It is time to turn education’s position as a “top national policy” into national competitiveness: investing based on outcomes, digitising data across the entire system, accurately forecasting human resource needs, identifying, nurturing and making effective use of talent, and linking schools with the real economy.
Affirming education as a top national policy is not merely about giving priority to a sector, but also represents a choice about the nation’s future. Politburo Resolution No. 71-NQ/TW on breakthroughs in education and training development has elevated the issue to a new level: Education must directly contribute to developing high-quality human resources and scientific and technological talent, meeting the requirements for rapid and sustainable development and national defence.
From “top national policy” to national competitiveness
Resolution No. 71-NQ/TW sets the goal of expanding access to education and quantifying a number of learning outcomes: By 2030, Viet Nam aims for at least 85% of people of the relevant age to complete upper secondary education or equivalent; the proportion of people of the relevant age pursuing post-upper-secondary education to reach 50%; the proportion of workers with college or university qualifications or higher to reach 24%; at least 35% of learners to study basic sciences, engineering and technology; and to have at least 6,000 doctoral students and 20,000 learners enrolled in talent programmes. The Resolution also sets the goal of having at least eight higher education institutions among the top 200 universities in Asia and at least one institution among the world’s top 100 universities in certain fields by 2030.
According to the Resolution, the ultimate goal is even greater than the figures mentioned above, with a vision to 2045 of building a modern, equitable and high-quality national education system ranked among the world’s top 20 countries; providing everyone with lifelong learning opportunities; and making high-quality human resources and scientific and technological talent a core driver and competitive advantage for Viet Nam to become a developed, high-income country. This is a point that needs to be fully understood throughout the entire political system: Education is not a “social expenditure” sector standing alongside economic development; education is the infrastructure underpinning productive capacity, innovation capacity, governance capacity and national strength.
From “learning to know” to “learning to create and serve”
If education is regarded as national development infrastructure, reforms must focus on people’s learning outcomes. This is also the time to address a paradox: Viet Nam performs well in terms of basic learning levels, but the proportion of students achieving advanced levels remains limited. This calls for a two-tier but unified strategy: ensuring a minimum foundation for everyone while simultaneously creating a sufficiently long “runway” for those with exceptional abilities.
Politburo Resolution No. 71-NQ/TW is moving in the right direction by calling for the reform of specialised and gifted schools to focus on nurturing national talent; expanding specialised STEM/STEAM classes; strengthening English; while developing higher education institutions into centres for research, innovation and entrepreneurship. However, for “talent training” to become an effective policy, it is necessary to change the way talent is viewed and focus on substance, bringing real value through innovations and solutions that contribute to and serve the country’s development. Therefore, it is necessary to build a continuous system for identifying-selecting-nurturing-challenging-making effective use of-protecting talent from general education through higher education, research and the labour market. Each talent must have an individual development pathway, rather than being forced to follow the same mould; at the same time, there needs to be a strong shift from input management to outcome-based governance.
Resolution No. 71-NQ/TW calls for greater autonomy and accountability for educational institutions; allocating budgets for higher education and vocational education based on mission, quality and efficiency, with priority given to commissioning and assigning tasks according to output results. This must become a substantive principle governing the effectiveness of budget investment, training programmes and learning outcomes. This gives rise to an urgent requirement: Schools must not merely prepare learners for a profession; they must prepare learners with the capacity to relearn, start again and innovate again many times throughout their lives.
One notable issue is that Resolution No. 71-NQ/TW has laid an important foundation by calling for the development of a data strategy to support digital transformation, a national education platform applying controlled AI, and the connection of education data with data on human resources, the labour market, employment and science and technology. This will form a unified national education data system capable of tracking learning processes, skills, aptitudes, training needs and transitions into employment; helping learners access better information about careers, helping schools adjust their curricula, and helping the State allocate resources to the right places and the right groups. In addition, it is necessary to build a national human resource demand forecasting system connecting higher education and vocational education with strategic economic sectors. This is when education will truly become part of the national development model, rather than operating relatively separately from the economic strategy.
Investing in people, creating a sustainable national foundation
As Viet Nam enters the AI era, the decisive advantage is shifting towards people who are capable of creating new knowledge and turning knowledge into value. To move faster, Viet Nam needs a transformation from an “education system” to a “human development ecosystem”. Within this ecosystem, the State plays the role of an enabler, ensuring equity and providing foundational resources; schools are responsible for quality; teachers are the force that directly determines learning; the family is the first educational environment; businesses are where capabilities are tested and are also training partners; society is a vast learning space; while learners must become the true subjects of the process of developing themselves.
Accordingly, education reform cannot focus solely on curricula and textbooks, but must also reform school leadership capacity, higher education governance and the capacity to implement education policies. Resolution No. 71-NQ/TW has set out specific steps: increasing occupational preferential allowances for teachers; providing financial and credit support so that no pupil or student has to drop out due to financial difficulties; establishing a national scholarship fund; attracting outstanding lecturers from abroad; allowing higher education institutions to make their own decisions on recruiting and hiring lecturers and appointing outstanding people from abroad; while also establishing strong mechanisms for businesses to invest, engage in public-private partnerships and establish links with educational institutions... These policies need to be implemented according to a unified principle: “One human development goal-one education data system-one national skills standard-one talent identification mechanism-one interconnected training network-one results-based financial mechanism and one transparent evaluation system.” Only then will “top national policy” be transformed from a slogan into the country’s operational capacity.
Viet Nam has travelled a long way in universalising education, raising people’s intellectual standards and creating a workforce with a strong foundation. The next stage will be much more challenging because it requires creating people with global competitiveness, but with Vietnamese character and identity; highly skilled in their professions and rich in a sense of responsibility. This is also how education can directly contribute to the goal of enabling Viet Nam to develop rapidly and sustainably and soon become a developed, high-income country.
