Teacher allowance: Fair compensation

Law No. 73/2025/QH15, the Law on Teachers 2025 (effective from January 1, 2026), passed by the National Assembly, is a significant milestone affirming the major policy of the Party and State in improving the quality of education . The law accurately addresses the status of teachers and policies on teacher remuneration. However, to move from policy to salary scales, allowances, and transparent payment methods, it is necessary to rely on guiding decrees and circulars. If the subordinate legal documents are poorly designed, the policy can easily fall into two extremes: either "empty slogans" due to lack of resources, or "overspending" leading to increased tuition fees in autonomous institutions, creating a negative social effect.

At this point, the real challenge is how to increase salaries without shifting the risk to tuition fees and without straining both local and central government budgets, given that the system has nearly 1.6 million teachers. Even small percentage adjustments would result in a significant budget deficit. Therefore, the Decree should adhere to the spirit of the "Framework Law": regulating the policy structure, calculation principles, funding sources, and roadmap; while the Circular should focus on criteria, target groups, and eligibility conditions in a transparent, measurable, and verifiable manner. Most importantly, the philosophy of compensation must shift: teachers' salaries cannot remain primarily "anchored" to academic qualifications, as this distorts the signal of fairness. Salaries based on job position and work value must be the foundation.

Therefore, the Decree should design the policy according to three clear layers: the base layer is salary based on position and job title linked to professional standards; the second layer is allowances based on the nature of the profession and working conditions; the third layer is rewards based on competence/contribution, but the design must prevent subjectivity, emotional bias, and favoritism by using measurable criteria, a transparent evaluation process, and the right to appeal...

From a budgetary standpoint, simply setting a level of support and leaving it to local authorities or training institutions to manage on their own will quickly lead to policy failure: wealthy areas will succeed, while those facing difficulties will find it even harder. Therefore, the 2026-2030 roadmap needs to be designed within the Decree as a fiscal commitment: prioritizing truly urgent groups (preschool education, particularly disadvantaged areas) in the first year, expanding in subsequent years according to medium-term balance capacity; accompanied by a formula for dividing expenditure responsibilities between the central and local governments, various units, and a mechanism for "ordering/assigning tasks" that fully covers labor costs to prevent autonomy from becoming an excuse for increasing tuition fees.

The circular needs to standardize the criteria for receiving allowances based on data: actual teaching time, class type, geographical area, difficulty level, and teacher shortage; and to digitize the payment process to reduce losses. An annual review mechanism is also needed: assessing the impact on the budget, the impact on the teacher labor market, and the impact on tuition fees in autonomous sectors.

Supporting higher salaries for teachers is right, but reasonable support means supporting a design that is both legally sound, budget-friendly, and minimizes the risk of shifting costs to students. If this is achieved, the Decree and Circular will become a real leverage: retaining talented teachers, attracting suitable candidates to the profession, and maintaining public trust that reform is aimed at improving quality, not changing the method of fee collection.

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