Vietnam is in serious shortage of more than 20,000 preschool teachers, negatively affecting the quality of the national preschool education, said the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET). Improper incentives for teachers, including low salary payment, are the main reason which has made thousands of teachers leave schools for other well-paid jobs, the Tuoi Tre newspaper reported Feb 17, citing the MoET. In fact, teachers in private kindergartens receive an average salary of VND2 million per month, while their colleagues in state-owned ones often need to work about four years to achieve this level of salary, said Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, chief of the Hanoi Department of Education and Training's preschool education division. The country plans to invest VND300 billion in improving the quality of preschool education in 2011, the ministry said. The MoET is also working with the Ministry of Planning and Investment and the Ministry of Finance to build a plan to support underprivileged preschool students in the 2011-2015 period with a $50 million preferential loan from the World Bank. Despite the country’s efforts to improve the quality of preschool education, lots of children under five years old find hard to get a seat at state-owned pre-schools. Worse still, series of cases about child maltreatment at private babysitting houses had been reported in recent months, raising controversies on education forums. The Southeast Asia country now has more than three million children aged 0-6 being taken care at 12,000 preschools, of which 50% are private ones. It has targeted to bring education chance to 97% of five-year-old children in the next ten years. (Tuoi Tre - Youth Feb 17 p8)
