Prestigious international schools have been lining up to enter Vietnam, and it would be easy to think the market is booming. But ask any school leader on the ground and they will paint a more measured picture.
Even with generous discounts dressed up as scholarships, enrolment of the emerging middle- and upper-income families once expected to embrace international education is only trickling in.
But the competitor many of these international schools are noticing is not another fee-charging school down the road. It is the public system, and it is arriving with serious state investment and political commitment behind it: a fixed share of the national budget, a delivery programme running to 2035, and a stated intention to build the very things families used to think they needed to pay to find elsewhere.
When Resolution 71 was signed, it was read by many as lofty national ambition. A year on, it is no longer a statement of intent. It is a program with an action plan, a budget line, and a schedule, and it has started to change what a free public school actually offers a family.
Walk into one now and you may find what was not there a couple of years ago: a STEM room built with corporate sponsorship, a new basketball court in the courtyard, a digital-skills programme for the teachers, and a genuine plan to teach parts of the curriculum in English.
So apart from cannibalising each other, private international and bilingual operators now face a public system that is free, ambitiously driven to build credibility on English and quality, and increasingly able to reach the same overseas universities that a private education was once thought necessary to unlock.
From announcement to rollout
Resolution 71 is the education reform Vietnam’s Politburo signed in 2025, placing education at the heart of national strategy and backing it with a fixed share of the budget through 2035. For schools that charge fees, what matters is not the ambition but the delivery, and the delivery is further along than most assume.
A government action plan landed within weeks, built around concrete tasks with named owners and deadlines. A national program for education modernisation runs from 2026 through 2035, so the money and the machinery are committed. Decrees on teacher pay, a unified national textbook, and English provision are moving through the system.
Two changes matter most for anyone charging tuition. Public schooling is now free from preschool through the end of upper secondary, in its second year. And English is being pushed into the public system directly, with a stated aim of making it a second language in schools.
Where the competition bites
Vietnamese families have never needed persuading that education is worth paying for. What they have paid private and bilingual schools to deliver is a specific bundle: stronger English, more modern teaching, better facilities, an environment a step above the local public school.
But the sheen of private and bilingual education has already dulled. International teacher quality is uneven, with many staff holding limited teaching qualifications, and a full international programme can disqualify students from a place at the country’s respected public universities. Resolution 71 puts a dent in what remains.
Vietnamese families have never needed persuading that education is worth paying for
Free public schooling means the paid option now competes against zero rather than a modest public fee. The English push erodes one of the oldest reasons to pay, and the scale of intent is easy to read in the numbers: the ministry has said it needs around 22,000 more English teachers by 2030, and plans to retrain some 200,000 existing teachers to teach in English.
Against a public teaching force of over a million, of whom only about 30,000 currently specialise in English, that is a deliberate, funded attempt to build the one capability the paid sector has most relied on selling.
The reform presses on quality too, through national-standard targets, more active teaching methods, and expanded STEM. And it hands public schools more room to act independently. The old chain of centralised approvals from ministry through city, district and ward is being reworked, and a public school that can choose its own tools, deploy staff flexibly, and introduce its own programs can begin to close the very gap that used to justify a private fee.
Who is exposed, and who is not
The pressure is real but not evenly spread. The domestic private and bilingual tier is the most exposed. These schools compete hardest for the emerging middle-class family, the one now choosing between a good free public place with improving English and a paid bilingual place selling much the same promise. As the public offer rises, that premium has to be justified more sharply each year.
Premium international schools are better insulated, though not immune. Their families are buying an overseas curriculum and a route to a foreign university, knowingly trading away the domestic option to get it.
But even here the pitch is harder than it was. The premium now rests on convincing affluent Vietnamese families that an international education offers something significantly better than a national tradition they already respect, and that is no longer an easy sell. The obvious overseas destinations are less obvious too: strong universities in China and South Korea now compete for the same students, so the foreign pathway no longer points in one direction, or necessarily westward at all.
Language centres sit squarely in the reform’s path. If the state succeeds in embedding English across public schooling, the after-hours market that grew up to compensate for weak public provision faces a real question about its role.
The same reform cuts the other way at university level, opening the door wider to foreign faculty and transnational partnerships. For providers positioned to partner into Vietnam rather than sell into its schools market, this is an opening. But at the school level, for anyone charging fees, the direction of travel is competitive.
The demand side is shifting too
The pressure is not only about supply. What the paid sector sells is being quietly revalued by families themselves. The exit route it was built on is no longer gated: a capable public school student can now win direct admission to an international university on their own results, without ever sitting in a fee-charging classroom.
And many bilingual graduates were always heading to Vietnamese universities anyway, choosing them as an aspiration rather than a fallback.
There is also a quieter perception at work, that the public system is the more academically demanding of the two. For many Vietnamese parents, in a country that has honoured scholarship for a thousand years, that is precisely the point. Vietnam is also a deeply patriotic nation, and the state system reinforces that in a way an international school, by design, cannot.
None of this means families are turning away from international education. It means the automatic pull is softening, and a premium that rested partly on that pull now has to be earned rather than assumed.
The enrolment question, honestly
It would be easy to overstate this and predict a sudden collapse in fee-paying enrolment. That is not what is happening. What is happening is slower and more certain: families are beginning to move, and every year the public system improves, more of them will.
The direction is not in doubt. Vietnam’s economy is growing fast, the state has committed real money and political weight, and the public system is the clear beneficiary. More families will choose it, not fewer, and they will keep choosing it as it improves.
Meanwhile, more international operators keep arriving into a market already saturated at the top end, dividing the fee-charging slice more thinly among more schools. The public option absorbs the growth; the paid sector competes harder for a shrinking share.
So the honest expectation is not collapse but steadily intensifying pressure, felt first at the value end of the paid market, among schools whose main selling point was simply being better than the local public option, and spreading as competition thickens. Two years in, that pressure is already building.
What this means for operators
The useful response is not alarm. It is to retire an assumption that has quietly underpinned a lot of fee-charging provision here, that the public system is a weak default any half-decent private school can beat. Resolution 71 is a stated intention to close that gap, backed by real money and a programme running to 2035.
The question worth asking is the one the reform will soon make unavoidable. What does your school offer that an improving, free, English-teaching public system structurally cannot?
If the honest answer is that you are a bit better, that position is eroding. If the answer is a genuine international pathway, a distinctive pedagogy, or an outcome the public system is not built to produce, that is defensible, and it is where attention and money should go.
Vietnam is doing something ambitious and, on its own terms, admirable. For the schools that charge families to sit outside the public system, the smart move is to treat it as a competitor rather than assume the gap that built this market will stay open.
