Behind the brand's growth is Ms Le Tue Minh, CEO of Innochain Education Investment Group and Chairwoman of Edison Schools. As the founder who both shaped the strategy and personally designed the learning pathways and curricula, Ms Minh shares how she built a distinctive made-to-measure educational ecosystem alongside Eco Retreat.
The first school I founded was in 2009, aimed at solving the study-abroad wave that hit many students at the general education level, back when the public school system had not yet prepared adequate integration and study-abroad preparation for university. Just a few years later, however, I noticed that many families' needs were changing. They were looking for a balanced life close to nature, for their children to study at a friendly, open-minded school equipped with comprehensive competencies and skills, with diverse personalised pathways so that the children gain autonomy and are free to choose any direction later in life — not simply to prepare for study abroad.
That was when I met Lương Xuân Hà, Chairman of Ecopark Group, and we quickly found common ground. The Ecopark chairman shared Ecopark's ambition: housing is not just a house, but an environment and a surrounding ecosystem for every family member — a place where everyone finds their own space to live happily, connected to nature, attached to the community and continuing to create for life.
This ignited in me the desire to create a new education product, because a place worth living in like that cannot do without a school — a space for the future generations of Ecopark to grow up happy, learning and creating. A school inside Ecopark is not simply a place to study; it becomes part of residents' lives, offering an open, balanced and diverse learning environment close to nature where children develop positive energy, curiosity, initiative, creativity and readiness to adapt to a constantly changing world. From that shared resonance, Edison Schools was born, with its first campus at Ecopark Hung Yen.
Education is a long journey, so what is "right" in education has to be judged from parents' feedback and from the pupils' energy day by day.
At Edison Schools, pupils do not spend hours on school buses, fall asleep from exhaustion, then come home in the evening to face four concrete walls. The school sits right inside the living environment, so the children have more time to exercise, explore nature, join community activities and stay close to their families. That is the foundation for them to develop their own motivation, rather than studying only because of pressure or results.
Many of our pupils passed the Grade 10 examination with excellent results and gained admission to public or selective top-tier schools, yet in the end still chose to stay with Edison Schools. This active, voluntary choice by the children themselves is the clearest proof that they trust the environment, feel happy there, and find motivation to learn and create. For me, no milestone is more meaningful than that.
What drives me is not just opening another campus in the South, right at the southwestern gateway of the most dynamic city in the country, but the chance to create yet another new education product, contributing a creative-education piece to an eco environment bound to nature, within the greenest urban districts in the country. At Eco Retreat I see a community with the very distinct traits of the southern region: dynamism, openness, generosity and full vitality — loving nature yet also modern and balanced. That difference is exactly what excites me, because it is an opportunity for Edison Schools to keep building a high-quality learning environment that holds its core philosophy while carrying new value suited to residents here.
This is also a step within Edison Schools' long-term development direction, with the ambition of being present in all three regions. The resonance and shared values around the desire to build a happy ecosystem amid green nature for every family member — a proposition proven by two brands over nearly a decade — make Edison Schools' continued presence at Eco Retreat a very natural choice.
I have always held that every school must be designed specifically for the community it serves. That is why the distinctive feature of Edison Schools here is a made-to-measure curriculum that not only addresses the core education needs of pupils and residents at Eco Retreat but also nurtures inspiration, motivation to learn and creativity for the children well into the future.
We do not force pupils into a single mould. Instead, we build flexible, personalised learning pathways that cover every destination: top public universities, private institutions, domestic international schools, and study abroad in Asia, Europe, the United States and Australia. Each pupil's pathway from Grade 1 to Grade 12 is closely accompanied by teachers, helping every child optimise their strengths, achieve the best results and develop comprehensively — abilities, skills and qualities from physical to mental, emotional and aesthetic dimensions. This is exactly the student-centred curriculum design model we pursue and keep updating, especially in the AI era, where everything changes and refreshes at a stormy pace.
The made-to-measure spirit is translated according to the distinctive needs and priorities of pupils and parents in each region, within a society and world in constant flux. For example, at Ecopark Hung Yen, which lies in the northern key economic zone with extensive cooperation and trade with China and other Asian countries, Edison Schools developed a Chinese–English trilingual programme alongside the Vietnamese–English bilingual or dual-bilingual track, and brought CSCA revision content (the mandatory standardised test for international students applying to Chinese universities) into teaching.
Meanwhile, many families in the South, including at Eco Retreat, orient their learning and career development towards the markets of North America, Europe, Australia, or South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. So Edison Schools here gives priority to helping pupils adapt to, integrate into and develop a business mindset for those specific environments. We are also among the first to introduce a second foreign language — Chinese, Japanese and Korean — into teaching from primary school, while integrating STEAM and Artificial Intelligence (AI) content with an appropriate duration and methodology for each age group.
What matters is that all these values are placed within Eco Retreat's green living environment, helping pupils balance international-standard education experience and global competencies without losing their connection to nature and the community.
A school cannot devote its full attention to academics if it must spend too much time and resources solving land, investment or infrastructure problems. From the very beginning, Lương Xuân Hà, Chairman of Ecopark Group, saw building a creative education environment as an essential, inseparable part of the urban eco ecosystem such as Eco Retreat rather than merely an add-on service. That frees Edison Schools to focus entirely on education quality, which in turn allows it to offer residents extremely reasonable tuition fees.
Conversely, I believe Edison Schools is an integral part of the young, modern resident community at Eco Retreat — for whom a creative learning environment and quality that meets international standards is one of the top criteria when choosing a place to settle for the long term.
With the goal of focusing on physical, intellectual, mental and emotional development through personalised pathways, Edison Schools at Eco Retreat will give pupils the conditions to develop naturally through outdoor exercise and contact with nature. Many parents have shared that they feel far less pressure around commuting and parenting, and feel more confident about having another child when the living and learning environment are combined so completely like this. A happy, harmonious life growing ever greener like the Eco forest — I believe that is the greatest value the two brands create together.
I do not expect every pupil to get into the most prestigious universities, or all of them to succeed and become famous. What I hope for most is that they keep the six core value pairs — the "genetic code" Edison Schools pursues across the whole system, in every campus: Respect – Cooperation, Love – Sharing, Honesty – Integrity, Positivity – Initiative, Responsibility – Diligence and Learning – Creativity.
For me, a child's maturity is determined not only by academic success but also by adaptability, creative thinking, global collaboration skills and balanced development of the physical, mental, emotional and character dimensions.
I believe pupils who grow up amid the nature of Eco Retreat will be like trees whose roots run deep into the soil, absorbing the foundational values of the nation from one generation to the next, so that from there they can rise higher, reach further and be able to join the world as equals. Building a solid launch pad so that children keep their identity while becoming confident, proactive and creative global citizens is not just a measure of success — it is the most complete promise Edison Schools makes at Eco Retreat.
The Edison logo is very special and carries the true spirit of "Eco" — it is a tree, rather than the traditional school images still commonly seen. We chose the "Edison tree logo" precisely because we share Ecopark's philosophy — that Eco Retreat and education is also about nurturing and tending young saplings into a forest, bringing flowers and sweet fruit to life. And trees never stand still; they grow without ceasing, developing ever greener just like life at Ecopark, at Eco Retreat, and for generations to come.