School of Education

Capacity building through professional development and collaborative research to enable educational reform implementation in Vietnam

In 2012 the Vietnam government introduced a programe of ‘radical and comprehensive’ educational reform, affecting all primary and secondary schools. With little or no extra resources, and a traditional centralised system, the ‘renovations’ depend on changes to the curriculum and pedagogy, assessment, teacher and leader professional training and development, and some decentralization of functions to schools.  Hence, the premium is on capacity building in schools (and other parts of the system)  - new skills and knowledge need to be acquired by principals and teachers.

The reform agenda is driven by the Vietnam government’s desire to continue the system’s excellent PISA performance registered in 2012, but moving forward, to achieve greater equity in schooling outcomes across all ethnic and socio-economic groups, and in particular, to introduce a curriculum that develops active knowledge and skills to equip and prepare the future Vietnam labour force for the 21^st century economy.

Two of the most crucial issues are how to introduce student-centred teaching methods while maintaining large class sizes; and how to promulgate more school-based autonomy with principals as pro-active managers and leaders when their traditional role has been to line-manage.

This Phase 1 study looked at the challenges and opportunities of these reforms, as perceived by school leaders and teachers. Its aim was to gather a better understanding of how the renovations were being seen from the school level, in order to subsequently design interventions to build school capacity to successfully implement the changes.