One Student, One Signed Record: Việt Nam Makes the Digital School Report Card Official From 8 October

For decades, the học bạ has been one of the most important pieces of paper a Vietnamese family owns. The school report book records every year’s grades, conduct assessment and teacher comments, and people carry it, or a certified photocopy of it, to school transfers, university admissions and job applications. From 8 October 2026, that record gets a legal digital form. Thông tư 70/2026/TT-BGDĐT of the Ministry of Education and Training (Bộ Giáo dục và Đào tạo) sets the rules for how a học bạ số (digital school record) is created, signed, issued, shared, stored and protected in general and continuing-education schools.

The document

Number: Thông tư 70/2026/TT-BGDĐT
Issuer: Bộ Giáo dục và Đào tạo; signed for the Minister by Deputy Minister (Thứ trưởng) Phạm Ngọc Thưởng
Signed: 22 August 2026
Effective: 8 October 2026
Length: 7 chapters, 26 articles
Legal bases: Luật Giáo dục 43/2019/QH14 (as amended by Luật 123/2025/QH15), Luật Giao dịch điện tử 20/2023/QH15, Luật Dữ liệu 60/2024/QH15, Luật Bảo vệ dữ liệu cá nhân 91/2025/QH15, Nghị định 69/2024/NĐ-CP on electronic identification and authentication, Nghị định 23/2025/NĐ-CP on e-signatures and trust services, and Nghị định 88/2026/NĐ-CP (28 March 2026) on education and training data.

The official metadata on the Government’s legal-documents portal matches the text: number, 22 August signing date, 8 October effective date and signer.

What changes

The ministry has been testing digital school records for more than two years. Kế hoạch 213/KH-BGDĐT (1 March 2024), also signed by Phạm Ngọc Thưởng, ran a pilot for primary grades 1 to 4 in all 63 provinces of the time, and cities such as Hà Nội later extended pilots to secondary schools with integrated digital signatures. Those pilots worked under plans and official letters, not a legal regulation. Thông tư 70 is the first time a regulation says what a digital record is and when it counts.

1. It has the same legal value as paper. Under Điều 4, a digital record created by the proper authority, following the correct procedure and the ministry’s data standard, and digitally signed under Điều 9, has “giá trị pháp lý như học bạ giấy”. It can be used for education management, administrative procedures and other lawful transactions.

2. One record per student, for life. Điều 7 says every student gets a single digital record linked to their lifelong learning record number (mã số hồ sơ học tập suốt đời). When a student changes schools, the record follows them and is synchronised, not started again. Records are compiled each school year, before 30 June, or 30 August in special cases.

3. Two signatures, then locked. Điều 8 and 9 require two layers of signing: the personal digital signature of the authorised person (subject teachers, the homeroom teacher, the principal or a delegate), then the school’s organisational signature. The fixed order is: finalise data, check it, sign it personally, sign it as the school, update the status. Once issued, a record cannot be edited in place (Điều 7 k5). Any correction means re-verifying, re-signing and re-issuing it (Điều 10 k3), and every issuance is logged with time, issuer, purpose and recipient.

4. No more “bring the paper one too”. Điều 12 k3 is the clause families will notice most: once a digital record, electronic copy or electronic extract meets the circular’s conditions, the receiving body may not also demand the paper học bạ, unless another law requires it. If the receiving system cannot yet connect online, it must accept an authenticated electronic copy (Điều 12 k4). Students and parents can also ask the school to convert the digital record to a valid paper document free of charge (Điều 12 k5).

5. Access through VNeID and the national public-service portal. Điều 11 lets students, parents or guardians, schools and education authorities access the record through school management software, the Cổng Dịch vụ công quốc gia and the VNeID app. Other organisations get in only with a legal basis or the student’s valid consent, and see only the data they need.

The data-protection layer

Chapter V is where the circular becomes a data law. Records must sync with the national education and training database (Cơ sở dữ liệu quốc gia về giáo dục và đào tạo) through open formats, a unique identifier, authentication and access control, audit logs, and real-time or periodic synchronisation (Điều 14 k3). Data can be shared only for the stated purpose, and recipients may not pass it on to third parties (Điều 15). Every creation, edit, access and share must be logged (Điều 5 k5, Điều 16 k3). Điều 17 k3 bans unauthorised access, falsifying data, selling or disclosing record data, and forging signatures or electronic extracts.

Students get the rights of a data subject under the Personal Data Protection Law (Điều 18). When a school has enough evidence of an error, it must fix it within 10 working days of receiving a complete, valid request (Điều 22 k8).

Who is affected

Schools (those teaching the general-education programme, plus continuing-education centres at lower- and upper-secondary level): they must assign staff to enter, check, sign, issue and administer records, write an internal access policy, and run backups and recovery.
Teachers, who now each need a working digital signature and are personally responsible for the data they sign (Điều 23 k1).
EdTech vendors. Điều 23 k3 makes providers of school-management and records software directly responsible for technical requirements, information security and data confidentiality “theo hợp đồng và theo quy định của pháp luật”. Every school-software provider in Việt Nam should read this clause alongside the data-protection law.
Universities, employers and commune-level People’s Committees that receive records. They must verify the data before relying on it and cannot use it beyond the purpose they received it for.

Transition

Paper records made before 8 October 2026 stay valid (Điều 25 k1). From that date, schools create digital records for both current and new students. Digitising old paper records follows a roadmap the ministry will issue, with priority for current students and for people who often need records for administrative procedures (Điều 25 k4).

Open questions

The data standard isn’t published yet. Điều 6 and 19 leave the field structure, encoding, display rules and connection standard to the ministry. Until it is published, vendors are building to a target that has not been fixed.
Signature costs and readiness. Personal digital signatures for every subject teacher across the country are a real cost and logistics burden. The circular does not say who pays.
Scope and legacy paper. The circular covers schools teaching the general-education programme (primary through upper secondary) and continuing-education centres. Vocational schools and universities are outside it. The roadmap for digitising older paper records has not been published, so employers and universities will keep seeing paper học bạ from older graduates for years.

Sources

This post is general information, not legal advice.