Schools & universities in Ratchaburi.

The most substantial English-medium schooling actually located in Ratchaburi. Ratchaborikanukroh School (โรงเรียนราชโบริกานุเคราะห์) runs a dedicated English Program from its campus at 421 Yutitham Road, Na Mueang, Mueang Ratchaburi 70000 (tel 032-328284). It is a full secondary pathway, not a bolt-on: the programme publishes both M3 and M6 graduating cohorts and has run continuously long enough to have posted yearbooks every year since 2009. For a family who wants English-medium teaching without leaving the province, this is the realistic option — ask the EP office directly for the current subject list, the balance of Thai and expatriate staff, and how M4–M6 subject choices are made.

Founded on 24 June 1925 and located at 411 Yutitham Road, Na Mueang, in the provincial capital (tel 032-337240, anubalrct.ac.th), Anuban Ratchaburi teaches from Anuban 2 (roughly age four) through Prathom 6, and runs not one but two language departments — an English Program and a Chinese Program — alongside the standard Thai programme. EP pupils sit the national NT and O-NET examinations plus Cambridge English Young Learners tests, Starters and Movers in P1–P3 and Movers, Flyers and Cambridge KET in P3–P6, which gives you an external, comparable measure of where a child's English actually is. This page previously flagged that the English-language Wikipedia entry describes it as a government school while also filing it under the Office of the Private Education Commission, and declined to repeat either. That is now resolved: it is a government school under the Office of the Basic Education Commission, administered through Ratchaburi Primary Educational Service Area Office 1.

Ratchaburi's best-known state secondary school, at Na Mueang in the provincial capital (ben.ac.th, tel 032-337302), teaching M1 to M6 and classified as an extra-large secondary school. We are again declining to publish a programme breakdown for it, and this time we can say exactly why, because the reason is a trap a parent will fall into within about thirty seconds of searching. At least four Thai state schools carry the royal name Benjamarachutit or a close variant, and the one with the strong search presence — including a detailed special-classroom structure of English Programme, SMTP and SMTE rooms — is Benjamarachutit in Nakhon Si Thammarat, at benjama.ac.th, a different school six hundred kilometres away. Our own tooling could not read the Ratchaburi school's site directly on this pass. So: the school is real, it matters, and any special-programme detail you read online should be checked against the address and the domain before you believe it applies here. Ask the school.

Ratchaburi's own public university, and it has an unusually specific origin. It opened in 1954 as Chom Bueng Village College, modelled deliberately on the Village Institutes of Turkey at the instigation of General Mangkorn Phromyothi, then Minister of Education: able rural children who had finished upper primary anywhere in the country were brought in on scholarships for a five-year teaching certificate and sent back to teach in their own home districts. That rural-service purpose still shapes it. It became a teachers' college, then a rajabhat institute, then a rajabhat university, and today runs faculties including Education, Industrial Technology and Nursing, plus its own demonstration school, from the Chom Bueng campus. It is not only a Chom Bueng institution: MCRU also runs an in-city learning centre in Mueang Ratchaburi, which matters if you assumed the whole student population lives forty minutes west of town.

The single most distinctive place to study in this province, and one most guides to Ratchaburi have never mentioned. MCRU's College of Muay Thai Studies was established on 7 October 2005 by resolution of the university council, as a self-funding unit ranked equivalent to a faculty. It built upward rather than downward: a graduate certificate first, then a Master of Arts in Muay Thai Studies from academic year 2005, then — in the second semester of academic year 2007 — a Doctor of Philosophy in Muay Thai Studies, which the college states was the first Muay Thai doctorate anywhere in the world, taught at Chom Bueng. The bachelor's degree came last, from 2009, with regular full-time intake from 2010. The college added a Bachelor of Thai Traditional Medicine from academic year 2008, also taught at Chom Bueng. If you are a foreign practitioner who assumed serious academic Muay Thai study meant Bangkok, it does not — it means Ratchaburi.

KMUTT — one of Thailand's leading engineering universities — operates a campus of roughly 1,200 rai in Chom Bueng district, and it is not a satellite service centre but a purpose-built Residential College: teaching buildings, dormitories, sports fields and a lake on one rural site ringed by villages, with students grouped in tens under a mentor lecturer, a co-curriculum of workshop, language and arts classes alongside the degree, and general-education subjects taught through problems brought in from the surrounding communities. Its own campus pages describe the academic programmes taught there as intelligent systems engineering, computer engineering and mechanical engineering, with shared foundation years and separate specialist teaching (contact 032-726500, kmutt.ratchaburi@kmutt.ac.th). Search results circulate a fourth programme, environmental engineering, and date a four-programme intake to academic year 2023; the campus's own about page does not list it, so confirm the current programme list with the campus before planning around it. The rental implication is worth stating plainly: this is a residential model, so it generates far less off-campus student tenancy than a commuter campus of the same size would.

A degree-awarding institution in the middle of the county town that has nothing to do with either university. At 84/21 Khathathon Road, Na Mueang (tel 032-321288), BCNR was established on 30 April 1974 as the Ratchaburi School of Practical Nursing and Midwifery under the Department of Medical Services, the ministry having approved its construction on 18 December 1973 on 8 rai 3 ngan 97 square wa. It became Ratchaburi Nursing College on 8 June 1990; received the royal name Boromarajonani, granted by Princess Srinagarindra to the ministry's nursing colleges, on 1 September 1994, initially as Boromarajonani Ratchaburi 1; affiliated its degree with Mahidol University on 30 June 1997; and took its present name on 16 September 1997. It has since bought adjoining land to reach 19 rai 1 ngan 32.8 square wa. It now sits within the Praboromarajchanok Institute, which the Praboromarajchanok Institute Act B.E. 2562, gazetted on 5 April 2019, made a specialist health-sciences higher-education institution in its own right. Teaching is in Thai.

