HeadStart comes up early in most Phuket school searches, and for a reason that is really a property question. It runs two campuses on opposite sides of the island, it charges the same fees at both, and it runs a bus network between them. So the school does not narrow down where you live — which means the housing decision stays open, and stays yours to get wrong.
This is a review of what HeadStart publishes about itself, read on 26 September 2026, set against our own rental book. We have no relationship with the school and no child there. Everything below comes from the school's own pages or from our catalogue, and where the school's documents disagree with each other we have said so rather than picked the flattering one.
What we checked, and what we did not
We checked the published fee table and its terms, the additional-fee schedule, the bus timetable and rates, the accreditation record, the published results, the calendar and the two campus addresses. We did not visit, did not speak to parents, and report nobody's opinion of the teaching. The documents are what you will be held to; the anecdotes are not.
The school in one table
| Founded | February 2005, as a home-school centre on Mae Luan Road with 15 students and three teachers |
|---|---|
| Roll | Over 1,600 students across two campuses, from more than 50 nationalities |
| Ages | 2 to 18 — Foundation 2–5, Primary 5–11, Secondary 11–16, Sixth Form 16–18 |
| Curriculum | English National Curriculum to IGCSE (Cambridge and Pearson Edexcel), then A Level, BTEC and the EPQ |
| Campuses | Chaofah City — 39/99 Moo 4, Vichitsongkram Road, Soi Na Seau 1, Muang. Cherngtalay — 9/2 Srisoonthorn Road, Thalang, which the school describes as the Laguna district |
| Accreditation | Thai Ministry of Education licence; Cambridge International School Network since 2011; ISAT since 2012; FOBISIA; Pearson Edexcel approved; Education Development Trust ISQM at Silver |
Twenty-one years is a long track record on this island, and HeadStart grew out of a house in Phuket Town rather than arriving as a funded international brand. That history is visible in the fees.
What it costs
The fee table is published in full and, since we last looked at it on 22 August, now carries the academic year it applies to. The figures themselves have not changed.
| Stage | Term 1 | Term 2 | Term 3 | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preschool | ฿139,000 | ฿104,000 | ฿104,000 | ฿347,000 |
| Early Years – Reception | ฿144,000 | ฿108,000 | ฿108,000 | ฿360,000 |
| Years 1–6 | ฿192,000 | ฿144,000 | ฿144,000 | ฿480,000 |
| Years 7–9 | ฿216,000 | ฿162,000 | ฿162,000 | ฿540,000 |
| Years 10–13 | ฿270,000 | ฿270,000 | — | ฿540,000 |
On top of tuition: an application fee of ฿8,000, non-refundable; an entrance fee of ฿100,000 on enrolment, non-refundable; and an endowment fee of ฿75,000, which is refunded on permanent withdrawal provided the child finishes the academic year and the registrar has thirty days' written notice before the last day of Term 3. Second children get 10% off tuition and third and subsequent children 15%, while enrolled at the same time. The entrance and endowment fees are charged for a maximum of two children per family.
The fee-increase policy is published, which is unusual on this island and genuinely useful: a rise of up to 5% is notified by the end of Term 2, and anything above 5% a full academic year in advance. You are told before you are committed.
One oddity in the instalments. HeadStart's 2026/27 calendar gives Term 1 73 school days, Term 2 59 and Term 3 51. Term 1 is billed higher accordingly, but Terms 2 and 3 are billed identically despite Term 3 being eight days shorter. For a Year 1–6 child that makes a Term 3 day cost about ฿2,820 against ฿2,440 in Term 2. It is not a large sum. It is a reminder that a termly invoice is not a measure of teaching time.
What the fee does and does not cover — and where the page contradicts itself
HeadStart sells itself on inclusiveness, and on meals it delivers: lunches and snacks are inside the fee, along with textbooks, learning materials, a selection of extra-curricular activities, academic boosters, basic accident insurance and the Duke of Edinburgh International Award, less its registration fee.
