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How to check a school is still open

A working website is not evidence that a school is teaching. Here is the ten-minute check.

Published 27 August 2026
A parent making notes at a kitchen table beside an open laptop.

International School Saigon Pearl told parents it was closing on a Friday evening in February 2025. Its last day of teaching was 19 June 2025. More than a year later its website still answers, still describes the programme, and still shows an admissions address.

That sounds like an unlikely thing to have to check. It isn’t. Three international schools in Ho Chi Minh City have stopped teaching in recent years, each for an entirely different reason, and in each case the problem was visible in public records before it was visible to parents.

This guide is the check we run before we publish any school on Tiny Circle. It takes about ten minutes, and it is worth doing before a tour rather than after a deposit.

Check one — is it licensed to enrol, not just licensed to exist

These are two different permissions, and the gap between them is where Saigon Star’s families lost years of fees.

Ask the school directly, in writing:

Which authority licensed the school, and is it currently licensed to operate and to enrol new students? Please could you share the licence and its expiry date.

Ask for the answer in writing and ask to see the relevant document rather than relying on a verbal assurance. Note the answer you receive and whether the school can provide the documentation.

Licences carry expiry dates. Ask when this one expires and what happens after.

Ask which authority issued it rather than assuming. Vietnam reorganised local government on 1 July 2025, and under Decree 142/2025/NĐ-CP the power to permit a preschool or a general-education school to operate now sits with the commune or ward People’s Committee. District education offices no longer exist, so a licence naming one is describing an authority that has since been replaced.

Check two — search in Vietnamese, not only in English

This is one of the most useful habits in this guide.

Vietnamese-language press reports school problems weeks or months before English-language coverage appears, and sometimes instead of it. Search the school’s Vietnamese name together with:

  • ngừng hoạt động — ceasing operations
  • đóng cửa — closing
  • giải thể — dissolved
  • chưa được cấp phép — not licensed
  • phụ huynh — parents

Any browser will translate the results well enough to tell you whether there is something to look into. You are not trying to read the coverage closely. You are only trying to find out whether coverage exists.

Check three — is it teaching now, not just online now

A website tells you a school existed when someone last updated it. To find out whether it is teaching this term, look for something that can only have happened recently:

  • A social media post from the last few weeks — not a scheduled-looking announcement, but a photograph of children, a sports day, a parents’ evening
  • A phone number that a person answers during school hours
  • A current fee schedule with this academic year on it
  • Named staff you can find elsewhere

If the most recent sign of life is a term old, ask why before you go any further.

Why this is a real risk here

The three cases are worth knowing because they failed in three different ways.

A school can close while perfectly healthy. International School Saigon Pearl had run since 2010 and taught the IB programme to more than 200 children. It closed because applications fell. Parents were told in February; teaching stopped in June. Every child was offered a place at International School Ho Chi Minh City with fees held for two years. It was an orderly, honest wind-down — and the website outlived it.

A school can be in trouble for a very long time before it disappears. American International School Vietnam was suspended from operating on 1 July 2024, with around 1,200 children enrolled. About 700 had transferred elsewhere within weeks. It was not formally dissolved until 12 January 2026 — eighteen months later. For most of that period it existed on paper, in the news and in search results, but was not teaching.

A school can be operating without permission to enrol, for years, invisibly. Saigon Star International School was licensed in 2014 and operated lawfully until 2020. Renewal was refused in 2021 after a dispute over its land. From October 2023 it was permitted to continue temporarily but was expressly barred from taking new students. It kept enrolling. Most families found out only when a confiscation notice went up on the campus in November 2024.

Nothing on any of those three websites would have told you.

The money question

For some families, the financial loss was not simply the closure itself, but money they had already paid.

Prepaying years of fees, or putting money into an “investment” or capital-contribution package in exchange for reduced tuition, is common in this market. At American International School Vietnam, more than 900 parents had placed roughly VND 3.6 trillion into interest-free packages. Saigon Star families had prepaid between VND 500 million and VND 1.6 billion, covering three to five years. When each school stopped teaching, that money was not simply refundable.

We are not going to tell you whether such an arrangement is right for your family — that is a financial decision, and it depends on things only you know. But it is worth being clear-eyed about what you are agreeing to, and these are reasonable things to establish in writing beforehand:

  • What exactly is being paid for, and over what period
  • Under what circumstances money is returned, and how long a refund takes
  • Who holds the money in the meantime
  • What happens if the school stops teaching before the period ends

If a school cannot answer those four questions in writing, that is worth weighing.

This is general information, not legal or financial advice. For a large sum, an independent lawyer is a small cost by comparison.

What this doesn’t mean

Most schools in Ho Chi Minh City are exactly what they appear to be, run by people doing careful work, and will still be teaching long after your child has moved on.

The point of these checks is not suspicion. It is that the cost of running them is ten minutes, and the cost of not running them has fallen on several hundred families here in the past two years. Do them once, early, and then get on with the part that actually matters — whether your child will be happy there.

How we do this at Tiny Circle

Every school on Tiny Circle carries a source link and the date we last checked it. That date is on the listing, in public, so you can see for yourself how fresh the information is rather than taking our word for it.

We run a closure check before publishing any school, and we run it again when we re-check a listing. We do not assess teaching quality, and we never claim to — that judgement is yours to make, on a tour, in the building.

If you find something on a listing that is out of date, tell us. There is a Suggest a correction link on every listing, and it goes to a person.

Sources

The three cases in this guide were verified on 26 August 2026 against the reporting below. The licensing position was re-checked on 23 September 2026.