Leverage for a prosperous Vietnam - final article: Struggling to find land for private schools

Focus on building houses, "forget" to build schools

The principal of a famous private junior high school in Hanoi shared his concerns because for the past 3 years he has been struggling to find land to open a school. He thought that with his deep expertise in education, experience in school management, and the desire to expand educational facilities in the context of Hanoi still having too many students and not enough schools, the unit would have advantages. “But for the past 3 years, we have been tirelessly looking for land. Sometimes we find land that is large enough and has a reasonable price, but it is stuck in planning and cannot be built. In places where there is land, the market price has skyrocketed, and investors cannot afford to buy it. Solving the problem of limited land area and regulations that prohibit high-rise construction, ensuring usable area/student is really difficult,” said the principal.

Hanoi has abandoned plots of land planned for school construction, used by locals to grow vegetables. Photo: Trong Tai.

In reality, there are places where high-rise apartments are built densely but there is a lack of schools because investors do not build schools. If there is good planning and reasonable policies so that educators can "join hands" with real estate companies to build schools, many problems will be solved.

According to this principal, in a fast-growing locality like Hanoi, the construction of a private school is both to reduce pressure on public schools and to ensure an abundant source of students, so it is very desirable to build a school. A school that operates systematically will not have to worry about a lack of students. In fact, in recent years, there have been educators with strong enough potential to successfully build new schools and open additional educational facilities, attracting the attention of many parents and students.

Ms. Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy, Principal of Nguyen Sieu Secondary and High School, Cau Giay District (Hanoi) said that the biggest difficulty of private schools today is land fund, lack of project land for education.

The number of students in many public schools exceeds regulations.

In fact, educators who want to invest in developing and building schools face difficulties in finding land for projects to be transferred directly. They have to go through brokers or other joint stock companies to request project transfer, leading to high project land prices, beyond the financial capacity of educators. “In short, teachers want to work but do not have money. Those who have financial capacity have difficulty in professional management and operation. Education and healthcare are two specific sectors that require investors to have expertise to be able to operate,” Ms. Thuy said.

The leader of the Department of Education and Training of a district in Hanoi said that in the past, there was a time when public preschool classes had more than 40 children per class. Recently, private schools have developed and the pressure on class size has decreased significantly. However, building and managing private schools is difficult in many ways. A preschool that trains according to a foreign program without facilities must rent a space with enough classrooms and functional rooms to ensure operations, which costs up to 300 million VND per month. Without policies to attract and support, schools will face difficulties.

“If there is determination and full implementation of issued policies, the obstacles and difficulties for private schools to develop will be removed. For example, Hanoi city has issued documents on allocating clean land or building schools for investors to rent to open schools... but for decades it has not been implemented.”

Dr. Hoang Huu Niem

Where to get rid of the problem?

In 2024, the Hanoi People's Committee issued a plan to mobilize social resources to invest in education, including the target of promoting private educational institutions to reach 21% and 14-16% of students studying in this group by 2025. By each level of education, strive to reach 30% for preschool education by 2025; 8% for primary school, 7% for secondary school. The highest level is high school, with the target of 40% of students studying in private schools.

According to the Hanoi Department of Education and Training, in the 2023-2024 school year, there will be nearly 2,900 schools at all levels, of which nearly 2,300 are public schools (accounting for nearly 79%), and about 600 are private schools (accounting for more than 20%) with more than 330,000 students. Ms. Pham Thi Le Hang, Head of the Department of Education and Training of Ha Dong District, said: "Developing private schools at all levels has greatly reduced the burden on public schools."

Mr. Tran The Cuong, Director of the Hanoi Department of Education and Training, once compared the education and training sector to a bird, with one wing being private schools and the other being public schools. There needs to be a harmonious and synchronous development of both public and private schools. Hanoi is the locality with the largest number of students in the country, with about 2.3 million students, an average increase of 40,000 - 50,000 students per year, posing the problem of having to build new and expand 30-40 new schools to meet the demand. In recent years, the districts of the capital have paid great attention to and invested in building schools, but in reality, there are still districts lacking schools and classrooms. The solution that Hanoi leaders as well as the Hanoi Department of Education and Training have proposed is to resolutely revoke slow-moving projects, propose that agencies, enterprises, colleges and universities move out of the inner city to reclaim that land to build schools.

Dr. Hoang Huu Niem, Chairman of the Hanoi Educational Psychology Association, said that the Resolutions of the Party Central Committee, laws, decrees and circulars have created quite adequate mechanisms and policies for the development of private schools. However, private schools still face many difficulties. "Where there is land but it is not planned for education, it cannot be done. The school network planning takes decades to be re-approved or adjusted," said Dr. Niem.

Many educational managers believe that student overload in public schools is a hot issue in education. Management agencies need to create mechanisms, policies, and conditions to promote the development of the private sector, ensuring facilities for students to have a variety of learning environments to choose from.

Preferential policies are needed so that educators can implement educational projects such as: Direct land allocation, creating conditions and mechanisms to support preferential loans for school construction as well as specific and feasible incentives.

Ha Linh

Source: https://tienphong.vn/don-bay-cho-mot-viet-nam-thinh-vuong-bai-cuoi-loay-hoay-tim-dat-cho-truong-tu-post1732338.tpo