Overview
Suratthani International School opened in 2014 on Phorkhuntale Road in Mueang district, about ten minutes from the city centre, and is the longest-established international school on the Surat Thani mainland. It teaches in English on a California State / Common Core foundation while working toward authorisation as an IB World School for the Primary Years Programme, which it currently delivers as a Candidate School. Its published strengths are unusually concrete for a school of its size: the only well-stocked English-literature library in Surat Thani by its own account, MAP Growth testing in mathematics and English to benchmark children against international cohorts, a landscaped garden in which every primary class farms its own vegetable plot, and a role as the region's Centre for Vipassana Meditation running full-day retreats with local Buddhist organisations. Behind the marketing there is real pastoral infrastructure too -- a Learning Support Coordinator, a pastoral counsellor, and a tiered English Language Support programme. The academic year runs mid-August to mid-June in two terms, and lunch is included in tuition.
BAANLYY is not affiliated with STIS and takes no paid placement in this guide. We publish no per-school fee figures anywhere on this site -- they change every year, and the figures circulating for Surat Thani's three schools are not comparable with one another. Ask the school for its current schedule.
Key facts
| Address | 51/91 Phorkhuntale Rd, Muang District, Suratthani 84000 |
| Area | Phorkhuntale Road, about ten minutes by car from the city centre |
| District | Mueang Surat Thani |
| Opened | 2014 |
| Curriculum | California State / Common Core foundation, with the IB Primary Years Programme taught as a Candidate School |
| Age range | From age 2. Where the school ends is genuinely unsettled -- see flags. |
| Religious character | Secular. STIS publishes no statement of faith, no worship requirement and no religious studies condition, and the independent directory doris records no formal religious affiliation. It does run full-day Vipassana meditation retreats with local Buddhist organisations, and describes itself as the Centre for Vipassana Meditation in Surat Thani -- that is a community and mindfulness programme, not a confessional requirement. |
| Scale | Around 240 pupils with typical class sizes of about 12, as compiled by the independent directory doris. The school itself publishes neither figure, and its doris profile is marked as independently researched and not claimed by the school -- so treat both numbers as indicative rather than official. |
| Boarding | None. STIS is a co-educational day school and students commute daily. After-school care runs until 16:45 for younger children. |
| Telephone | +66 98 017 7189 |
| Official website | stis.ac.th |
The pathway, stage by stage
- EY Prep (age 2-3) -- a play-based early-years framework in a dedicated space, designed by the school to feed into the PYP
- Early Years Programme, Kindergarten 1-3 -- inquiry-based and play-driven, built on the PYP's six transdisciplinary themes
- Grades 1-5 -- the IB Primary Years Programme, with explicit literacy and numeracy instruction alongside inquiry
- Beyond Grade 5 -- the school's own curriculum pages describe no secondary programme. Its fee schedule does. See the flags below before you plan around either.
Where the school stops
Unresolved, and you should treat it as unresolved. The school's own curriculum pages describe exactly two programmes -- EY Prep for ages 2-3 and the PYP for ages 3-11, naming Grades 1 to 5 -- and no secondary school. Its own published fee schedule, however, carries a Middle School tier from Grade 6 upwards with its own testing fee and admission fee, and budgets for IGCSE and SAT examination entries. Those two documents cannot both be describing the same school. Get the current year-group list in writing before you move a child who is older than about ten.
No school on the Surat Thani mainland teaches to 18. See the Surat Thani schools guide for how all three compare on this, and the Koh Samui schools guide for the nearest schools that do.
Accreditation & memberships
What STIS itself publishes. Where an independent source disagrees, it is named in the flags below rather than quietly dropped.
- IB Primary Years Programme -- Candidate School, pursuing authorisation as an IB World School (the school publishes the IB's standard candidacy disclaimer, which states that candidate status is no guarantee of authorisation)
- Cognia -- the school's homepage describes it as the only fully accredited global campus in Surat Thani town and carries a Cognia certificate image uploaded in February 2026 and a Cognia footer badge
- ONESQA -- Thailand's Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment, badge published in the site footer
- ISAT -- International Schools Association of Thailand, badge published in the site footer
- Common Core State Standards -- the curriculum framework, published as a footer badge
Who it’s for
Families with primary-age children who want an inquiry-led IB PYP classroom, a small community-scale school and a secular setting, inside the city and on a short school run. It is the most established of the three and the only one in Surat Thani teaching an IB programme. It suits families with a teenager far less well: nothing the school currently publishes describes a secondary programme in any detail.
