The Prime Minister has just issued Decision No. 2371/QD-TTg dated October 27, 2025 approving the Project "Making English the second language in schools in the period of 2025 - 2035, with a vision to 2045".
According to the project, at the high school level, all schools must teach compulsory English from grade 1. Of which, at least 20% of schools have achieved level 1 in teaching this language, 5% have achieved level 2 and 2% have achieved level 3. In the following years, the number of schools achieving level 3 gradually increased to 15%, levels 2 and 1 were 20% and 50% respectively.
Ms. Lieu Thi Kham - Principal of Trang Phai Primary and Secondary School (Lang Son) said that teaching English from grade 1 is a big policy, creating a legal basis and specific orientation for the school to develop a personnel plan, teaching program and facilities.
"This is also a driving force to improve the quality of the teaching staff when this policy creates positive pressure, encouraging teachers to self-cultivate foreign language skills and standardize qualifications to meet new requirements" - she said.
However, in reality, Ms. Kham believes that mandatory English teaching from grade 1 will face many difficulties, especially the problem of teacher shortage.
"Trang Phai Primary and Secondary School currently does not have enough English teachers, so it is forced to sign a short-term teacher contract to ensure the program. Moreover, the team of contract teachers is constantly fluctuating, directly affecting the stability of the collective and long-term teaching plans" - Ms. Kham expressed.
The principal of Trang Phai Primary and Secondary School added that the school also faces pressure to train and foster, when it needs to organize professional support activities for new teachers, which is time-consuming and costly.
"In addition, the school also faces difficulties due to differences in English proficiency between levels of education. With the characteristics of an inter-level school, when it is mandatory to teach English from grade 1, we will have to carefully consider arranging suitable teachers for each grade, especially grade 1, where students are new to this subject" - Ms. Kham shared.
The shortage of teachers is not only a concern for 1 or 2 schools, but also occurs in many provinces and cities, especially mountainous provinces.
According to statistics from the Ministry of Education and Training, it is necessary to add about 12,000 preschool English teachers, nearly 10,000 primary school teachers, and train at least 200,000 teachers with the ability to teach English by 2030 to implement the project.
Regarding solutions to overcome difficulties in ensuring the teaching staff when English becomes a compulsory subject from grade 1, in an interview with Lao Dong reporter, Dr. Nguyen Tung Lam - Vice President of the Vietnam Association of Educational Psychology, Chairman of the Board of Education of Dinh Tien Hoang High School (Hanoi) - said that it is necessary to increase the number of teachers, which can be implemented in two combined directions.
"First, on-site teacher training. Current teachers at the school are trained and improved their capacity. Some teachers can achieve quite good qualifications after 1-2 years of training. The goal of this plan is to both improve the general qualifications and supplement human resources for the school. Second, recruiting new teachers. This is a way to increase resources from the outside to ensure a sufficient number of teachers, meeting the needs of teaching English from grade 1" - Mr. Lam said.
However, when implementing the above solutions, Dr. Nguyen Tung Lam emphasized the need to pay attention to two important issues regarding resources and finance.
"First of all, the quality of teacher training must be guaranteed. We cannot only provide express training without ensuring quality, because multiple training but poor quality cannot improve the qualifications of teachers. Second, resources and finance must be clear. Any plan to increase teachers requires a specific budget; without financial resources, the solution will not be feasible" - Mr. Lam commented.
According to Dr. Nguyen Tung Lam, improving the existing teacher qualifications and adding human resources from the outside is a feasible solution, while creating motivation for teachers to proactively nurture foreign language skills, meeting the requirements of teaching English from grade 1.
