"The education sector is facing unprecedented opportunities. Never before have the Party and State paid so much attention and expected so much of education and training as they do now." This is the emphasis of Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Kim Son on the opportunities and responsibilities of the sector before the new school year 2025-2026.
Such concern and expectation are demonstrated through a series of unprecedented policies for education by the Party and State in recent times, under the direction of General Secretary To Lam, especially in Resolution No. 71 on breakthrough in education and training development recently issued by the Politburo to remove current bottlenecks in Vietnamese education and at the same time create leverage for Vietnamese education to make a breakthrough.
With unprecedented, breakthrough goals, breakthrough, unprecedented solutions and investments are needed. And the solutions proposed in Resolution 71 are considered a “real dream” for the education sector.
Unprecedented regime for teachers – untying the teacher “bottleneck”
Teachers are the key factor, the “machine” that determines the quality of the education sector, but for many years, the lack of teachers has always been a burning issue in the education sector. One of the main reasons is that teachers’ income is still low compared to many other professions while the work pressure is high and the responsibility is high.
On the eve of the new school year 2025-2026, the education sector is still short of more than 102,000 public teachers (including more than 30,000 preschool teachers and more than 72,000 general education teachers) while about 60,000 assigned positions have not been recruited.
At the discussion on the draft Law on Teachers on November 9, 2024, General Secretary To Lam emphasized that "lack of teachers and schools is a very current issue".
“Ensuring sufficient number of teachers according to prescribed standards” and “having special and outstanding preferential policies for the teaching staff” are the affirmations of the Politburo in Resolution 71 with specific policies. The Resolution stipulates preferential allowances for preschool and general education establishments of at least 70% for teachers, 30% for staff, and 100% for teachers in particularly difficult areas, border areas, islands, and ethnic minority areas.
These are considered "dream" numbers when the current allowance for preschool and primary school teachers is only 30 to 35%, for teachers in difficult areas it is 50%, and school staff have no allowance.
These figures also far exceed, even double, the draft Decree regulating preferential allowances for civil servants and employees working in public educational institutions, announced by the Ministry of Education and Training in June. According to this draft, the allowance for school staff is from 15-20%, for teachers from 30% to 45%, and for teachers in disadvantaged areas from 50 to 80%.
Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Kim Son said that after Resolution 71 was issued, the Ministry is finalizing this draft. Accordingly, the basic salary of all teachers will increase, the increase will be at least 2 million VND and the maximum will be 7 million VND/month, not including other allowances. "This is truly a dream come true," said Ms. Nguyen Thi Huong, a teacher at a secondary school in Hung Yen province.
Regarding vocational education, according to the Resolution, for the first time in history, vocational education teachers and lecturers will be ordered and assigned training tasks from the State budget, similar to current general education teachers.
For university lecturers, the Resolution requires increasing the support mechanism for lecturers to study to improve their qualifications at home and abroad, and implementing the system of co-tenured lecturers. This is the first time the concept of “co-tenured lecturers” has been officially included in a legal document, eliminating the current regulation that a lecturer can only be tenured at one university, opening up opportunities for universities to flexibly utilize high-quality lecturers.
According to Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Thanh Nhan, Vice Principal of the University of Education (Hue University), improving the remuneration regime is a great encouragement from the Party and the State for teachers. With improved living conditions and income, teachers will feel secure in their work and wholeheartedly devote themselves to the cause of educating people. This will also increase the attractiveness of the teaching profession to society, attract talented and excellent people to pedagogy, improve the quality of the teaching staff, thereby improving the quality of training.
This effect has been clearly demonstrated in this year's university admission season when the "boost" from the tuition-free policy, subsidized living expenses for pedagogical students, and increased salaries for teachers has attracted great attention from candidates for the pedagogical industry, pushing the benchmark for the pedagogical industry sky-high with 4 "peaks" of 30 points, dozens of other industries from 28 points or more, surpassing even "hot" industries such as artificial intelligence or semiconductor technology and having a huge gap, even double that of other training industries.
“The quality of a student with an entrance score of 19-20 points is completely different from that of a student with 26-27 points. The quality of teacher training students today is much better than before,” Associate Professor Nguyen Thanh Nhan said.
The superior preferential treatment and the assignment of the role of leading teacher recruitment to the education sector as stipulated in the Law on Teachers (newly issued, effective from January 1, 2026) are expected to thoroughly resolve the problem of local teacher surplus and shortage that has persisted for decades in the education sector and at the same time improve the quality of the team.
