Thailand and Switzerland Launch 9-Year Multilingual Education Program in Deep South
Thailand and Switzerland are launching a nine-year multilingual education program in the Deep South, using Jawi Malay to help students in Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces transition to Thai while improving academic achievement.
Deputy Education Minister Akkanut Kanngittinant met with Swiss Ambassador Pedro Suhalen at the Swiss embassy in Bangkok on August 4 to review cooperation on improving education quality for youth in Thailand's southern border region. The discussion centered on a pilot education project supporting five schools across Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces, designed to boost learning achievement through mother-tongue-based multilingual education (MTB/MLE) using Jawi Malay as the foundation language while following Thailand's national curriculum.
The nine-year program covers kindergarten through sixth grade, expanding annually. Prince of Songkla University is collaborating with Swiss agencies to develop curricula, teaching materials, and teacher training. Deputy Minister Akkanut emphasized that this multilingual approach represents a crucial educational innovation, helping students whose daily language is Malay dialect build bridges to Thai language learning and deeper content comprehension while developing long-term language proficiency.
Akkanut noted that the Education Ministry prioritizes reducing inequality and ensuring equal educational opportunity for all children as mandated by the constitution. However, over 80 percent of students in the southern border provinces attend private Islamic schools. The ministry is therefore coordinating through the Office of the Private Education Commission to extend the program's reach and genuinely support this target population.
