What CHROs of Multi-Location Schools in Southeast Asia Need to Fix Now
There’s a certain irony that I keep coming back to in conversations with HR leaders across Southeast Asia’s education sector.
Schools are in the business of preparing students for a complex, fast-changing world. They invest enormously in curriculum design, teaching quality, and future-ready learning frameworks. Yet behind the scenes, many of the same school groups running two, three, or even five campuses across the region are managing their own people operations on a patchwork of spreadsheets, disconnected systems, and local payroll vendors that don’t talk to each other.
I don’t say that to be critical. I say it because I see it constantly and because the cost of leaving it unaddressed is growing fast.
Southeast Asia’s international school sector is in a genuine boom. The market is projected to grow from $59 billion in 2024 to nearly $83 billion by 2029. New campuses are opening across Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and beyond. School groups that were running one or two sites five years ago are now managing regional portfolios. And the CHROs tasked with holding all of that together are being asked to do more, faster, with people infrastructure that was never designed for this level of complexity.
This is the conversation I want to have.
The Multi-Campus HR Reality Nobody Warns You About
When a school group opens its first campus, HR is manageable. You know your staff, you understand your local obligations, and you probably have a decent handle on payroll.
Then comes the second campus. Maybe it’s in the same city, different enough to introduce new lease structures, slightly different employment terms, a second set of approvals and sign-offs. Then comes a third campus in a different country entirely. Suddenly you’re managing staff on different contracts, different statutory contribution frameworks, different leave entitlements, and different regulatory filing deadlines, all at the same time, all with a team that was built for a simpler operation.
That’s the reality for a growing number of CHROs across this region right now. And the regulatory environment isn’t making it any easier.
What’s Changed in 2026 and Why It Matters for Schools
Let me be specific, because the compliance landscape across Southeast Asia has shifted meaningfully in just the past few months, and several of these changes hit schools particularly hard.
Singapore has raised its CPF Ordinary Wage ceiling to SGD 8,000 from January 2026, adjusting contribution calculations for local and permanent resident staff. At the same time, tax clearance for foreign employees, the IR21 process, has moved fully online, meaning payroll systems now need to produce the correct digital formats automatically. For schools with a significant expatriate teaching cohort, this isn’t a minor administrative update. It’s a process change that needs to be embedded in your systems before it catches you out.
Malaysia has updated its EPF contribution logic for foreign employees, changing how wage rounding interacts with contribution calculations. HRD Corp is also expanding mandatory training levy requirements to additional industries and school groups should be actively verifying whether their classification has changed.
Vietnam updated its regional minimum wages from January 1, 2026, under Decree 293/2025. Foreign nationals working in Vietnam are generally liable for social insurance and health insurance contributions, with the total statutory burden for standard employees sitting at 32% of the salary base. If your payroll team is still working from last year’s figures, the exposure is real.
Thailand has updated its PND91 tax reporting structure, with form mapping changes that affect how year-end data is compiled and submitted.
None of these are insurmountable. But each one requires someone in your organisation to know about it, act on it, and ensure it’s reflected accurately in payroll across every campus, every month. If your systems aren’t built to handle that centrally, the burden falls entirely on your HR team to manage manually. And that’s where errors happen.
Your Expat Teachers Are a Compliance Category of Their Own
International schools in Southeast Asia run on international talent. That’s a strength — and a significant compliance obligation.
Recruiting and retaining experienced educators from the UK, Australia, North America, and across Asia is increasingly competitive. But every expat hire introduces a layered set of obligations: work permit management, tax clearance requirements, social insurance classification, housing allowance treatment, and in some cases, dual tax residency considerations.
What I see too often is that these obligations are being managed through a combination of institutional memory, email threads, and individual HR officers who carry the knowledge in their heads. When those people leave and in a sector with meaningful staff turnover, they do leave, that knowledge walks out the door with them.
A CHRO running a multi-campus school group cannot afford to have compliance sitting in someone’s inbox. It needs to live in a system.
Fragmented Tools Create Fragmented Visibility
Here’s a question I ask CHROs when we first meet: can you tell me, right now, your total headcount across all campuses, your leave liability as it stands today, and your projected payroll cost for next quarter?
Most can’t. Not because they’re not capable, they absolutely are, but because the information lives in five different places and pulling it together takes days, not minutes.
This matters beyond operational inconvenience. School boards and finance committees are increasingly expecting HR leaders to come to the table with workforce cost data, not just culture and engagement updates. Payroll is typically one of the largest line items in a school’s budget. If the CHRO can’t provide real-time visibility into that number, the conversation about HR’s strategic value becomes harder to have.
Fragmented systems also create fragmented risk. When payroll for Campus A runs on one platform, Campus B is managed by a local vendor, and Campus C is still on a spreadsheet, you don’t have a compliance model, you have three separate compliance risks that you’re hoping don’t collide at the same time.
Fairness, Discrimination, and the Governance Expectations Schools Now Face
One more development that CHROs in the education sector should be watching closely: Singapore’s Workplace Fairness Bill passed its second phase in late 2025, introducing new employer obligations around discrimination that are expected to be implemented across 2026 and 2027. Schools are expected to review their recruitment, performance management, and grievance processes to prepare.
For most international schools, workforce diversity isn’t a policy initiative, it’s just the daily reality of operating in a multicultural environment with staff from dozens of nationalities. That’s genuinely something to be proud of. But it also means the governance frameworks around fair employment practices need to be equally robust. Parents, accreditation bodies, and regulators are paying closer attention to how schools operate internally, not just academically.
What Good Looks Like
The school groups that are getting this right share a few things in common.
They’ve moved away from the model of managing each campus independently with its own local tools and vendors. Instead, they’ve invested in a unified HR and payroll platform that gives their CHRO and finance leadership one consistent view of the entire workforce regardless of which country a campus sits in.
They’ve built compliance into the system, not around it. Statutory updates, contribution rate changes, and filing deadlines are handled at the platform level, not through someone manually updating a spreadsheet after reading a government circular.
They’ve given their HR teams back their time. Instead of spending the majority of the month on payroll processing, data reconciliation, and chasing down approvals, their teams are focused on the things that actually move the needle, teacher development, retention programmes, and building the kind of workplace that attracts the best educators in the region.
And critically, they’ve given their CHROs the visibility and credibility to operate as genuine strategic partners to school leadership, not just administrators.
The Window to Get This Right is Now
The international school sector in Southeast Asia is going through a period of genuine scrutiny. Expansion is becoming more deliberate. Boards are asking harder questions about operational resilience. Regulators are more engaged. And families who are increasingly locally based, not just expatriates, are making choices based on how schools perform, not just on reputation.
In that environment, a school group’s people infrastructure is no longer a back-office function. It’s a competitive differentiator.
The CHROs who build the right foundation now, centralised, compliant, and scalable, will be the ones best positioned to support their schools through the next phase of growth. The ones who don’t will spend their time firefighting compliance issues, managing payroll errors, and explaining to their boards why a function as critical as HR is still running on disconnected systems.
I’ve had that conversation on both sides of the table. Trust me, the first version is a much better conversation to be having.
Let’s Talk
If you’re a CHRO or HR leader at a multi-campus school group in Southeast Asia and any of this resonates whether you’re actively looking for a solution or just starting to ask the right questions, I’d genuinely love to connect.
At Yomly, we work with organisations across the region to bring HR and payroll onto a single, compliant, and people-first platform. We understand the education sector, we understand the Southeast Asian compliance landscape, and we understand what it takes to give HR leaders the tools they need to lead, not just operate.
Reach out to me at info@yomly.com, or visit yomly.com to learn more about how we support school groups across the region.
