Bridging Educational Access to Migrants (BEAM) has opened a higher grade school for Burmese migrants in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand on January 4.

The school has two programmes. The first is pre-college course preparation for further studies in international universities and the other is to prepare students for living there, said Ko Kyaw Win, in charge of the living course training.

"Mainly, we will help students to enroll in universities. We will help them to continue further studies in international universities. We will look for a contact with donor organizations which will help them attending the universities. Especially, we will look for organizations which are offering scholarships."

To continue further studies, we will select students who must have, at least, standard 10 (high school) education. Training will be for two years. At first year, we will refresh the 10 standard course and then we will continue pre-college preparation course in the second year.

We will mainly teach English, Mathematics, Science and social subjects at the training. In the first year, we will teach these subjects in Burmese while we will teach these subjects in English in the second year. Only 40 students will be selected for one academic year.

We will also teach computers, web designing, printing, sewing in the living course training in Burmese, Shan and Thai languages. There is no age limit for this course.

The training schedule will be five days a week from Monday to Friday. The training has two classes from 8 am to 11 pm and 5 pm to 8:30 pm.

Ma Khaing, a new student, said "This kind of chance cannot be had in my country. There are many students who have arrived in Thailand for economic reasons without finishing their school. Therefore, it's a big chance for them and for me, it's provides a chance to do the living course training."

The school is being managed by Burmese Migrants Education Program based in California, USA.