Students in remote and poor areas nationwide are dropping out of school after the Tet holiday despite the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET)'s best efforts to support poor students returning to class.

Before the Tet holidays, the ministry sent a document to departments of education and training nationwide to provide help and support to poor students so that they would not drop out of school after Tet, an annually re-occurring problem.

In many schools, teachers are finding that students have not returned to class.

Student absences are mainly due to having to help their parents in farming, according to Tran Thi Viet, principal of Hoang Then Primary School in the northern mountainous province of Lai Chau .

For some other students, it is because they want to have longer holidays, she said.

Even with the efforts of teachers visiting parents to persuade them to get their children to return to school after Tet, schools only welcomed 86 per cent of the students on the first school day after the holiday.

Some 150 students out of 1,800 students at the school failed to return after Tet, accounting for 8.4 per cent of the total, three times higher than the allowed rate of the MoET .

Only 70 of 250 students in the secondary school of Tra Lanh Commune in the central province of Quang Ngai returned to school after the holiday, according to Dinh Van Lep, head of the Education Unit of Tay Tra District.

Meanwhile, only 90 per cent of students in Nam Se Secondary School in Lai Chau came to school after Tet, according the school's principal Pham Thi Mai.

"Some of them have quit school, but others return after a long Tet holiday as it is traditional for Dao ethnic people to take a longer break, this happens every year," she said.

Nguyen Xuan Luong, vice principal of Mu Sang Primary School in Lai Chau said he was worried as students taking long periods of time off school could affect their studies.

Ngoc Anh, principal of Trung Leng Ho School in Bat Xat Commune of northern mountainous province of Lao Cai , said that the provincial People's Committee had to support the school in calling for students to return to class.

The commune's authority would also organise a festival to gather residents in the commune and ask them to take their children to school.

To tackle the problem, MoET has recently ordered departments of education and training in cities and provinces nationwide to set up lists of students in difficult circumstances.

Schools nationwide will have to submit their reports on the number of students dropping out of school after the Tet holiday to MoET by the end of this month, according to Do Thi Van, an expert at the ministry's Department of Planning and Finance./.