Hanoi (VNA) – The Politburo’s Resolution 71-NQ/TW on making breakthroughs in education and training development is seen as a significant milestone, reflecting the Party’s strategic vision for the sector, said Nguyen Thi Viet Nga, deputy head of the full-time National Assembly deputies of Hai Phong city and a member of the NA Committee for Culture and Education.
As the nation is entering a new era of development, with a strong aspiration for new heights, this resolution identifies education as a “top national policy”, considering it one of the key drivers of fast and sustainable development, she told VietnamPlus newspaper.
The greatest significance of Resolution 71 is that it underlines the decisive role of education in forming high-quality human resources, providing the foundation for Vietnam to realise its development aspirations and stand alongside the great powers around the world.
Nga noted that while Vietnam’s education sector has obtained notable achievements in recent years, it still faces several bottlenecks. These include the educational quality gap among regions, overly academic curricula and textbooks with limited practical application. Other challenges include inadequate policies for teachers that fail to encourage long-term dedication, and insufficient investment in infrastructure, especially in remote and disadvantaged areas.
Resolution 71 outlines comprehensive solutions to address these bottlenecks, such as exempting tuitions, adopting full-day schooling, and prioritising investment in boarding and semi-boarding schools in border and disadvantaged regions. Others include fundamentally reforming curricula and textbooks to ensure that they are up to date, logical and relevant to reality.
These are strong and timely policies to clear bottlenecks and create momentum for breakthroughs in education, Nga emphasised.
She highlighted three key breakthroughs in the resolution. First, education is positioned within the overall national development strategy and directly linked with industrialisation, modernisation, and international integration. Second, it stipulates that a single set of textbooks must be used nationwide and localities are allowed to add specific content to ensure both consistency and flexibility. Third, it gives priority to unprecedented policies such as tuition-free general education, full-day schooling, and the development of high-quality schools in border and island regions.
These breakthroughs will create a fundamental change, ensuring equal access to education while simultaneously improving training quality to help Vietnamese youth be fully prepared for the new era.
However, Nga also warned that the greatest challenge to the resolution implementation is resources – ensuring adequate funding, facilities, and teaching staff capable of meeting the very high requirements it sets. Social attitude and the adaptability of parents, students, and teachers to new changes also present a significant obstacle.
To carry out the resolution, the legislator proposed three key measures. The first is to devise a rational plan to mobilise and allocate financial resources effectively, avoiding wastefulness and dispersion. The second is to enhance the quality of teachers while reforming salary and benefit policies so they can work with dedication and peace of mind. The third is to strengthen social monitoring and feedback to ensure all policies are implemented transparently, consistently and productively.
Nga shared the view of Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Kim Son, who stressed that education has never received such comprehensive and strong attention as it does today, and that if the sector fails to seize the development opportunity, it will be at fault to the nation and future generations.
Looking ahead, she underlined that the education sector must focus on the quality of the curriculum and textbooks, ensuring logicality, modernity and real-life relevance.
It is also critical to improve the quality of the teaching staff so that teachers truly become the ‘core’ of reform. Equally important is promoting the quality of educational governance, which means transparency, efficiency, overcoming the achievement-driven mentality and, above all, putting students at the centre of education.
When these aspects of quality are ensured, the country will be able to seize the opportunity that the Party, State and the people are providing for and raise Vietnam’s education to a new level, according to the deputy./.
