Vietnam Biggest City to Invest $138.46M in Preschool Education

Vietnam’s southern metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City will spend over VND2.7 trillion ($138.46 million) on a program to improve the quality of preschool education in upcoming years, said the Department of Education and Training. The sum will be mainly used to build classrooms, purchase equipment and train teachers, the Dan Tri online newspaper reported Jan 14, citing the department. Currently, local state-run preschools are overloaded, meeting only 70% of the demand, the department admitted. Worse still, 12 wards and communes and many industrial parks in the city have not had a state-owned preschool. Teacher shortage is another problem, concerning the local authorities. The city has 696 preschools in the 2010-2011 academic year, of which 407 are state-owned and 289 are private-run. The number of children of preschool ages are 262,354, including 43,452 kindergarten-age kids and 218,902 nursery-age ones. (www.dantri.com.vn Jan 14)