On school trips the same page says two different things. The "Included in Fees" tab lists school trips as covered by tuition. The "Additional Fees" tab lists school trips as billed to parents separately. The terms and conditions split the difference, putting "day trips, residential trips" inside the fee and "school trips" outside it in the very next paragraph. We cannot tell you which is right, and neither can the page. Ask in writing which trips are billed before you sign, and keep the answer.
We flag this because our own island-wide schools guide states that trips are inside the fee at HeadStart. That sentence rests on one of two contradictory lists on the school's own site. It is not wrong so much as unresolvable from the published material.
Three charges are unambiguous and large enough to change a budget:
- English as an Additional Language — ฿60,000 a year. Years 1 to 11. The school decides who needs it, and a student identified as needing it "must attend" until they meet the school's English standard. On a Year 1–6 fee that is a 12.5% uplift you do not control.
- Additional Education Needs — ฿80,000 a year, on the same basis.
- Examinations and BTEC. Cambridge and Pearson entry fees are charged to parents, across 3 to 11 subjects a year depending on the study plan, with late-entry and re-sit fees on top. BTEC registration falls at the start of Years 10, 12 and 13. No amount is published for any of it. For a sixth-former this is the single largest unquantified line in the school's cost base.
Uniforms, transport, sports academies, individual music lessons, academic competitions, school performances, late pick-up, lost library books and textbooks for examination subjects are also billed separately.
The bus, which decides where you can live
This is the part of a school's cost base that property advice usually ignores, and on Phuket it is the part that determines your postcode.
HeadStart runs buses for Years 1 to 9 only — no Foundation, no Sixth Form. Pick-up is from centralised meeting points at 6:30 am; the afternoon run drops children at the house, and an adult must be there to receive them or the child goes back to school. Buses are GPS-monitored, capped at 80 km/h, belted, and carry an adult overseer.
The published rate is ฿2,500 a week, or ฿400 a single trip and ฿600 a round trip. Paid termly it drops to ฿1,700 a week, multiplied by the number of weeks in the term. Payments are strictly non-refundable. The school does not publish how many weeks it bills, so the termly figure cannot be derived from the fee page alone; on the 2026/27 calendar's 183 school days — about 37 weeks — ฿1,700 a week comes to roughly ฿62,000 a year for one child.
The routes are the useful part. From the Chaofah City campus: Rawai/Chalong, Patong/Kamala, Thalang/Cherngtalay and Thalang/Pasak. From the Cherngtalay campus: Koh Kaew via the Chaofah campus, Pasak–Layan, Kamala–Surin, Laguna, Supalai Palm Springs and Thalang–Blue Tree.
Where families live for it, and what that costs
Matching those route names to our own rental book gives the honest version of the housing question. These are median monthly asking rents for three-bedroom villas on a twelve-month minimum lease, taken from our catalogue on 26 September 2026. Of 1,850 priced, available long-term rentals, 1,823 — 98.5% — carry a twelve-month minimum, so these are long-let figures rather than holiday rates.
| District | Median 3-bed villa | Listings | Campus it serves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bang Tao | ฿150,000 | 314 | Cherngtalay (Laguna, Pasak, Layan) |
| Kamala | ฿150,000 | 20 | Both |
| Thalang | ฿130,000 | 47 | Both |
| Rawai | ฿120,000 | 179 | Chaofah |
| Ko Kaeo | ฿120,000 | 24 | Cherngtalay |
| Chalong | ฿110,000 | 89 | Chaofah |
| Kathu | ฿100,000 | 23 | No published route |
One number in that table deserves a warning. Ko Kaeo's three-bedroom median across all property types is ฿85,000 on 55 listings — and ฿120,000 once you filter to villas, on 24. The district's cheap reputation is built on its houses, not its villas, and a family reading an all-homes median will budget ฿35,000 a month short. The same correction, smaller, applies to Chalong (฿100,000 all homes, ฿110,000 villas) and Kathu (฿90,000 against ฿100,000).
What the results actually say
HeadStart's own results page reports, for the 2026 cohorts: at A and AS Level, 47% A*/A, 90% A to C and a 100% pass rate; at IGCSE, 49% A*/A, 92% A to C and a 100% pass rate. BTEC Level 3 candidates took 83% Distinction or Distinction*, and all thirteen EPQ candidates took an A or A*. The school states the global comparators as 29% at A Level and 22% at IGCSE.
