Vietnam’s Aggressive School Mergers Acutely Test To Lam’s Governance Model

On 5 September 2026, millions of Vietnamese pupils began the new school year in a school system that no longer resembled the one they had left for holiday in May. This was the result of the most sweeping reorganisation of Vietnam’s public school network in decades. In barely 14 months, more than 11,000 schools nationwide had been consolidated into fewer, larger institutions.

The merger campaign is best understood not simply as education reform, but as a broader governance experiment and one of the clearest domestic tests yet of General Secretary To Lam’s preferred administrative style: consolidate institutions, impose ambitious numerical targets and tight deadlines, and rely increasingly on digital oversight to detect problems after implementation. In most of the merged schools, the policy can be defended as an efficiency measure consistent with his wider “breakthrough” reform agenda. However, the emergence of oversized schools, reports of inconvenienced families having to travel much further to attend school, and other problems with the consolidation project, reveal the rigidity — and potential counterproductivity — of its highly centralised, target-dictated approach.

The mandate came from a directive requiring provinces to reduce the number of public education institutions by at least 30 per cent from their 1 July 2025 baseline, with better-placed localities encouraged to cut by as much as 50 per cent by 30 August 2026. The Ministry of Education and Training estimated that the programme would consolidate more than 11,000 schools, reassign over 20,000 school administrators, most of whom are former teachers, and return roughly 11,000 of them to classroom teaching.

The programme aligns with Politburo Resolution No. 71 of August 2025 on the “breakthrough” development of education, itself part of the broader reform agenda associated with Resolutions 57 on science, technology, innovation and digitalization, 59 on international integration, 66 on legal reform and 68 on private-sector development. These are To Lam’s central policy “pillars” for Vietnam’s next phase of development.

There is a strong case for the reform. Vietnam’s school network has long been fragmented into large numbers of relatively small institutions, often with separate principals, deputies and administrative offices regardless of enrolment. Consolidation allows provinces to concentrate investment, upgrade facilities and redeploy surplus administrators into understaffed classrooms, thereby helping to ease chronic teacher shortages.

Yet the costs became visible almost immediately. In Thanh Hoa Province, more than 400 pupils were kept home for several days by parents protesting a merger that added more than two kilometres and a provincial-road crossing to their school commute. Analysts have warned that reducing the number of administrative units achieves little unless the resulting savings translate into better teaching and classroom conditions. They have also raised concerns that a hierarchy between “main” and “branch” campuses could undermine staff morale and perceptions of equality.

The most striking example is Nha Trang’s newly merged primary school in Khanh Hoa Province, where 13 former schools were consolidated into a single entity spanning 18 sites, 287 classes and more than 10,500 pupils, roughly three times the scale of a typical merger. A former education official publicly questioned whether any single leadership team could effectively govern a school of that size. Beyond the sheer administrative burden, managing 18 campuses spread across different locations is also likely to make it harder to ensure consistent teaching quality, facilities and management standards across the school, creating a risk that disparities emerge between campuses.  

The problem arises partly from the reform’s incentives. While the directives establish clear numerical targets for reducing the number of institutions, they do not appear to impose a ceiling on the size of the schools that emerge. For example, Khanh Hoa reduced its network from 728 schools to 246, eliminating 640 principal and deputy-principal positions. Such aggressive consolidation contributed to the emergence of oversized institutions such as the Nha Trang primary school. When performance is measured primarily by the number of institutions eliminated, local authorities may have incentive to consolidate further than is educationally optimal.

A merger campaign that weakens classroom quality would therefore undermine the human-capital pipeline on which To Lam’s development agenda depends.

The austere approach is also consistent with To Lam’s broader faith in centralised digital management, which he sees as a way to address problems that may arise after consolidation. In June 2026, he called for Vietnam to “shift decisively from managing education to governing the development of education” and advocated a unified national data system capable of identifying teacher shortages, overcrowding and dropout risks in real time. This reflects the same confidence in centralised digital monitoring that is visible in other parts of his reform agenda, especially the administrative streamlining.

Looking Ahead

The 2026–2027 school year will provide the first real test of whether the benefits of consolidation outweigh the risks. The key question is whether students will receive consistent and improved teaching quality, adequate facilities and effective school management after the restructuring. Particular attention should be paid to very large, merged schools such as the one in Nha Trang. If evidence emerges that educational quality, access or management has deteriorated in excessively large schools, the government should consider imposing a ceiling on the size of merged schools and breaking up excessively large institutions into smaller, more manageable units.

The stakes extend beyond education. To Lam has repeatedly presented schooling as upstream infrastructure for the science, technology, innovation and AI ambitions of Resolution 57, telling education officials that training “must go one step ahead” of the country’s strategic industries. A merger campaign that weakens classroom quality would therefore undermine the human-capital pipeline on which To Lam’s development agenda depends.

The school-merger programme is thus an unusually revealing test of whether an administrative model built around speed, consolidation, quantified targets and digital oversight can deliver substantive improvements rather than merely a leaner organisational chart. Its success will depend not on how many schools disappear from official statistics, but on whether teaching quality, access and accountability improve at the institutions that remain.

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