Myanmar’s refugees found safety in Thailand. Education is harder to come by

Thailand has welcomed more Myanmar refugees since the 2021 coup than at any point in recent memory. Figuring out how to educate the teenagers among them – mid-schooling, with no Thai – remains the hardest part.

Published 25 May 2026
4 min read

Mae Sot – Every morning at seven, Daw Thitsar packs two lunchboxes, bundles her daughters onto the back of her e-bike and rides to the school-bus stop. Her girls are 11 and 13. The route takes them past Mae Ku Noi School, a Thai government institution a few minutes from their home.

Inside its gates, Thai children in white shirts and blue skirts are starting their school day. Daw Thitsar’s daughters keep going. Their school is a 30-minute bus ride away.

“I tried to get them into the Thai school,” she said, her voice low.

Back in Myanmar, her husband is in a prison cell for opposing the military coup. After his detention, Daw Thitsar crossed the border with her daughters and settled in Mae Sot. But Thailand presented an immediate barrier: her girls spoke no Thai.

“We contacted the Suwannimit Foundation, but it didn’t work out. They said my children would have to start over from kindergarten, or be fluent in Thai first. So I enrolled them in a Myanmar migrant school,” she said.

The Suwannimit Foundation is a Thai nonprofit established in 2010 to support vulnerable people along the Thailand–Myanmar border. For many newly arrived families, it is a first point of contact. But for Daw Thitsar, even that door was closed.

Once the school bus pulled away, she headed to a restaurant in town, where she works as a kitchen hand.

“I have papers, so I can work legally,” she said. “The only reason the children are in the Myanmar school is the language barrier and their age. There is simply no other option.”

Learning centres under pressure

Daw Thitsar’s predicament is shared by thousands of families who have made the same crossing. Since Myanmar’s military seized power in February 2021, Mae Sot has become one of the main destinations for those who can no longer safely remain inside the country. For families with teenagers who arrive speaking no Thai, the migrant learning centres are often the only realistic choice.

Across Tak province, where Mae Sot is located, the Thai government formally recognises 62 such centres, according to the Burmese Migrant Teachers’ Association. Most follow the Myanmar national curriculum, with Thai taught as a supplementary subject. A handful also offer instruction in ethnic minority languages.

“The walls are closing in on migrant schools,” said Daw Tin Aye, a pseudonym, the headmistress of Hsa Mu Htaw School. “Now they’re telling us that everything except Myanmar-language and English classes must be taught in Thai.”

Thai authorities have raised this requirement in joint school meetings since 2024, though it has not yet been formalised as mandatory policy. For now, it remains an instruction that educators say is impossible to implement and impossible to ignore.

“If they force us to teach everything in Thai, our children are in trouble,” Daw Thitsar said. “They are only just learning the alphabet.”

“In my heart, I just want to attend my old school”

Daw Thitsar’s 13-year-old daughter is one of 27 students in her Grade 5 class at the migrant school. “The school is small. There are fans, but because there are so many students, it still feels hot,” she said. “Lessons are taught in Burmese, so I can understand and keep up.”

Thai is new to her, and she is candid about the difficulty. “Writing is not too hard yet – we are still learning basic letters – but I’m not sure how it will be later. Pronunciation is difficult. They say it will be even harder when we learn more. Since we speak and study in Burmese, we don’t really use Thai. I only know a few words: some rude ones, and how to ask the price of things.”

She remembers her school in Myanmar with something close to longing. “There, even after school, I had friends nearby because the school was in my neighbourhood. Thai schools are nice, they are big and have lots of space to play, but I wouldn’t be able to study if everything were taught in Thai. My mother once asked if I would stay if I had to go back to kindergarten. I don’t want to study with very young children.”

She paused, then added: “In my heart, I just want to attend my old school in Myanmar.”

Schools absorbing the crisis

Myanmar migrant schools have existed in Thailand since the 1988 pro-democracy uprising. By the early 1990s, learning centres had become part of the border landscape.

