HCM City (VNS/VNA) - Hanoi and HCMCity are both rolling experiments in granting more autonomy to public schoolsin hopes of improving educational quality and reducing the schools’ reliance onthe State budget.

The southern city’s Department of Education and Training for the first timeallowed two high schools to recruit their own teachers this school year.

Nationally well-known Le Hong Phong and Tran Dai Nghia high schools for thegifted no longer needed to await the education department’s approvals forteacher contracts or receive transferred teachers appointed to the schools.

HCM City was preparing to extend recruitment autonomy to more high schools inthe 2019-2020 school year, the municipal education department’s human resourcedivision head Nguyen Huynh Long told Nguoi Lao Dong (Labourer)newspaper.

All high schools for the gifted in the city and Nguyen Du, Le Quy Don andNguyen Hien schools would be part of the pilot programme, Long said.

As well as personnel autonomy, HCM City authorities appear to be ready to easetheir grip on how high schools collect and spend their money.

Education and training department director Le Hong Son said his department wasworking on a proposal to the city People’s Council to allow high schools tobecome financially autonomous, with those that meet certain conditions allowedto set their own tuition fees for non-profit purposes.

Schools, however, must strictly follow regulations to assess and publiclyrelease reports on their spending and assets if granted autonomy, Son said.

“The proposal actually comes from the fact that many schools are now lessdependent on the State budget,” he said.

“Our ultimate goal is to grant a complete autonomy to schools while theauthorities will only oversee the quality of education output.”  

HCM City so far has five public schools already financially independent of theState budget while more than 1,220 others are partly funded.

The capital Hanoi, meanwhile, is also piloting school autonomy but in adifferent way.

The city’s focus is not on high schools like HCM City but rather at thosecertified as “high quality educational facilities”.

According to Nguyen Viet Can, head of the Division of Planning-Finance under Hanoi’seducation department, the city has carried out a programme to grant financialautonomy to 12 high quality public schools. They included all levels of theeducation system from kindergartens to primary, secondary and high schools.

Those schools were set to have their infrastructure and operation costs by theGovernment for three years after they were acknowledged as high quality, Cansaid.

When the three years passed, the schools would be on their own. Their incomewould mainly come from tuition fees, which would be capped by the authorities.

The schools, however, were yet to receive autonomy in teacher recruitment.

“The Department of Home Affairs has yet to issue guidelines on the issue,” Cansaid.

HCM City and Hanoi are the first cities in Vietnam seriously attempting toreform public education by handing more freedom to schools.

These moves finally came following repeated calls over the pastdecades for the Government to reform education, including granting more autonomyto public schools over curricula, personnel and financial spending, but littlewas done.

Many schools, especially those in poorer localities, still wanted a stablefinancial guarantee from the State budget while the Ministry of Education wasreluctant to give up its role in managing educational quality.

HCM City’s Nguyen Du High School headmaster Huynh Thanh Phu acknowledged theproblem, saying that a full autonomy poses risk to a school though it isbeneficial in many ways.

“If a school is funded by the State budget, it can rest assured it will havemoney to pay salary to teachers regardless of what happens. However, there willbe other problems like the budget is not enough to run extra activities orimprove the educational quality,” he said.

“A fully autonomous school will know what is really necessary to spend for thestudents. It, however, will totally depend on the headmaster to decide. If heor she fails, the school won’t be able to enroll students and there will be noincome for the teachers.”- VNS/VNA