Focus resources on modernizing schools
Along with the problem of teachers, the lack of facilities to meet training requirements is a major bottleneck in the education sector. Statistics from the Ministry of Education and Training show that the country is still short of more than 35,000 classrooms to meet the ratio of 1 class/room, meeting the requirement of studying 2 sessions/day, of which preschools are short of nearly 28,000 classrooms, and primary schools are short of nearly 7,500 classrooms. This figure does not include the number of classes and classrooms that are still lacking if the number of students/class is guaranteed according to regulations. The number of classrooms that have not been solidified is over 64,000.
In areas with particularly difficult economic conditions, there are still 6,477 borrowed classrooms, mainly concentrated at preschool and primary levels. In border areas, remote areas, the need for boarding accommodation for students is very high but due to insufficient resources, students still have to travel a very long and arduous distance to school every day.
The Ministry of Education and Training said that in the 2013-2024 period, the proportion of state budget expenditure on education not only did not reach the minimum level of 20% as prescribed, but was also mainly spent on regular expenditure. Specifically, regular expenditure accounted for 83.4%, investment expenditure accounted for only 17.6%, equivalent to less than 4% of total budget expenditure, not meeting the requirements for renovation, upgrading and new investment.
Investment in higher education is also not commensurate. According to Dr. Pham Manh Hung (University of Economics, Vietnam National University, Hanoi), for a long time, Vietnam's expenditure on higher education has been about 0.27-0.35% of GDP, equivalent to 1.5-1.8% of total state budget expenditure, much lower than international standards, becoming a "bottleneck" in the development of higher education.
Resolution 71 has removed these bottlenecks by not only stipulating that the general budget for education must reach at least 20% of the total state budget, but also clearly allocating that investment spending must reach at least 5% of the total budget, and spending on higher education must reach at least 3% of the budget. “This is a breakthrough in the regulation on budget spending for education. There must be very practical investment to have quality worthy of the level,”
Regarding investment spending, in Resolution 71, the Politburo directed to focus resources on solidifying and modernizing schools and classrooms, ensuring adequate facilities and equipment that meet standards, with special attention paid to investing in practice rooms, playgrounds and physical training spaces for students. Raising the standards of educational facilities at all levels to gradually approach international standards, completing the construction of a network of boarding schools in disadvantaged and border areas before 2030, and expanding the university preparatory training system for ethnic minority students.
For higher education, invest in modernizing technical infrastructure, expanding development space, focusing on upgrading facilities, laboratories, building excellent training and research centers at key educational institutions and teacher training institutions. The resolution encourages the construction of high-tech urban areas - universities, a new model that is being effectively operated in developed countries.
Speaking at the conference summarizing the 2024-2025 school year, Minister of Finance Nguyen Van Thang especially reminded leaders of provincial and municipal People's Committees that the 2026 budget expenditure must prioritize making estimates for education and training according to the allocation targets required by Resolution 71.
According to Minister Nguyen Van Thang, the 2026 budget estimate is for total expenditure on education and training to be about VND630,000 billion, an increase of about VND134,000 billion compared to 2025. "This is the minimum expenditure level, so the budget estimate can increase depending on demand and there is no ceiling," the Minister of Finance emphasized.
"Only with practice can we practice morality," Professor Nguyen Dinh Duc (University of Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi) emphasized, adding that increasing investment in education and in the teaching staff not only demonstrates the Party's practical concern for education but is also a specific solution to contribute to achieving the goals set for the industry.
“This adequate investment will play an important role in modernizing the school. With investment, there will be modern equipment to improve the quality of training, link training with research and link innovation activities of schools with businesses better and faster,” said Professor Nguyen Dinh Duc.
Open the mechanism of socialized education
At the 2024-2025 school year summary conference, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh affirmed that public investment cannot meet all current educational development needs. Therefore, attracting social resources is extremely important. Decree 71 also affirms the Party's guiding viewpoint of "creating a breakthrough in resources, ensuring that the State plays a leading role, taking public investment as the leader, attracting social resources for the comprehensive modernization of the national education system."
The breakthrough in attracting social resources is clearly demonstrated in very new mechanisms on human resources and investment in education.
Regarding human resources, the Resolution opens up new mechanisms such as building appropriate policies to mobilize talented people outside the teaching force to participate in teaching and training in educational institutions, participating in vocational skills guidance or presiding over research activities; building programs to attract excellent lecturers from abroad with outstanding incentives.
