VietNamNet Bridge – The Hanoi and HCM City education departments have sent an ultimatum to substandard people-founded high schools, saying that they have to upgrade their education quality, or get eliminated.

The HCM City Education and Training Department has announced that it would take inspection tours to 119 non-state owned schools from February 2013, according to Saigon giai phong.

A lot of schools in the city have been found as having insufficient financial capability to maintain the education activities. The students of many schools still have to sit in rent rooms, though the schools have been operating for more than 10 years.

The Khai Tri Secondary and High School in district 5 and Phuong Nam High School have been forced to stop operation because they cannot meet the requirements as promised when applying for licenses. The Hien Vuong School has filed for dissolution because it is incapable enough to maintain operation

A senior official of the HCM City Education and Training has affirmed that all the schools which don’t have necessary conditions as requested by the education ministry would be forced to shut down, even though the city’s authorities have been calling for the socialization in education, i.e. calling for the investment from different sources for the education development.

Meanwhile, Phap luat Vietnam has reported that the Hanoi Education and Training Department is checking the conditions of non-state high schools in the preparation for the 2013 enrolment season.

The schools which cannot meet the requirements in material facilities and teaching staff have been told that they would not be given enrolment quotas for the new academic year. There is a principle that must be followed by all schools that they must be standardized to ensure the students’ benefits.

Some experts have suggested blaming responsibilities on some individuals who deliberately did not expose the information about the schools’ situations to the public, which then led to the wrong decisions of parents and students when enrolling in the schools.

Meanwhile, people founded schools have been on tenterhooks because they can anticipate the possibility of failing to enroll students for the new academic year which would begin after the summer.

A report by the Hanoi education department showed that Hanoi had 92 operational people founded schools in the 2012-2013 academic year, which accounted for 50 percent of the total schools in the city.

However, the people founded schools gather only 10,000 students, or 17 percent of the total high school students in the city.

The headmaster of the An Duong Vuong High School in Dong Anh district Do Van Man admitted that people founded schools now have to struggle to look for students, complaining that there are not enough students to enroll.

About 4,000 students graduate secondary schools in Dong Anh district in 2011-2012, while a part of them went to state owned high schools, while the remaining 1,088 students went to the 10 people founded schools in the locality, including eight high schools, one vocational school and one continuation education center, which meant that every school only had 100 students.

According to Man, the overly high tuitions set by people founded schools, which are generally 10 times higher than that at state owned schools have kept students far away from people founded schools.

And this is a vicious circle: since schools cannot enroll students, they don’t have money to upgrade the material facilities and the teaching staff. The poor conditions have made it more difficult to look for students.

Compiled by Thu Uyen