The province's second nursing college, and the reason it has a royal suffix is a naming problem worth knowing. At 99 Moo 3, Lat Bua Khao, Ban Pong (tel 032-330479-82), on 40 rai, it began as the Ratchaburi Midwifery School, taking its first intake on 2 February 1970 as the Department of Health's fifth such school; became Ratchaburi Nursing and Midwifery College on 6 July 1987; and was named Boromarajonani Ratchaburi 2 in 1994. Because Ratchaburi then had two nursing colleges in the same district town, and Ratchaburi 1 and Ratchaburi 2 were confusing the public, the college petitioned for a distinct name and King Bhumibol granted the suffix Chakriraj — the reign of the Chakri dynasty — on 26 August 1996. It opened its four-year Bachelor of Nursing Science in 1997 in affiliation with Mahidol University's Faculty of Nursing, with the first cohort receiving degrees in 2001, and moved out to Ban Pong in March 2000. Teaching is in Thai.

In the canal country by the floating markets, at Wat Luang Pho Sot Dhammakayaram in Phaeng Phuai, Damnoen Saduak, sits a college of Thailand's principal Buddhist university. It grew out of a certificate in Sangha administration taught there from academic year 2005 by MCU's Baliseuksa Buddhaghosa Nakhon Pathom campus with the Sangha of Region 15; forty-five monks and Pali teachers finished it and most wanted to continue to a degree, so the regional ecclesiastical governor proposed a permanent unit. The university council approved it as an academic service unit of the Faculty of Social Sciences on 26 April 2006, and raised it to a college in its own right, gazetted on 26 February 2016. It teaches bachelor's degrees in Buddhist management and in political science under the Faculty of Social Sciences, and in Buddhism under the Faculty of Buddhism, plus certificates in Sangha administration and in teaching morality in schools. Teaching is in Thai.

Thailand's technical colleges are routinely described — including, until this revision, by us — as a certificate-and-diploma sector. In this province that is wrong. Ratchaburi Technical College and Photharam Technical College are both member colleges of the Institute of Vocational Education: Central Region 4, which groups nine colleges across Ratchaburi, Kanchanaburi, Nakhon Pathom and Suphan Buri and awards the Bachelor of Technology. Its published programme list sites two of those degrees in this province: electronics technology at Ratchaburi Technical College and electrical technology at Photharam Technical College, both continuing programmes for holders of the higher vocational diploma, taught in Thai. The institute's head office is at 90 Thesa Road, Phra Pathom Chedi, Mueang Nakhon Pathom (tel 034-242856) — outside the province — so the degree is conferred elsewhere while the teaching happens here.

This is the sentence most guides will not write. Ratchaburi province has no international school. It does not appear in the standard national list of international schools in Thailand — not a full-curriculum school, not an international kindergarten — and a search of the International Schools Association of Thailand's membership surfaced no member in this province either. Note the limit of that second check: ISAT publishes a member search rather than a province-by-province register, so treat it as strong corroboration, not as a certified count. If you need an international curriculum, you are commuting out of the province or you are living somewhere else. The three realistic destinations are set out below, with what each one can and cannot do.

Mahidol University International Demonstration School sits at 999 Phutthamonthon Sai 4 Road, Salaya, Phutthamonthon, Nakhon Pathom 73170 — the closest international-curriculum school to Ratchaburi, on the Mahidol Salaya campus. It is WASC-accredited, founded in 2013, runs roughly 820 students, and blends California content standards with the Thai national curriculum. The catch is decisive: it takes Grades 10 to 12 (M4–M6) only. It solves sixth form. It does nothing at all for a younger child, and any guide implying Nakhon Pathom answers the international-school question for a primary-aged family is wrong.

Founded in 2014 in southwest Bangkok toward Samut Sakhon — the side of the capital a Ratchaburi family actually approaches from — Norwich takes children from Nursery at age two through to Year 13. Its own site states the pathway plainly: the English National Curriculum through Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4, culminating in IGCSE and AS/A Level. Note that some third-party directories list an IB Diploma at Norwich; the school's own website does not, and where those disagree we go with the school. Mandarin is a deliberate focus throughout. Confirm the school-run bus catchment before assuming the commute is viable from the province.

If your work or lifestyle pulls south rather than toward Bangkok, HHIS is the other direction out of Ratchaburi, straight down Highway 4 through Phetchaburi, at 549 Moo 7, Hin Lek Fai, Hua Hin, on a hillside campus beside the Black Mountain golf course. This page previously told you to check its age range and curriculum before planning around it; here is the answer from the school itself. It opened in August 2015 with 75 students and now reports more than 430 students, 63 teachers and over thirty nationalities. The pathway runs playgroup, early years, primary and Key Stage 3 on the English national curriculum, Cambridge IGCSE in Years 10 and 11 — it became an accredited Cambridge International Assessment Centre in 2018, the same year it took the International Schools Quality Mark from the Education Development Trust — and then the International Baccalaureate Diploma in Years 12 and 13, launched in August 2020, with the first IB cohort graduating in 2022. It joined the Council of International Schools in 2024. That makes HHIS the only one of these three that can take a child from playgroup to a university-entrance diploma on a single campus — but from Ratchaburi town it is a relocation, not a commute.