Headmaster's message 5th April 2024

Dear Parents and Guardians,

We have had a truly wonderful term and the achievements of our students have been remarkable. It makes me very proud as a headmaster to see the amazing progress our students have made. Our school feels very different this year and much of what we do now extends into the weekends as our students compete (and win!) in numerous enrichment activities. In this letter, I hope to give a snapshot of the many achievements of our students. Looking back through the calendar I counted over 120 events since January. It is hard to believe how much has been going on in our very busy school!

We started the year with receiving our first set of offers for top universities including Medicine and Engineering at top Thai universities as well as UK top 10 and Russell Group universities. One of our students also gained a generous scholarship offer for the prestigious Shanghai Jiatong University. 

We celebrated the launch of our first set of new Academic Scholars and Pre-Scholars and by the end of this term will have also appointed Sports, Music and Leadership Scholars and have advertised for our first set of Enhanced British Curriculum Scholars.

We have had much to celebrate in Sports this term with medal winners in FOBISIA Tennis and Swimming, and several significant BISA tournament wins, including U9 Girls Basketball, U13 Girls Volleyball and U15 Girls Netball as well as 2nd place in U9 Boys Basketball and 3rd Place in U13 Boys Volleyball. Often, I receive complaints about our performance in sports and speaking to the heads of our competitor schools, they have told me that they receive similar complaints from their parents. At the FOBISIA heads meeting in Vietnam, the head of  another Bangkok school commented to me that they had a 2 hour parent meeting because one of their teams lost to DBS! It is easy to form a negative impression when our teams are losing, but I prefer to take a data driven approach to measuring our success. I am very pleased to say that of the 8 BISA schools, this term DBS was the joint top winner of tournaments. There was only one other school that won 3  BISA tournaments this term and they have twice as many students as DBS. In our first year in BISA, we did not expect to win any tournaments competing against larger and more established schools so we are obviously very pleased by our students’ achievements and the support they receive from our highly skilled team of PE teachers, supplemented by our external coaches. Winning of course isn’t everything. What is more important is what our students learn from the experience. Therefore, it is important that staff and parents continue  to work together to build a culture where students reflect on their own performance when they come off the pitch and use it to fuel future success and build their confidence and character.

We have also had some significant student achievements in other areas such as the Mathematics Olympiad, ATOD dancing, Vex Robotics (where we once again dominated the Bangkok round to have two teams qualify for the world championships - the only Bangkok school in the division to do so), and the  World Scholars Cup where we won over 100 medals, including 57 gold medals. One of our teams finished 1st and another finished 3rd out of a total of 300 teams!

As our school has grown, we have had to work harder to maintain our strong sense of community. This has been a success we should all be proud of. It has been magnificent to see parents and staff competing against each other in Sports, wonderful community cultural days like Chinese New Year and International Day bringing us together and our charitable activities like the Pancake Run raising significant funds for both the Beaumont Ruam Pattana School and Rainbow House. Our Eco-conference was also a highlight which emphasized our commitment to sustainability and showcased the talents of some of our students.

A final highlight in the last few weeks has been Drama, with amazing productions in Years 3-6 and finishing this week with the hilarious Olympiaganza Senior Production. It is wonderful to see many of our students who are often quite shy and introverted develop huge confidence on stage.

Finally, today we celebrated the end of term and Songkran. I would like to wish everyone in the community a restful break. Term 3 will be equally busy as we gear up for examinations and assessments. It is important that all of our students are well rested for this next busy term.

Saswadee Pi Mai Thai!

Jonny Liddell

Headmaster