Internationalising Viet Nam’s VET system
As part of VET Toolbox, the British Council has helped to connect Viet Nam’s VET sector to international quality standards and supported its ongoing reform, with a focus on enhancing quality assurance and benchmarking qualifications.
Improving the relevance and quality of VET
The Vietnamese government has a long-term strategy to raise the quality of its VET system by bringing it in line with international standards. This includes a goal for ten Vietnamese colleges to meet these standards by 2030. To support this, the British Council delivered an initiative in 2018 to help strengthen a crucial part of the quality improvement and quality assurance process: evaluation.
Evaluations in four colleges used consultations, observations and employer visits to look at existing quality assurance mechanisms, areas of good practice and areas for development, including preparing for formal inspections, self-assessment, peer reviews and observations. The colleges were also equipped with a new self-assessment tool to guide them through the self-assessment process.
As a result, participating colleges have implemented real change. Da Lat Vocational College, for example, has developed a new quality assurance system, an action plan for quality improvement and new systems and processes for reflecting on quality improvement improving the quality of teaching. They’ve also implemented approaches to attract new students, improve the orientation process and bring industry perspectives to the learning environment. This has led to higher staff retention, an improved enrolment rate and a lower dropout rate.
Speaking on the success of the intervention, Dr Do Nang Khanh, Deputy Director General of Department of Vocational Education and Training, said: ‘the inspection helped the colleges benchmark their quality to UK standards and improve their self-assessment process in order to raise their quality standards. Recommendations from the UK experts steer the colleges to develop strategies to overcome identified limitations and improve the quality of training, employer engagement and employability opportunities for students after graduation.’
Benchmarking qualifications
In 2021, the British Council further supported the internationalisation of Viet Nam’s VET system, by providing a quality framework for colleges to benchmark qualifications against international standards, supporting the process of raising the quality of qualifications and gaining international recognition.
After assessing five qualifications in five VET colleges, a toolkit was developed to support the benchmarking of qualifications against international quality standards and develop a set of quality assurance principles.
This represents a significant step in helping Viet Nam’s VET sector align its qualifications and quality assurance system with education systems internationally.
Enhancing private sector engagement
As part of a VET Toolbox mentoring partnership supported by the British Council, Hertford Regional College built the capacity of staff in Vietnamese VET colleges in the areas of private sector engagement and quality assurance, with the aim of increasing the relevance of their training offer to employers’ needs.
Read the full version of the case study in the Downloads section below.
Find out more about Toolbox projects.