VietNamNet Bridge - The competition among students for seats at star secondary schools is expected to be ‘scorching hot’ this year as schools plan to reduce enrollment quotas in an effort to improve education quality.

Tran Thuy An, headmaster of Tran Van On Secondary School in district 1, HCMC, said the district education sub-department had not allocated enrollment quotas, but it was foreseeable that the number of students this year will be lower than in 2015.

As the number of students is very high, the school’s management board has to arrange more classes to ensure education quality. 

However, as the number of classrooms is limited, the school will not be able to receive too many students.

In principle, schools prioritize to receive the students who live in the districts where the schools are located. 

The competition among students for seats at star secondary schools is expected to be ‘scorching hot’ this year as schools plan to reduce enrollment quotas in an effort to improve education quality.

However, they can also receive limited numbers of excellent students from other districts. This means that students need to have good school records to be able to enroll in star schools in other districts.

In the 2015-2016 academic year, Tran Van On received 385 sixth graders. The school also received students who did not live in district 1, but they had to satisfy specific requirements.

The Nguyen Van To Secondary School last year only received 160 students for the sixth grade. These included some students from Ben Thanh Ward, but they had to get a 20 score from the year-end math and literature exam in the fifth grade.

According to Huynh Thi Phong Lan, deputy headmaster of Nguyen Van To Secondary School, the school would have six sixth-grade classes. 

However, the exact number of students will be determined by the district people’s committee. The school has been trying to reduce the number of students in every class from 35 students to 30-32.

The headmaster of a secondary school in one district confirmed that star schools tend to cut the number of students in each class to meet the criteria for standard schools and to improve education quality. 

Therefore, the race for seats at the schools this year would be much stiffer than the years before.

However, the problem is that even when setting such high requirement, schools still find it difficult to choose the best ones, because there are too many students who received title of ‘excellent student’ when they were in fifth grade.

In the 2015-2016 academic year, for example, the Nguyen Van To Secondary School enrolled 175 sixth graders, but 800 excellent students had applied to attend the school.


NLD