Themed “Learning and Teaching for Peaceful and Sustainable Societies: From early childhood to primary and secondary education”, the two-day forum was organised by UNESCO, the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training (MoET), and the Vietnam National Commission for UNESCO.
The forum will focus on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Global Citizenship Education (GCED), two key programmes necessary to achieve Target 4.7 of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on Education.
Speaking at the opening session, MoET Minister Phung Xuan Nha said after a decade of ESD of the UN from 2005 to 2014, ESD has become a central point of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with 17 SDGs.
Since 2013, Vietnam has carried out fundamental and comprehensive educational reforms, he noted, adding that a milestone of the effort was the approval of the national general education programme in December 2018 which aims to develop the qualification and capacity of learners and equip them with skills necessary for the 21st century.
However, Vietnam is facing several problems in the programme implementation, including how education can reach and serve all people, how to update curricula and standards to meet development demand in the future, and how to turn learning into a life-long process, he said. The minister also proposed that at this forum, participants will together specify necessary actions to realise the SDGs.
