The ministry estimates that 59.6 percent of primary school teachers have bachelor’s degrees in a pedagogical major or more, while 40.36 percent (159,934 teachers) will need re-training to improve their qualifications.

When Vietnam integrates more deeply into the world, it will be a blunder to maintain the system of junior pedagogical. In developed countries,  teachers must have a university degree to work in the national educational system.

Nguyen Tung Lam, chair of the Hanoi Education Psychology Association, also thinks that improving primary teachers’ qualifications is a must. 

Meanwhile, Ho Canh Hanh, rector of the Ba Ria-Vung Tau Pedagogical Junior College, sees the low feasibility of the plan, though he admitted that raising standards for teachers is inevitable.

He warned that if primary school teachers finishing junior colleges are not recruited in the next five years, this would create difficulties for localities and pedagogical schools. The demand for primary school teachers is very high for day-boarding classes and the new integrated teaching methods.

Moreover, primary schools need teachers for many subjects, from music to arts, from physical education to foreign language and informatics. 

Hang believes the demand for primary school teachers would not be met if pedagogical junior colleges cannot get involved in the training process.

He said that primary school teachers finishing intermediate schools and junior colleges can satisfy the requirements.

“In fact, the education quality of these teachers is not really lower than the teachers who have higher education levels,” he said.

However, he admitted that teachers need to upgrade their qualifications to satisfy the new requirements of the general education renovation program. It would be better to allow local pedagogical junior colleges to join forces with education universities to implement the retraining.

Meanwhile, some analysts doubt the retraining will help. On an education forum, a teacher admitted that she attended a lot of refresher training courses, but her knowledge has not improved.

“At the training courses, trainers ignore trainees’ mistakes, and trainees go to class just to obtain degrees. They are useless,” she commented.

Lam also said that degree must not be the only thing for schools to assess the quality of teachers, because it is easy to obtain degrees now. Teachers need to be trained, selected and well remunerated.

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