I swapped teaching in the UK for Thailand, now I have more money and more joy

A British teacher who swapped inner city state schools for the international schools of Bangkok says he is now better off and more fulfilled – joking that the only thing he misses about life in the UK is Nando’s.

Ryan Woolaston, 39, moved to Thailand to start a new life with his wife Amy in 2018 after eight years teaching maths in secondary schools in the UK.

The teacher, from Nuneaton in Warwickshire, says he has a higher disposable income and an ideal base for travel, with life in the UK having little draw for him aside from a certain restaurant chain. “I’m only half-joking”, he told i. “Part of the reason for my trip back in the summer is genuinely to go to Nando’s.”

Mr Woolaston, who had been head of department and in the senior leadership team, says moving to Thailand entailed an initial pay cut, but the lower cost of living and bills mean he has more disposable income than he had in the UK.

He and his wife, a speech and language therapist, are now able travel more than they could before moving, and he recently returned from a trip to Sri Lanka during the school holidays.

“I’m interested in being able to travel, it’s the perfect base to be able to do that,” he said. “In Thailand, you can jump on a plane on Friday and be on one of the best beaches in the world for the weekend.

“The best you could get to, when I was in the UK, was Skeggie [Skegness] beach.”

He does not get a pension as part of his remuneration but he said his school pays 13 months in his annual salary, and he treats the extra month as a pension payment.

“I think they do really take care of you,” he said.

Mr Woolaston said being able to travel more has been one of the major advantages of his new life in Thailand (Photo: Ryan Woolaston)

Mr Woolaston has worked in two separate international schools since moving to Bangkok and says the difference in teaching is marked.

“I think the first thing is the complete difference in what your day-to-day looks like,” he said.

In the British state school system, he felt the approach was rigid and faced constant funding cuts.

“My career was in challenging, inner city secondary schools,” he said. “It’s tough teaching in those schools, but it’s also extremely rewarding.

“I think the impact you can have on individual students is very high there.”

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However, he said working in schools in Thailand “has given me more time to focus on the teaching, maybe a bit more joy and personal fulfilment”.

“Behaviour management isn’t really an issue out here,” he said. “One of the things that struck me when I moved out to Thailand, you don’t really give detentions, for me that was part of the adjustment.”

In the UK, managing behaviour in schools in Coventry, Nottingham and the outskirts of Birmingham was, he said, part and parcel of the job.

“We were working with kids in severe danger of falling into gangs,” he said. “I think when you look at cuts to local services in the UK, that has a big knock-on effect on some young people.

“Funding of background services has had a real impact, it’s been death by a million cuts. We have been underfunded for the last 15 years.

“There was never a way to recover from it.”

As head of maths, he still teaches the UK curriculum but pupils work towards iGCSEs instead of standard GCSEs.

While the schools he has worked for in Thailand are selective, he pointed out that: “Bangkok has a very competitive schools market – I don’t think any of the schools can afford to be super, super picky in terms of admissions.

“Both the schools where I have worked there has been a range of students and a range of abilities.”

Class sizes are dramatically different. In the UK, he taught classes of 33, while the biggest class in his current school has 11 pupils.

“I just think you get to know the students a lot more,” he said. “I can stand in my corridor and I know pretty much every student who passes by name.

“When you have classes of 30-plus kids it’s not so easy to do that.”

Mr Woolaston said he now has more disposable income than he had in the UK and recently returned from a trip to Sri Lanka (Photo: Ryan Woolaston)

Aside from the heat and snakes, he has found few reasons to leave his expat life in Bangkok. “I think property or family are generally the reasons most people go back to the UK,” he said.

He has enjoyed his trips back to the UK, but says “the times I have been back and visited my hometown [Nuneaton], when I was there it was like a ghost town”.

“You are walking around and everything is locked up,” he added. “There’s a lot of pubs have shut down.

“It feels like the town is dying.”

Mr Woolaston says it was his wife’s uncle – a “lovely guy” with a “big personality” who died before they left – who gave them the encouragement they needed to make the move.

“We visited him in his final few days and he was telling us about how p*ssed off he was that he’d paid off his mortgage then a few days later diagnosed with terminal cancer.

“He told us life is short and to get out and live a little while we can. He was the final push we needed to just do it.”

Asked if he would ever consider a permanent return, he said: “It depends on whether my mum is going to read this article.

“I don’t think so but nobody knows what’s going to happen or what is round the corner.

“At the minute, we are very, very happy here.”