Ordering and bidding for teacher training under Decree 116 faces many obstacles and is ineffective.

Decree No. 116/2020/ND-CP, issued by the Government on September 25, 2020, stipulates policies on financial support for tuition fees and living expenses for teacher training students (hereinafter referred to as Decree 116). This Decree applies starting from the 2021-2022 academic year's enrollment cohort.

After three years of implementation, Decree 116 has achieved certain results, such as: an increase in the number of candidates and parents interested in teacher training programs; a significant increase in the number of applicants, admission scores, and enrollment rates in teacher training programs compared to other fields and disciplines. This demonstrates that the policies of Decree 116 have had a positive impact on attracting academically strong students to teacher training programs, serving as a foundation for improving the quality of the education system.

However, the implementation of Decree 116 has also given rise to some limitations, difficulties, and obstacles that need to be amended and supplemented to suit practical realities. Specifically, difficulties and obstacles arise from the methods of ordering, assigning tasks, and bidding.

*Students of Hanoi Pedagogical University*

According to statistics from the Ministry of Education and Training over the three years of implementation, the percentage of students assigned tasks by local authorities only accounted for 17.4% of the total number of enrolled students and 24.3% of the total number of students registered to benefit from the policy. Only 23 out of 63 provinces and cities implemented the task assignment, ordering, and bidding process.

The number of students eligible for "training to meet social needs" and funded by the state budget accounts for 75.7% of the students registered for the policy and 82.6% of the students enrolled.

The Ministry of Education and Training acknowledges that the method of ordering/assigning tasks/bidding for teacher training has not been implemented to the extent and with the effectiveness intended by Decree 116.

In particular, there are 06 teacher training institutions that have been commissioned by local and neighboring localities but have not yet received payment, or have only received a very small portion of the payment (including 02 key institutions: Hanoi University of Education with 13 quotas; Ho Chi Minh City University of Education with 51 quotas), affecting the support policy for teacher training students and causing inequality between teacher training students trained under the commissioned/assigned/bid mechanism and teacher training students trained according to social needs.

Large localities like Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Da Nang have the advantage of attracting high-quality human resources, so even without ordering/assigning/bidding on teacher training, they still have a large number of teachers applying to work there, creating inequality between localities.

According to leaders of the Ministry of Education and Training, difficulties and obstacles arise from the allocation of financial support for teacher training students. Specifically, each year (2021, 2022, 2023), the Ministry of Finance only allocates approximately 54% of the required funding for teacher training students at teacher training institutions under the Ministry of Education and Training. Therefore, funding for teacher training students is often delayed and requires additional funding requests compared to the training plan, leading to difficulties for both teacher training institutions and teacher training students.

Due to uneven development, resource conditions, and budgetary balances among localities, many localities face difficulties and lack sufficient funds to implement teacher training programs through commissioning/assigning tasks/bidding processes.

Specifically: Difficulties and obstacles arising from monitoring the recovery of reimbursement funds: Decree 116 assigns the provincial People's Committee the responsibility of guiding, monitoring, and urging teacher training students to reimburse the support funds. However, localities are not the units that provide funding for teacher training students under the social needs training program. Furthermore, localities have not directed relevant agencies to implement and guide the implementation, causing difficulties in its execution.

In the coming period, the Ministry of Education and Training requires training institutions with teacher training programs to proactively work with the People's Committees of provinces and centrally-administered cities and propose to the direct management agency the assignment of training tasks and registration of enrollment quotas according to the guidance of the Ministry of Education and Training to effectively implement Government Decree No. 71/2020/ND-CP and Decree No. 116/2020/ND-CP.

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