Today, in Hanoi, the British Council in collaboration with the Directorate of Vocational Education and Training (DVET) organised the national seminar International Skills Partnerships on Quality Assurance: Review of the collaborative programme between UK and Vietnamese colleges.
Attending the seminar were: the Vice Minister of the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, Associate Professor Le Quan; the UK Ambassador to Viet Nam, HMA Giles Lever; the Deputy Director General of the Directorate of Vocational Education and Training, Dr. Truong Anh Dung, and 150 representatives from Vietnam and the UK, vocational colleges and media agencies.
The national seminar reviewed and disseminated the collaboration programme between UK and those Vietnamese colleges fitting within an MOU framework signed in 2015 between the British Council Vietnam and the Directorate of Vocational Education and Training (DVET) with the intention of developing a quality assurance system in vocational colleges ear-marked for investment to become high-quality colleges in Vietnam.
Over the course of a three-year implementation, the collaboration programme has achieved significant results and produced impressive figures. UK institutions hosted 68 leaders and senior teachers from their Vietnamese counterparts to learn UK approaches to skills and quality assurance development. Experts from six colleges in the UK undertook 22 visits to Vietnam to train 1,379 managers, staff and lecturers; three national seminars were organized to attract the participation of nearly 500 leaders, lecturers and policy makers in the vocational education system in Vietnam; and 243 quality assurance procedures and tools were developed and applied in 183 faculties of Vietnamese colleges.
Moving toward the goal of improving the quality of vocational education and international integration, vocational colleges in Vietnam have learned and effectively applied UK models of quality assurance. Participating colleges have improved their capacity, established a quality assurance culture and trained their teachers and lecturers to UK standards in vocational teaching.
Commenting on the collaboration program, the DVET said: ‘The UK has a well-developed education and technical education system, in which quality assurance and management play a vital role. Therefore the DVET and the British Council Vietnam in recent years have collaborated extensively in vocational education and training. The development of quality assurance systems in colleges is necessary to improve the effectiveness of governance and management, and contribute to improving the quality of education in accordance with the Resolution 29/NQ-TW dated November 4, 2013 of the Party Central Committee on fundamental and comprehensive reform of education and training.'
During the one day seminar, delegates from participating colleges in Vietnam and UK shared the results of the international skills partnerships between the four UK institutions—Brockenhurst, Cymoedd, Loughborough, and West College Scotland—and the Vietnamese counterpart colleges. The programme review report was shared by Dr. Pham Vu Quoc Binh, Director, Quality Assurance Department of DVET.
Offering congratulations on the positive impacts of the collaboration programme, Danny Whitehead, Acting Director of the British Council in Vietnam, said: ‘The British Council is very proud to have been working in partnership with the Directorate of Vocational Education and Training (DVET) on this initiative for three years. Being a priority of the British Council’s Skills for Employability programme, we worked to share UK good practice in several areas to support our Vietnamese partners in their internationalisation of vocational education and training, enhancing employability for young leaners as well as learning and exchange friendly knowledge with countries over the world.’