Classes of well over 30 students pose a difficult challenge for even experienced teachers. Photo courtesy of https://www.teachingnomad.com

AF Reeves - @afreeves23

Excuse the extra noise, but physical readers may have noticed that I’ve been moved to a larger section of the page, with far more space to ramble. To celebrate, I thought I’d take a swing at arguably the most salient issue affecting ‘expats’ right now, in Hà Nội at least: ESL, and how it’s looking.

A lot has changed since the days of a Shark Thủy-backed Apax shaking things up and challenging the holy triangle of Apollo, Language Link and ILA. It’s no longer an evening and weekend gig, with the majority of hours for teachers now in the nine to five. The backpackers are largely a thing of the past, and there seemed to finally be a sense of post-COVID cohesion.

This is Việt Nam though, and I’ve been hearing rumours of the golden age of ESL coming to a close since at least the summer of 2016, when I was still trawling Dave’s ESL Café in the hope of understanding what I was about to get myself into. Since then, I’ve regularly dismissed the naysayers as gatekeepers and alarmists. The Việt Nam they threw themselves into head first started asking them for qualifications, having the audacity to demand receipts and oversight to go with them. In reality, it was always going to change, but the market of a country dead set on development was always going to have enough ESL hours to go around. Until now, maybe.

As Việt Nam’s visibility improves with its development and the winds of change blow eastwards, more ships of hopeful sailors take to the sea. Maybe Việt Nam can offer them a future, with teaching the means by which to make themselves useful. It’s been two weeks since the start of the academic year, and many teachers find themselves still firmly in their apartments. But why?

While ESL tends to be thought of as language centres and after-school tuition, those same centres have spent years putting their operations, resources, know-how and teachers into additional lessons inside state schools during the regular week, known as ‘linked’ programmes. A no-brainer, surely? Native and qualified teachers, already in the country for work, supporting a government push for better spoken English.

Yet here we are. Since 2025, public schooling has been free from preschool to Grade 12, and linked English, at up to VNĐ1.1 million a month, has looked increasingly like tuition by the back door. In April, National Assembly Deputy Nguyễn Thị Thủy took the issue to the floor, proposing that public schools be banned from slotting linked classes between regular lessons, where parents have little choice but to sign up, and arguing that schools should not be turned into fee-collecting businesses.

In Hà Nội, the plan that had governed foreign language teaching in schools since 2019 expired without a successor, and new rules from July require schools to publish details of any foreign partner and its teachers’ credentials.

Companies are dangling contracts and even offering to pay teachers to stay on while they scramble to find a solution.

It’s strangely reminiscent of China in 2021, when the ‘Double Reduction’ policy banned for-profit tutoring in core subjects, English included. Thousands of teachers lost their jobs, some with barely any notice. Beijing was going after the after-school market, though, while Việt Nam is reining in paid programmes inside its own state schools and still wants as much English in them as it can get.

Part of the problem is that the companies weren’t always providing a service at the quality expected. The TEFL market is not exactly a bastion of regulation. The majority of teachers are committed, hard-working educators worth every penny, but there is also a remarkable number, in the traditional sense of the word, who are chancing it. Programmes that schools feel somewhat obliged to offer to stay competitive, and that parents sign up to for not too dissimilar reasons, aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be.

I’m a teacher. I’m certainly not in the habit of blowing my own trumpet, and I’ll go as far as to admit that I wasn’t worth the salary I was paid when I started here nearly a decade ago, though I did put the work in to make sure the quality of my teaching came to match my remuneration. That said, I’m not sure anybody can do that in a classroom of 50, the majority of whom don’t have the English to benefit from the class time alone. In education, we can quite clearly see that the more input and one-to-one time students get with teachers, the better the results. That isn’t what students and parents are getting here, but schools and companies can’t afford, or aren’t willing, to do it any other way.

What next? It seems the Ministry of Education and Training and the city education departments are entertaining proposals from companies, with the aim of improving standards, creating a better deal for schools and parents and keeping a closer eye on what is actually going on with ESL in schools. At least one major player seems to have got something over the line, but many other teachers are sat at home still waiting, with work permits and visas tied to an employer that has no classes to give them.

Longer term? Whatever happens, there will be less work available. The push is towards improving the quality of local English teachers instead of paying a premium for ‘expats’, and those who do make it will have to be more clearly qualified than ever. It’s an environment that should sort the wheat from the chaff, but at a cost. There will be less English learnt. From my experience, local teachers aren’t at the standard required as things stand. Losing the transient passers-through might well mean losing a whole host of very good teachers who provide great tutelage.

From a teacher’s perspective, the market is likely to be squeezed, and better-qualified teachers may well end up being offered less than before for the same work, or more. For the first time ever, I might be tempted to warn potential sailors to stay at shore. — VNS