As many as 845 primary schools with around 315,000 students in 36 provinces and cities have benefited from the School Education Quality Assurance Program (SEQAP) during its two years of operation, Deputy Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Vinh Hien said. Addressing the conference to review implementation of SEQAP, held in Hanoi on April 13, Deputy Minister Hien said that under the project, around 50,000 primary school teachers and 3,100 school managers received further training to increase their teaching and management capacity. However, he pointed out shortcomings in implementation, such as a lack of coordination among central and local State management agencies and slow capital disbursement. He proposed beneficiary localities and the project’s management board improve the situation with SEQAP, one of nine programs using World Bank (WB) loans, and emerge from the group of projects with slow disbursement. The project has been carried out since March, 2010 and will continue until December, 2015 with an investment capital of $186 million, of which $27.9 million came from the Vietnamese government and the rest financed by the WB, the UK Department for International Development and the Belgian Development Agency. It is designed to improve the quality of primary education in the country, raise ethnic minority children’s study results and create equal education opportunity for all children. (vietnamplus.vn Apr 13)
