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Better teaching staff key to improved education |
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Wednesday, 23 March 2011 |
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HCM CITY — Viet Nam needs to improve the quality of management and teaching staff at schools and colleges as well as education departments nationwide, experts said at a workshop held here last Sunday.
Principals, vice principals and other managerial cadre at educational institutions as well as officials of the departments of Education and Training at all levels would have to develop the skills and capacity to meet current and future challenges, they said.Qualified management staff played a very important role in ensuring that education in Viet Nam makes the required progress, said Tran Mai Uoc of the HCM City Banking University.As of now, they were not capable of meeting the demand for developing education in the country, Uoc added.A Politburo report in 2009 said that increased State investment in the sector had not shown commensurate improvement in the quality of education in the country. It had attributed this to management weaknesses, especially the lack of qualified managerial staff.For its part, the Government had informed the National Assembly that there were shortcomings in the recruitment of managerial staff.One shortcoming was that they are often selected on the basis of the length of service in an institution and not the experience, skills and qualifications needed for a particular job, it said.It said the lack of specialised training in educational management also resulted in a lack of professionalism among managerial cadre in the education sector.Uoc said the staff should have the opportunity to attend updated training programmes to improve their skills.It is also important to have preferential policies to attract and retain qualified managing staff, he added.Prof. Hoang Tam Son, former principal of the city's Institute of Education Managers, told the workshop that the institute would make a plan to develop qualified managing staff and submit it to the Ministry of Education and Training.Another institute official, Phan Minh Phung, said educational reforms in the country could only be successful if both the managerial and the teaching staff were better qualified and more professional.This would ensure the effectiveness of training programmes, better facilities in schools and improved curricula, Phung said.He said the first thing that needs to be done to improve staff quality was to amend the laws that regulate the education sector. The laws should make clear the criteria for recruiting teachers and transferring them, he saidNext, the ministry should strengthen supervision of training programmes to ensure they match real demand, Phung said.
Currently, the Ministry of Education and Training runs two institutes in HCM City and Ha Noi that provide courses in education management. But these are not accessed by officials from most localities, many of whom say they are hindered by bureaucratic hurdles and a dearth of financial support.
(Source: VNS)
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