You are here

06/09/2013

On 22 and 23 August 2013, VVOB Vietnam organized a national symposium on Education Quality together with national education sector partners including the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), the National Institute for Education Management (NIEM), the Vietnam National Institute of Educational Sciences (VNIES), the Hanoi National University of Education (HNUE), UNESCO and non-governmental organizations including ChildFund, Oxfam GB, Plan International and the Vietnam Coalition For Education For All.

Education quality: a multidimensional concept

The symposium "Towards a Learning Society: Supporting Teaching and Learning in Vietnam" reached 237 participants (61% female, including a variety of national and local policy makers, education managers, lecturers, teachers, researchers, representatives of political, social, professional and mass organizations as well as development partners. Additionally, 46 journalists representing 28 newspapers, 5 television stations and 1 radio station attended the event.

At the symposium, 50 presentations (62% by female presenters) covered different aspects of quality of education through four perspectives: students, teachers, managers, and parents and communities. Mr. Pham Do Nhat Tien, former assistant of the Minister of Education and Training in Vietnam and Mrs. Ushio Miura programme specialist of the Regional Bureau for Education in Asia and the Pacific of UNESCO in Bangkok, delivered a national and a regional keynote at the conference. The keynote speakers considered education quality as a multidimensional concept that needs to be addressed through a systemic approach with comprehensive education policies.

Thematic outcomes

Based on the thematic sessions, key findings and policy recommendations were formulated in each of the four covered perspectives. These thematic outcomes include:

  • promote students' activeness and autonomy, focus on self-learning, problem-solving and creative thinking skills while ensuring support to include vulnerable and disadvantaged students in their learning;
  • enhance teacher training and professional development through development of communities of practice, action research, use of ICT, pedagogical innovations, development of professional sharing meetings, improve link between student teachers and schools through increased and earlier practice time, support teachers in ethnic minority areas in delivering rights-based inclusive education and address non-formal learning needs in teacher training;
  • enhance education management through innovations of in-service trainings towards modernization and relevance, improvement of M&E towards supporting poor and disadvantaged students in accessing education and promotion and application of research on theory as well as good practice towards innovations of managing professional development;
  • and improve links among family, society and schools as well as resources for supporting parenting skills, enhanced community based activities and more diversification of contents and modalities of community-based education services in line with local contexts and needs.

Reflections

Following the thematic debriefings during a panel discussion, H.E. Mr. Nguyen Vinh Hien, Vice Minister of Education and Training, summarized his final reflections and provided additional recommendations regarding the enhancement of education quality in Vietnam in a 'harvesting' session. Vice Minister Hien emphasized:

  • students need to become all round citizens that can support the industrialization and development of the country, therefore the education system needs to emphasize the development of students' competencies and their self-learning capacity, reflected in textbooks with room for creativity and with specific attention to the needs of disadvantaged children;
  • teachers need incentives to learn continuously and update their skills, which will be emphasized in a compensation and remuneration scheme as part of the new project for education reform, need to interact with communities and need more practice in pre-service, while for in-service teacher training, the first e-learning courses have been uploaded as an important instrument to enhance efficiency and effectiveness of teacher professional development;
  • education managers need to take up their decentralized autonomy and leadership role with a focus on quality assurance;
  • and schools need to take up their facilitating role as a bridge between family as first education environment and society, while parenting education plays an important role and community learning can be better consolidated at local level by consolidating the programmes of centres for general techniques and career orientation, community learning centres and continuing education centres.

Vice Minister Hien also confirmed that the key findings and recommendations will reach the Education Reform Committee while more specific ideas from the symposium will be taken up with the respective functional departments of the Ministry of Education and Training. As a follow-up, VVOB Vietnam will jointly submit all key findings and policy recommendations with co-organizers to the MOET leadership.

Thank you

In conclusion, VVOB Vietnam would like to thank all co-organizers, and especially the Department of Teachers and Educational Administrators of the Ministry of Education and Training for all the contributions and joint efforts made to make the symposium a successful platform for sharing lessons learnt and best practices of promoting quality of education and providing substantial policy recommendations on further enhancement of education quality in Vietnam.