Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam and the Ministry of Education and Training discussed pedagogical reform.

Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam said that to solve the current problems in the quality of the teaching staff, all parties need to face the truth and work together to solve the problem.

In the meeting following the phenomenon of “declining teacher input” in the 2017 entrance exam held this morning, August 17, at the Government Office, opinions all recognized the underlying cause of the unattractiveness of the teacher training profession stemming from the fact that the output of the profession is not guaranteed, the treatment of teachers is not satisfactory, and the teacher training work still has many shortcomings.

The meeting took place on the morning of August 17. Photo: Dinh Nam

At the beginning, Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam said he "wanted to hear about what had been agreed upon", because in fact the issue of improving the quality of the teaching staff and strengthening the teacher training system had been discussed a lot.

Specifically, after more than a year of discussion, the Government issued Decision No. 732 approving the Project "Training and fostering teachers and managers of educational institutions to meet the requirements of fundamental and comprehensive innovation of general education in the 2016-2020 period, with a vision to 2025" with detailed figures and directions.

The Deputy Prime Minister noted that the education sector should focus on training, retraining, and updating knowledge for the current teaching staff in the coming time. In addition, vocational training should be provided; for example, targeting industries that are in need of human resources such as tourism or information technology to "solve" the problem of teachers who studied pedagogy but are having difficulty finding jobs.

"When signing Decision 732, the Government's spirit was to only recruit new people to train very few in key schools; the rest would be focused on training the team" - Mr. Dam reminded.

Presenting at the meeting, Minister Phung Xuan Nha said: The Ministry of Education and Training has identified developing the teaching staff as the focus of the industry and has specific solutions.

According to Mr. Nha, the reasons why the pedagogical industry is less attractive are that the difficult "output" has strongly impacted the "input"; although the remuneration regime has been given attention, it is not suitable for the characteristics of the profession... Speaking specifically about pedagogical training, there is a phenomenon of schools accepting pedagogical codes but the training process is not guaranteed, lacking output testing.

Mr. Nha also added that on the afternoon of August 16, the Ministry and schools had a meeting together to frankly and comprehensively look at the problem.

Strong solutions have been proposed such as: drastically cutting quotas, planning weak schools into satellite schools, and even closing weak training sectors.

Instead of recruiting and training, schools will have to step up the task of retraining the current staff, which means they will still have funds to "live" but not just "live by recruiting".

According to Vietnamnet