Choosing a school in Vietnam for your children

Choosing a school in Vietnam starts before you look at any school: decide what you want school to do for your child, set a budget range, and only then compare curricula and campuses. Most families do it the other way round.

In August 2026, Larry Huynh walked OV members through how to choose a school in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), which he said has more than thirty private and international schools and no reliable public comparison between them. Larry is the son of Vietnamese refugees who settled in Australia and is Dean of Students at the International School Ho Chi Minh City, a school near the top of the price range. These are the lessons we would pass on to any Overseas Vietnamese family weighing the move.

Decide what school is for before you compare schools

Larry asks parents to picture their child years from now, out of school, and say what they want school to have given them.

"If you couldn't ask for anyone else's opinion, what do you want school to give your child, and how would you decide?"

He works in three layers:

• Purpose: what you want education to do for your child.
• Principles: rules and values tied to that purpose. Their job is to eliminate. If bilingual education is a principle, every monolingual school leaves the list. If your budget tops out at a number, everything above it goes.
• Preferences: uniforms, a school within ten minutes of home, a good football program. Missing one does not kill a school.

The trap is generic principles. Academic excellence, wellbeing, safety and respect sound right, but no school fails them, so they rule nothing out. Make yours specific enough to shorten the list, such as a budget range. Larry also recommends doing this with your partner.

Treat tiers, results and status as starting points

Three shortcuts feel like research but tell you less than you think.

The tier system. Ask ten people in Saigon to explain it and, Larry says, you will hear about nine different interpretations. It runs on reputation, word of mouth and price.

Grade 12 results. If your child is two, those results are eighteen years away. A school can have an excellent Grade 12 cohort and a primary program that does not fit your child at all.

Non-profit status. Many parents read it as a guarantee of quality.

"A school that is nonprofit does not guarantee you quality education."

Larry has worked in both kinds. Quality, in his experience, depends on systems and culture, not status.

There is a fourth pull that parents seldom admit: choosing a school for what family, colleagues and friends will think of it. Research backs the wider point. Schneider and Buckley found that what parents say they want from schools and what they search for are not the same thing.

Judge value, not tuition

The most expensive school is not the best value, and it may not be the best school for your child. Settle your budget range first, the maximum and the minimum, then look at what you get back for it:

• A curriculum and a culture of teaching that fit your purpose.
• Support beyond academics, which matters most for children who are neurodivergent or need something mainstream schooling does not offer.
• Location: are you willing to travel fifteen minutes or an hour each way?
• How mature the school is. Larry noted that many schools in the city are ten years old or less, and younger schools often have less established systems and more staff turnover.

One practical trap: schools structure fees differently. Some build uniforms, laptops, camps and co-curriculars into tuition. Others look cheaper on paper and bill those separately. Ask each school what its fee includes before you compare any two numbers.

Choose a curriculum by where your child may go next

Larry said three programs dominate in Vietnam: the IB, the American program and Cambridge. The IB is the most popular and the most widely recognised, running from age three through the Diploma.

Under the curricula sit three systems. Public schools teach the Vietnamese national curriculum. Private and bilingual schools blend it with an international program. International schools teach in one language, almost always English. Two warnings from Larry:

• A school with "international" in its name is not necessarily licensed as an international school by the Vietnamese government.
• There is no accreditation body for Montessori, so a school using the name may not run a full Montessori program.

His key question: which matters most, the specific curriculum, how far it travels, or the skills your child builds? If you are going back to Germany, the German system may be your principle. If you might move again but do not know where, the IB or Cambridge makes more sense.

Plan for Vietnamese reading and writing yourself

This is the lesson many Việt Kiều parents miss. If you speak Vietnamese at home and choose an international school, your child will almost certainly speak it fluently. There is a good chance they will never learn to read or write it.

International school curricula aim for proficiency in a second or third language, and that language is usually Spanish, Mandarin or German. In primary, most international schools offer Vietnamese exposure classes, with culture and some vocabulary, pitched at a broad audience that includes children with no Vietnamese heritage. If literacy matters to you, plan extra classes, a tutor or teaching at home from the start.

The three systems trade off directly. Public schools give the strongest Vietnamese at the lowest cost, with the least international exposure. Bilingual schools build competence in reading, writing, listening and speaking for less than international schools, with a heavier workload in the upper years. International schools give the most portable credential at the highest price. You do not have to choose one for good: Larry sees many families use a bilingual or public school through primary, then switch to an international school at grade six.

For a Viet Kieu family, his case for Vietnamese is not mainly practical. In his experience, most children raised away from their roots try to retrace them once they are old enough. Vietnamese is the connection to that.

If you are still deciding whether to move, start with How to test a move to Vietnam before you make it, and for the work side, read Moving to Vietnam for your career.