The Vietnamese K-12 Informatics Landscape: A Descriptive Reference Baseline (Curriculum, Examinations, Institutions, Teacher Pipeline, 2026)

This paper synthesises a descriptive baseline of the Vietnamese K-12 informatics system as it stands in 2026. The system rests on four institutionally distinct strata: (a) the universal curriculum operationalised by Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) Circular 32/2018/TT-BGDĐT, which for the first time in Vietnamese K-12 history makes Tin học (Informatics) a compulsory subject from Grade 3 onward; (b) the specialised chuyên Tin track, governed at curriculum level by MOET Decision 5251/2017 and at institutional level by the chuyên-school regulation (Circular 06/2012, superseded by Circular 05/2023), which operates approximately seventyseven informatics-specialised classes inside provincial selective public high schools; (c) the examination cascade running provincial HSG (học sinh giỏi, gifted-student) → national HSG-QG (Olympic Tin học cấp Quốc gia, the kỳ thi VOI under MOET nomenclature) → IOI team-selection test (TST), under which Vietnam has fielded an uninterrupted IOI delegation since 1989 and a current-decade medal density placing it consistently inside the top-ten participating nations; and (d) the teacher pipeline running through sư phạm Tin (informatics teacher-training) programs at HNUE, ĐHSP TP.HCM, ĐHSP Huế, and a handful of regional sư phạm institutions. The paper is descriptive, not normative; recommendations and comparisons-with-judgment are deferred to F1 (program position) and F3 (four-tradition comparison). The contribution is a single-document synthesis of the four strata that no published Vietnamese-language paper currently provides at the descriptive level needed for program reference, a curriculum coverage axis read against CSTA 2017 K12 standards as international anchor, a per-claim data-confidence appendix specifying, for every quantitative figure cited, the source, the year, the confidence level, and the resolution path, and explicit citation gaps marked in-line so future authors with privileged access to MOET statistics can resolve them without re-deriving context.