'Educational supercity' will teach and learn bilingually, calculate financial support for students

On August 27, at Binh Duong Exhibition and Convention Center, the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee held a conference to summarize the 2024-2025 school year and deploy tasks for the new 2025-2026 school year. Attending the conference were Permanent Deputy Minister of Education and Training Pham Ngoc Thuong; Deputy Secretary of the City Party Committee, Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council Vo Van Minh.

At the conference, Director of the Department of Education and Training of Ho Chi Minh City Nguyen Van Hieu said that after the merger, Ho Chi Minh City has nearly 2.6 million students with more than 3,500 educational institutions, becoming an "educational super city". In general education alone, there are more than 2 million students (939,002 primary school students; 759,278 secondary school students and 352,051 high school students).

This poses many challenges for the education sector in Ho Chi Minh City, not only because of the large number of students but also because of the large administrative boundaries and diverse types of areas (rural, urban, island communes, special economic zones, etc.). The state of facilities and teacher capacity is uneven in localities, especially in disadvantaged and densely populated areas.

In addition, the surplus - shortage of teachers, a part of managers and teachers do not meet the requirements of foreign language and IT proficiency, leading to the failure to keep up with the requirements of innovation in education and international integration.

Ho Chi Minh City is studying financial support plans for students.

In that situation, immediately after rearranging the administrative boundaries, the Department of Education and Training of Ho Chi Minh City divided the area into 16 professional clusters. Promote the autonomous activities of the professional clusters. Monitor the comprehensive activities of the units in the 16 professional clusters, the department will grasp the situation and record any abnormalities, difficulties, and problems to promptly guide and resolve. In addition, the department will also record effective educational activities to introduce to other units to learn from and share experiences together.

In the 2025-2026 school year, Ho Chi Minh City will put into use 1,434 new classrooms with a total budget of more than 4,500 billion VND from the state budget. In addition, 180 classrooms invested from socialized sources will be put into operation, ensuring 100% of school places for children in the area.

Ms. Lam Hong Lam Thuy - Head of General Education Department, Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training said that they are building to implement a project to make English the second language in general schools.

Specifically, Phase 1 (2025-2026) is the preparation and pilot period; Phase 2 (2027-2030) is the period of wide-scale implementation and evaluation. Then, based on the preliminary results of Phase 2025-2030, the City will develop a Project for the next phase with higher goals, aiming to make English truly a second language, popular in learning, research and life, contributing to building Ho Chi Minh City into an educational, economic and financial center of Asia.

Initially, the pilot program will be implemented in schools implementing high-quality education content, advanced schools, international and regional integration (19 primary schools, 16 secondary schools and 4 high schools). After that, the model will be evaluated, lessons learned, adjusted and replicated.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the conference, a representative of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training said that in the 2025-2026 school year, Ho Chi Minh City has not yet implemented support for boarding meals for primary school students like Hanoi, but is studying a plan to support students financially in a different, similar way.

Speaking at the conference, Permanent Deputy Minister of Education and Training Pham Ngoc Thuong stated that the 2025-2026 school year will face many challenges, as this is the year when many decrees and resolutions related to education and training will be implemented. Therefore, he suggested that the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training take advantage of policies and make efforts to achieve the highest results.