Hanoi (VNA)ꦑ – Deputy Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Van Phuc spoke about the vision of Vietnam’s education at a workshop on education strategy building and development planning held on July 4.

The workshop was organised by the Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences in coordination with the Vietnam National UNESCO Committee, with support from the Ministry of Education and Training, the national scientific-technology programme on education-training, and the Vietnam Association for Education for All.

First question: What is best for students?

According to Deputy Minister Phuc, Vietnam’s education sector has reaped proud achievements. The country performed better than most other countries at the same level of income in terms of fairness and quality of education. Besides the impressive outcomes in education universalisation, the country is known across the world for the maintenance of students’ capacity on a wide scale. However, Vietnamese students are said to lack skills and study motivation due to the gap between school and reality requirements. The training of teachers still shows many problems. The rate of school dropout remains high, especially in ethnic minority areas. “It is obvious that we have not fulfilled the top mission of the education sector which is to produce human resources meeting the needs of fast economic growth,” Phuc said. “We have to do better and it is now time to change,” he stressed. According to the deputy minister, in making any decision relating to education, the first question in Vietnam is “What is the best for students?” The biggest task of the Ministry of Education and Training is to improve education quality for each student, and the implementation of this task must focus on students’ interest.

In order to bring real benefit for students and help them be prepared for opportunities and challenges in the 21^stღ century, the Ministry of Education and Training need to build effective plans for carrying out the Government’s key educational policies to help students gain success and improve the country’s competitiveness.

Educational experts said in order to build plans, the first thing is to define a vision. On this regard, Deputy Minister Phuc said, “We want to have high-quality education and bring lifetime study opportunities to every Vietnamese citizen so that they can discover and fully optimise their personal abilities, enhance productivity and life quality. “We need an education that can fully awake a person’s potential, which means the educational system should be designed with diversity in order to facilitate each student,” the Deputy Minister said. He went on to say that we need an education that can meet the demand of the modern society, helping produce Vietnamese citizens with high creativity and adaptability. Such requirements can only be met through educational experiments towards the goal of bringing into full play the ability of each student. “We should ensure that a higher rate of high school graduation really corresponds to the ability to pursue study at higher level or the possibility of getting a better job of students,” Phuc said.

A vision plays the decisive role

Speaking at the workshop, Chief Representative of UNESCO Office in Vietnam Michael Croft said the clear definition of a vision for education plays the decisive role in planning education development. He said the rapid digitalisation is impacting every aspect of life, including education, in countries all over the world. Therefore, sharing experience among countries is very necessary to multiple success stories and prevent repeated failure. Croft said with more than 150 participants being officials, policy makers, experts and educators, the workshop provided a chance for Vietnam to learn from other countries’ experience. Speakers at the event introduced development trends of education in the world and educational strategies of several countries. Vietnamese educators shared opinions on approaches and methods to build educational development strategies as well as lessons drawn from the building and implementation of educational development strategies in other countries. The workshop spent two days of July 5 and 6 on training to enhance the capacity of building strategies and plans for educational development for policy makers, planners and education experts. Michael Croft said the workshop was a chance for Vietnam to learn from the experience of countries which had undergone the same situation in the past. He added that it is necessary to define key factors in building educational strategies, like priorities and budget allocations. -VNA