The picture briefly improved after the junta’s controlled political opening from 2010 onward. The 2012 by-elections brought Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy back into public life; the NLD’s landslide in 2015 prompted many migrants to go home, and enrolment in border schools fell sharply.

The 2021 coup reversed all of it. As the military began arresting activists and bombing civilian areas, hundreds of thousands fled across the border once more. The learning centres, already stretched, were overwhelmed.

In the middle of this surge, Thai authorities conducted raids on several centres in 2024 and 2025, with some teachers facing prosecution.

“It shook us,” Daw Tin Aye said. “The rules feel like a piece of elastic that can be stretched and pulled at any moment. We are fighting just to keep the doors open.”

A shifting policy landscape

Since early 2024, Thailand’s Ministry of Education has repeatedly revised its approach to migrant learning centres. Among the requirements being discussed at joint meetings: each centre must hire at least one Thai national teacher. For schools that operate on donations and volunteer labour, that is a condition many cannot meet.

At the same time, the ministry has issued statements affirming that migrant children are welcome in Thai state schools. In January 2026 it formally removed all restrictions on enrolment by group, education level and area, a significant widening of a policy that had already put 95,724 students without a national identification number into Thai classrooms in 2024.

“It’s genuinely good that they say migrant children can attend Thai schools. The facilities are far better than ours,” Daw Tin Aye said. “But you cannot open that door while simultaneously squeezing the migrant centres out of existence.”

The language wall

For children who fled Myanmar mid-schooling, the language gap is not merely an inconvenience. It is a structural barrier that the Thai school system is ill-equipped to absorb. Younger children adapt; teenagers, who arrive with years of Myanmar-curriculum education behind them, face a much harder road.

“Young children are not really the problem,” Daw Tin Aye said. “For teenagers, it is a far bigger challenge. Migrant centres like ours are the only ones equipped to bridge that gap.”

Ko Khun Naung has spent more than two decades navigating that gap from the other side. A former migrant worker who came to Mae Sot over 25 years ago, he now holds a Thai national ID card. Since the 2021 coup he has devoted much of his time to helping migrant families find places in the Thai school system, building on years of earlier volunteering with NGOs and international organisations.

“Most Thai schools are already at capacity,” he said. “And even when a school agrees to take a ten-year-old, they make the child start from kindergarten. For a teenager, that is simply not workable.”

He is clear that this is rarely a matter of deliberate exclusion. “The heart of it is language. If a child cannot follow the lesson, the lesson is useless. That is why they keep ending up back at the migrant schools.”

Nationalist pushback

The language barrier is compounded by organised political opposition. On 17 March, a Thai ultranationalist group called “Thais Won’t Tolerate This” demonstrated outside the Ministry of Education, demanding a suspension of 2025 rules that allow undocumented students to enrol in state schools.

The group’s stated objection was limited to undocumented students. But in Mae Sot, families with valid residency documents say they, too, are being turned away from Thai schools.

Looking for a way forward

Ko Myo Myint, a pseudonym, represents the Burmese Migrant Teachers’ Association, known as BMTA. Founded in 2005, the organisation brings together more than 790 teachers from 74 schools across Mae Sot district, coordinating on educational matters and advocating for migrant children’s access to schooling.

He said the Thai government is still working to make its “Education for All” policy a practical reality. Pilot programmes are reportedly in development. If they succeed, migrant students could gain access to trilingual instruction.

Before 2021, migrant learning centres served mainly undocumented residents. The post-coup influx broke that model: tens of thousands of new arrivals, roughly 70 percent of them teenagers with no Thai-language background, flooded a system already near its limits. Ko Myo Myint said the result has been administrative strain and rising tensions between the two communities. He said he was hopeful a solution was coming, but could not say when.

“Both sides are actively looking for a way forward,” he said. “Particularly for the teenagers.”

This story is part of a collaborative reporting project between HaRDstories and Delta News Agency, supported by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.