With this direction, the Resolution has removed the current human resource bottleneck in general education in implementing comprehensive education, especially in mobilizing artists to participate in teaching culture and arts to students to preserve, promote and foster national cultural identity; removed the bottleneck in vocational education in mobilizing artisans, skilled workers, and businesses to participate in training; removed the bottleneck in recruiting high-quality human resources in higher education, especially in scientific research.
Regarding investment mobilization for education, the Resolution requires the development of a legal framework to form a funding fund for educational institutions to mobilize community capital. This is a breakthrough step to mobilize social resources for education.
The resolution also requires the development of strong enough mechanisms and policies to encourage organizations and enterprises to invest in education development while allowing the implementation of a series of preferential policies for private education, from priority credit capital to land incentives. Specifically, prioritizing the use of clean land funds, allowing flexible conversion of land use purposes to education; not collecting land use fees; reducing land rent and land tax for domestic educational institutions; not applying corporate income tax to private educational institutions operating not for profit; applying the form of leasing state-owned facilities to private educational institutions.
From the experience of 30 years of establishment and development of private educational institutions, Ms. Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy, Principal of Nguyen Sieu School (Hanoi) said that the biggest difficulty of private schools today is not human resources or management capacity but the problem of facilities, especially land. Therefore, when contributing ideas to the development of Resolution 71, Nguyen Sieu School proposed two solutions: there should be a policy of land tax exemption and reduction and allowing private schools to rent and use surplus public facilities to invest and upgrade into schools that meet international standards.
“And Resolution 71 has opened up the legal corridor to realize these things. If implemented vigorously, this will be a breakthrough to help non-public education develop to its full potential,” Ms. Thuy said.
Expressing her excitement and confidence in Resolution 71, Ms. Thuy said that this is the first time a resolution of the Politburo has dedicated specific regulations and policies to the private education sector, affirming that “non-public education is an important component of the national education system”. “This is a historic change,” emphasized Principal of Nguyen Sieu School.
According to Ms. Thuy, another important breakthrough of the Resolution is the opening of a corridor to develop new training models, with suitable infrastructure and operating conditions. Thanks to that, non-public schools will have more opportunities to invest, innovate, and implement many advanced educational models, meeting the diverse learning needs of society.
Empowering autonomy, removing the "golden hoop"
The principal of a high school in Hanoi frankly said that along with increasing investment levels, there needs to be openness in the autonomy mechanism for educational institutions to "remove the iron ring" for schools.
“Implementing a two-level government and eliminating the education department level is a step forward, but it is still necessary to give schools more autonomy in terms of finance, personnel, and professional activities,” the principal shared.
Sharing this view, Ms. Chu Thi Xuan Huong, Principal of Hoang Mai Secondary School (Hoang Mai Ward, Hanoi) said that autonomy associated with a monitoring mechanism and self-responsibility from recruitment to financial use is an important "key" for each school to maximize its internal strength and improve the quality of education.
To address this issue, Resolution 71 affirms to promote decentralization and delegation of authority associated with resource allocation; enhance autonomy and self-responsibility of educational institutions associated with inspection and supervision; reduce the number of management agencies with educational institutions, ensuring the principle of linking professional management responsibilities with human resource and financial management.
Regarding higher education, the Resolution affirms the priority for developing higher education and ensuring full and comprehensive autonomy for higher education institutions, regardless of the level of financial autonomy. Budget allocation for higher education and vocational education institutions is based on mission, quality and efficiency; placing orders with key areas according to output results. There is a special and outstanding mechanism to develop 3 to 5 elite universities following the model of world-class research universities...
Having participated in the direction and management of a university, Professor Nguyen Dinh Duc (University of Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi) said that he was very pleased and appreciated these very wise, drastic, correct and expected directions of higher education institutions. According to Professor Nguyen Dinh Duc, in recent years, university autonomy has been like a breath of fresh air that has "changed the face" of many universities, but there are still bottlenecks. The viewpoint of "ensuring full and comprehensive autonomy for higher education institutions" will remove these bottlenecks.
The construction of a world-class university model and investment in scientific research in Resolution 71 resonates with Resolution 57 on science and technology to become the core and locomotive of innovation, leading the innovation ecosystem of Vietnam.
“Resolution 71-NQ/TW fundamentally changes the mindset of financial investment in higher education to a level and level that is outstanding,” said Professor Nguyen Dinh Duc, affirming that Resolution 71 is truly “contract 10” in Vietnamese higher education, which will bring strong and breakthrough developments to higher education in the coming time./.
Source: https://baolangson.vn/nghi-quyet-71-giac-mo-co-that-cua-nganh-giao-duc-5058127.html
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