Minister of Education and Training Phung Xuan Nhà, speaking at a national online conference on October 31, said 2019-2020 was a special year, when MOET had to adjust its plan twice because of Covid-19. The academic year finished two months later than in previous years.

Minister of Education and Training Phung Xuan Nha

After two outbreaks in Vietnam, nearly 1.5 million teachers and managerial officers, and nearly 24 million students, have been safe.

Despite Covid-19, education activities have not been disrupted. New education methods, especially online teaching, have been applied to ensure uninterrupted study for students.

High school finals were successfully organized which recognized the completion of general education for hundreds of thousand of students and allowed universities to enroll students.

The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) started the new general education program and prepared conditions for implementation of the program in accordance with the roadmap set by the National Assembly.

MOET also approved five sets of textbooks for first graders. This was the first time that schools and students had the right to choose textbooks to use as the compilation of textbooks was done by individuals and organizations who hadmet the requirements. In previous years, MOET was the only compiler of textbooks used by all schools nationwide.

General school students gained great achievements at international competitions with 49 gold medals won at Olympiads in 2016-2020 (there were 27 gold medals in 2011-2015).

Vietnam has also made progress in tertiary education with the autonomy policy in university governance, improving the quality of training and research.

In 2019, Vietnam had 12,475 scientific articles published inprestigious international journals, or 2.7 times higher than 2015, ranking 49th in the world, or a 9-grade promotion. Around 90 percent of the articles were contributed by universities.

Vietnam has for the first time seen its four higher education establishments ranked in the world’s top 1,000, and many majors ranked in the top 500.

Regarding online teaching, Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung said that 80 percent of students studied online during the Covid-19 pandemic. The figure was higher than the average 67.15 percent of OECD countries.

According to Hung, the education sector needs to pioneer digital transformation, and target youth first as the driving force to promote the transformation in society.

“The advantage of Vietnam is that it has a lot of powerful digital technology firms which can develop digital platforms for the education sector,” Hung said. 

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