Moving to Krabi with young children: what we tell families who ask
The same five questions arrive in our inbox every month. Here are the answers we give, including the ones that are not entirely encouraging.
Joy Stapleton··7 min read
Every few weeks an email arrives from a family somewhere cold, asking some version of the same question: could we actually do this? Could we move to Krabi, put the children in school, and make an ordinary life here?
The honest answer is yes, plenty of families do — and it is worth knowing what you are choosing before you choose it.
It is a small town, and that cuts both ways
Ao Nang has one main road, a beach at the end of it, and limestone cliffs behind. That is most of it. There is no international hospital, no shopping mall and no international school beyond primary and secondary at Krabi International School.
What it does have is a walkable centre, a genuinely mixed community, and a pace that families arriving from a European city find almost disorienting for the first month. Children here spend more of the year outdoors than they would almost anywhere in Europe.
Schooling needs planning past the age you are planning for
We take children from one and a half to six. That covers the early years properly, but if your child is four when you arrive, you are two years from needing to know what comes next.
Families here take one of three routes: Krabi International School for primary and secondary, a Thai school, or home education. All three work, and all three are easier to arrange before you arrive than after.
Visas are the part that decides everything
It is the question most families leave until last and should ask first. The route our families use is an education visa, which follows from enrolling on a Thai language course — we run a one-year programme with a partner school that covers the tuition and the visa paperwork together.
The visa itself is decided by Thai Immigration, and practice varies between provinces. What we can do is enrol you on a real course and prepare the paperwork properly. What nobody can do is promise you an outcome — be sceptical of anyone who offers to.
Come in the wet season
If you visit in February, you will see Krabi at its most persuasive, and you will be making a decision on incomplete information.
Come in September instead. See what the rain is actually like, how the town feels when the tourists have gone, and whether you like it anyway. The families who settle happily here are usually the ones who came at the wrong time of year and stayed anyway.
Thinking about the same move?
We reply personally, usually within one working day.