Location & the school run
About ten minutes by car from the city centre, on Phorkhuntale Road in Mueang district. Surat Thani has no rail transit of any kind, so families drive, ride-hail or arrange private transport. STIS publishes no school bus or coach service -- doris records the same absence -- which makes this the school where where-you-live matters most.
Areas families use for this school run: Central Plaza / Talat Kaset →Ban Don riverside →
What we could not verify, and where sources disagree
We publish this rather than tidy it away. Every item below is something a family should raise directly with the school.
- Our own previous pages said STIS runs from Kindergarten through Grade 8. We can no longer source that anywhere on the school's website, and the profile page that carried it stated in its own header comment that it took the figure from our guide -- which is circular. It has been removed rather than replaced with a different guess.
- The school's curriculum page and the school's fee schedule contradict each other on where STIS ends. The curriculum page describes the PYP to age 11 and Grades 1-5. The fee schedule, as compiled by doris from the school's own documents, has a Middle School band from Grade 6 up, a separate Grade 6-and-above admission fee, and line items for IGCSE and SAT examination entries. We report both and pick neither.
- Cognia status is reported two different ways. The school's homepage banner calls STIS the only fully accredited global campus in Surat Thani town, naming Cognia and ONESQA, and a Cognia certificate image was uploaded to the site in February 2026. doris records STIS as a Cognia candidate rather than accredited. Ask the school which it is and for the certificate date.
- The school's milestone graphics also reference WASC, both as membership and as accreditation, without dates. Cognia and WASC are separate bodies. We do not resolve this; ask.
- Compulsory Mandarin appears in doris's summary of the school and in older third-party listings, but the school's current curriculum pages describe EY Prep and the PYP without naming a Mandarin programme. Confirm before you count on it.
- Several facilities panels on the school's own website are unfinished, carrying the literal words SAMPLE TEXT under the sports hall, play space, ICT studio, creative studio and science laboratory, and a placeholder image under a botanical garden. The library, gardens and meditation programme are written up properly and in detail; the rest we do not assert.
- The school's contact email in older listings sits on a stisthailand.com domain, separate from its stis.ac.th website. The current site obscures its addresses behind anti-spam encoding, so we publish the telephone number instead.
- STIS describes itself as the only international school in the city of Suratthani. Balance International School, also in Mueang district, describes itself as the first fully credited Cambridge International School in Surat Thani City. Both statements are on the schools' own websites. Both cannot be read literally.
Confirm these before you enrol
- Ask for the current list of year groups actually running, in writing, with the number of children in each. This is the single highest-stakes question in Surat Thani. All three schools are small and comparatively young, published age ranges disagree with each other and in one case with the school's own fee schedule, and a stage can appear on a website while no class exists behind it.
- Ask what happens after the school ends -- because none of the three takes a child to 18. Get the school's honest answer on where its leavers actually go, and what it will and will not do to help you place a child who is 14 or 15 when you arrive.
- Ask whether the school holds a current Thai Ministry of Education school licence, and ask to see it. One of the three states on its own website that it is still in the process of obtaining one.
- Ask whether the school runs a bus, and exactly which sub-districts it covers. With no rail transit anywhere in the province, the bus catchment -- or its absence -- quietly decides which neighbourhoods are realistic for you.
- If your child is not a confident English speaker, ask how English language support is assessed, whether it is compulsory once a child is placed in it, and what it costs. At one school the programme is compulsory on assessment and carries a supplementary fee treated as part of standard tuition.
- Ask what is genuinely included and what is billed on top -- lunch, uniform, residential trips, external examination entries, after-school care, insurance. Surat Thani's schools split these very differently, which makes headline tuition figures close to useless for comparison.
- Request the school's own current fee schedule in writing. We do not publish per-school fees because they change annually, and because the figures circulating for these three schools are not comparable with one another.
Sources & References
Facts are taken from the school's own official website first. Independent directories are used only as a cross-check and are named wherever we rely on them. BAANLYY is not affiliated with this school and takes no paid placement in this content -- always confirm current fees, admissions, licensing and campus details directly with the school.
See the full Surat Thani international schools guide for how STIS compares with the city's other schools.
Hero photo by Katerina Holmes on Pexels.
