics
• Chaiyaphum Technical College — basic institutional data
• Thailand National Sports University, Chaiyaphum Campus
• Institute of Vocational Education: Northeastern Region 5 — member colleges
• Ramkhamhaeng University — 23 regional campuses and 41 examination centres
• RMUTI campuses — Rajamangala University of Technology Isan
• Chaiyaphum province — Wikipedia
• Tourism Authority of Thailand

Primary and official sources are cited above. Government rules, fees and procedures in Thailand change over time and vary by office; always confirm current requirements with the relevant authority before relying on them. BAANLYY never takes paid placement in editorial content.

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