How Did Vietnam’s Schools, Parents and Students Respond to the School Closing in February – May of 2020? Results from School Principal and Parent Phone Surveys, and from Student Assessments

The global Covid-19 pandemic that spread throughout the world in 2020 disrupted the education of over one billion students. This disruption continued into 2021, when hundreds of millions of students were still not in school, although almost all countries had reopened their schools at some point in 2022. Yet even after students had returned to in-person learning in their schools many had lost many months of in-person learning, and attempts to implement strategies for students to learn and study while their schools were closed varied widely across countries.

The global cost of reduced learning from the Covid-19 pandemic is still being calculated. This paper focuses on one country, Vietnam, to assess the impact of Covid-19 on education in that country, using data collected in the summer of 2020.

The first case of Covid-19 in Vietnam was detected in late January of 2020. This was near the beginning of the Tet (lunar New Year) holiday of that year, and during that holiday schools typically are closed for one or two weeks. To contain the spread of this virus, the government of Vietnam directed all schools to remain closed after the Tet holiday, yet at the same time the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) instructed school principals to implement several strategies to continue instruction while the schools were closed. Due to Vietnam’s unusually successful control of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, schools were reopened about three months later, around May 4, 2020. Vietnam’s schools stayed open a few weeks longer than normal, ending instruction for the 2019-20 school year at the end of June or in early July of 2020.

This paper uses data collected in 2020 to examine three questions regarding the impact of Covid-19 on education in primary schools in Vietnam in that year:

1. What did primary school principals and teachers do to maintain student learning when schools were closed for three months (February, March and April) of 2020?

2. What did parents do to support their primary-school-age children when their schools were closed?

3. What effect did the school closure have on Grade 3 students’ learning of mathematics and Vietnamese (literature) during the 2019-20 school year?

We find that the vast majority of primary schools undertook a wide variety of actions to provide instruction to their students during the three months that the schools were closed, and that more than half undertook activities more than once per week. Most parents report that their children were able to benefit from the instruction provided by the schools, but this was less common for students from poorer families. The evidence on student learning indicates that the younger cohort of students (those who started grade 2 in the 2018-19 school year) appear to have performed as well as the older cohort of students (those who started grade 2 in the 2017-18 school year), which implies that the Covid-19 pandemic did not result in any “learning loss” in Vietnam in the first half of 2020.