The banner running across every other page of the site disagrees with that page. It advertises 42% A*/A at IGCSE against the results page's 49%, and 60% BTEC Distinction or Distinction* against 83%. Only the A Level figure, 47%, matches. We cannot reconcile them and we are not going to guess which cohort each refers to. If a number matters to your decision, ask for the year and the cohort size in writing. This is the second Phuket school we have reviewed that publishes two versions of its own results — UWC Thailand's results page and school profile give its 2026 IB average as 34.4 and 34.5.
The accreditation, read properly
The same site banner says HeadStart is "rated Outstanding by Education Development Trust". That is true of three standards out of eight. In the November 2022 inspection the school was rated Outstanding on students' personal development, on accommodation and resources, and on partnership with parents and the community. The other five — including teaching and learning, the curriculum, pastoral care, and leadership and governance — are rated variants of "good". The overall award is Silver, held since 2017 and maintained in 2022, above the Bronze awarded in 2014.
Worth knowing: the school's own page describes the ISQM as awarded "for a period of three years", and the most recent accreditation it lists is November 2022. We could find no later inspection published. That is a question for the school, not a conclusion.
What we could not find out
- Examination and BTEC fees. Published as a policy, never as a number.
- Which year groups each campus takes. The fee table is campus-agnostic and the site does not set out the range at Cherngtalay against Chaofah. For a family choosing a side of the island for the next decade this is the first thing you need and the hardest thing to find.
- The downloadable fee schedule. The Downloads tab offers a "School Fee Schedule 2026-27 and 2027-28" PDF. The link returns a 404. Next year's fees are advertised as published and are not retrievable, which matters because the 2027/28 school calendar beside it downloads perfectly well.
- Weeks billed per term for the bus. Hence an estimate above rather than a figure.
The verdict
It suits
- A family that wants a Cambridge route without the top-tier fee. At ฿480,000 for primary, HeadStart sits about ฿288,000 a year below BISP, the dearest school on our own island-wide fee table, while running the same IGCSE route. Over five years that gap is ฿1.4m.
- Families who want A Levels. BISP does not teach them — we corrected our own schools guide on that point last month. HeadStart does, alongside BTEC for students the purely academic route does not fit.
- Families who have not yet chosen a side of the island. Two campuses and a bus network reaching Rawai, Chalong, Patong, Kamala, Layan, Laguna and Koh Kaew is more geographic freedom than any single-campus school can offer.
- Families arriving without English. The EAL provision is real and structured — provided you budget the ฿60,000.
It does not suit
- Anyone who needs a fixed, complete number before committing. Examinations, BTEC, uniforms and trips are all unpriced, and the trips line is self-contradictory.
- A sixth-former without a car or a driver. The bus stops at Year 9.
- A family set on small classes. At more than 1,600 students this is a large school, and it publishes no class size or staff-to-student ratio anywhere we could find.
- A buyer who wants Kathu. It is the cheapest villa district in the table and the one with no route on it.
On the arithmetic that actually decides things: one Year 1–6 child at HeadStart costs ฿480,000 in tuition, ฿108,000 in non-refundable entrance and application fees, a refundable ฿75,000, and around ฿62,000 for the bus — call it ฿650,000 in year one before a single examination entry. A three-bedroom villa within the Cherngtalay campus's reach adds ฿1.8m a year at the Bang Tao median; the same child at the Chaofah campus living in Chalong adds ฿1.32m. The housing decision is worth two to three times the school decision, and unlike the fee table it is negotiable.
If you are working that problem, our long-term rental book carries what is actually available now, and it filters by district — Bang Tao, Thalang, Chalong, Rawai, Ko Kaeo, Kathu — with the district guides covering what each area is like to live in. For the other schools, our 2026/27 schools map puts the fees side by side, and we have reviewed BISP and UWC Thailand the same way. Tell us the campus, the year group and the month you arrive, and we will send you what sits on the bus route, including the houses that never reach the site.