VietNamNet Bridge - The last 10 years witnessed big upheavals in the pre-school education. The policy on pre-school education socialization has kept a lot of children away from kindergartens.

At a working session with Minister of Education and Training Pham Vu Luan, Hanoi’s Mayor Nguyen The Thao mentioned the Resolution No. 05 as a typical example showing the contradictions between the policies and the implementation in reality, which have caused headaches to local authorities.

According to Thao, in recent years, pre-school education has been going against the expectations.

The Resolution 05, which aims to socialize pre-school education, i.e. calling for the investments from all possible sources in the society, set up the goals that 80 percent of children can go to nursery schools by 2010, and 70 percent can go to kindergartens.

Meanwhile, 85 percent of children at pre-school age now go to state owned schools, which means that Hanoi cannot fulfill the tasks set up in the resolution.

Hanoi determined to look for another way to follow

Since 2007, nursery schools in Hanoi have been living tensely every enrolment season. The high tide broke out in 2011, when a series of local newspapers reported that parents have to queue up through the nights in front of nursery schools to buy the forms of applications for study for their children.

The hot lines of press agencies were then busy all the times because of the incoming calls from the parents, who complained that they had nowhere to send their children to. The state owned schools were overloaded, while private schools were too costly and household run classes could not provide high quality services.

When the 2011 enrolment season finished, the Propaganda Committee of the Hanoi City Communist Party’s Central Committee had to open a special session on preschool education at a periodic press conference, where Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, the then head of the pre-school education division, heavily criticized the Resolution No. 05.

Huong has retired, but she still remembers the days when Hanoi got determined to go the other way when realizing the serious demand of Hanoians to bring their children to state owned schools.

Hanoians are not rich enough to pay for high quality services provided by private schools. Therefore, they have been eager to go to state owned schools.

Before Hanoi got expanded, it had 150 semi-state owned nursery schools in very poor material facilities and the lack of teachers.

The Resolution 05 says that local authorities have to socialize pre-school education. Meanwhile, the 2005 Education Law does not allow semi-state owned schools existing.

As such, the 150 semi-state owned schools had to shift into private or people-founded schools. And if so, the Hanoi’s pre-school education would suffer. Though the number of children going to school may increase, but they would not be able to have high education quality, because Hanoians would not have money to pay to bring their children to good education establishments.

In such circumstances, Hanoi still had to implement the policy on preschool education socialization. However, it decided to “dodge the laws” by shifting the semi-state owned schools into state owned schools with finance autonomy.

“At that time, the issue was mentioned every time when we had the chance to work with the then Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Thien Nhan,” Huong said.

The State has finally taken back the responsibility of arranging nursery schools for children instead of assigning the task to people. However, experts say the lack of state owned schools one time has caused the bad consequences which cannot be settled easily.

Hien Thu