Education and Learning: Preliminary Findings from the Round 4 Survey in Vietnam

This fact sheet presents preliminary findings from the fourth round of the Young Lives survey in 2013. It reports on children’s learning and some of the changes that have taken place in key education indicators for our sample children over the eleven years since the first round of data collection in 2002. The data show that the enrolment rates for the 12-year-olds are high, for boys and girls alike and in both rural and urban areas, although children from the poorest households and ethnic minority communities are still more likely not to be attending school. Education inequalities are more apparent with respect to extra classes, which can be regarded as a private supplement to the public education system, with two-thirds of all children receiving extra tuition – almost 90% of children from better-off households but just a third of children from poorer homes. Education outcomes, measured in the highest grade achieved and maths test scores of 12-year-olds, reflect this. Children from poorer households and ethnic minority groups have completed, on average, fewer grades of school and do less well in our maths tests, which raise concerns about the continued intergenerational transmission of poverty. Encouragingly, we also see evidence that these children among our Younger Cohort are doing better than the Older Cohort when they were aged 12 in 2006 and that the learning gaps that exist between them and their better-off peers are starting to close.