Foreign-invested nurseries in Vietnam will not be allowed to receive local children aged below five, according to the government’s newly-issued decree.

Despite taking effect on November 15, 2012, this information has only just become widely known after the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) held a meeting on the implementation of the decree.

Decree 73/2012/ND-CP stipulates that foreign-owned nurseries will only be permitted to admit foreign children.

The numbers of Vietnamese students at foreign-invested primary and secondary schools in Vietnam are currently capped at 10% out of their total student number and 20% for high schools.

The ban on children below the age of five has worried parents whose children are currently learning at international schools such as Kinder World and ACG Vietnam.

Tien Phong Newspaper cited an official from the International Cooperation Department under the MoET, the decree compiler, as saying the compiling group carefully considered the restriction. He claimed that children under five years old were not fluent in Vietnamese, therefore, studying at foreign schools could lead to a situation that children could speak foreign languages better than Vietnamese.

The official also said that the appropriate rate of Vietnamese students at international school could be 20-25%.