In the bustling port city of Hai Phong, Vietnam, teachers are bracing for one of the most significant shake-ups the country’s education sector has seen in decades. As the 2025-2026 school year approaches, the entire Vietnamese education system is adapting to new administrative boundaries, following a sweeping merger that reduced the number of provinces and cities from 63 to just 34. This administrative overhaul, while intended to streamline governance, has left teachers, students, and education officials scrambling to keep lessons relevant and accurate—even as textbooks lag behind the changes.
According to reports from Vietnamnet and local education authorities, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has issued urgent directives to ensure that schools across the country, including those in Hai Phong, are prepared for the new academic landscape. Teachers are being asked to proactively adjust their lesson plans to reflect the updated provincial boundaries, population figures, and local histories, even though the official textbooks have yet to catch up with reality.
“After the administrative unit mergers, there are now only 34 provinces and cities instead of 63 as before,” explained Nguyen Thi Dieu, a geography and history teacher at Minh Tan Secondary School in Bach Dang Ward, Hai Phong, as cited by Vietnamnet. “This leads to major changes in regional boundaries, the names and numbers of provinces and cities, the area and population of regions, resources, economic development, administrative maps, population maps, and maps of economic sectors and regions in Vietnam.”
The impact of these changes is felt most acutely in social science subjects. Four subjects are directly affected: History and Geography from grades 4 to 9, Geography in grade 12, History in grade 10, and Economic and Legal Education in grade 10. Teachers must now update and adjust their teaching content to accurately reflect new local historical events, figures, and geographical data, aiming to prevent students from confusing outdated information with current realities.
“If the content related to local history, notable figures, historic achievements, and events that took place in the former administrative areas is not updated promptly, students will have difficulty grasping new information and may easily confuse the present with the past,” said Dao Thi Van, a history teacher at the Kinh Mon Vocational Education and Continuing Education Center. She noted that, in the past, textbooks and other platforms regularly updated administrative information, making life easier for both teachers and students. Now, however, the onus is on teachers to research and integrate these changes themselves—a daunting prospect for many.
In preparation for the new school year, educators returned to their schools at the start of August 2025. According to Nguyen Thi Thu Huong, Deputy Principal of Nui Deo Primary School, teachers gathered to exchange information and receive professional guidance on how to adapt social science lessons to the new administrative landscape. But with official guidance from the Department of Education and Training still pending, many teachers are left in limbo, waiting for more concrete instructions while doing their best to bridge the gap with their own research and initiative.
“From July 1, 2025, until the start of the new school year, adjustments and additions to textbooks could not keep pace, so students will continue using the current textbooks and curriculum,” reported Vietnamnet. The 2018 general education program, however, is designed as an open framework, allowing teachers to proactively review, select, and adjust textbook content to fit the new practical local administrative conditions. This flexibility is crucial, but it also places a significant burden on educators to ensure accuracy and relevance in their lessons.
School leaders in Hai Phong are not sitting idly by. Hai Huy Hiep, Principal of Truong Cong Dinh Secondary School in Le Chan Ward, noted that on August 12, the Ministry of Education and Training announced a call for feedback on revisions to certain subjects to better align with the new two-level local government system and administrative boundaries. “Teachers in our school are actively and proactively contributing suggestions so that the ministry can soon complete some textbooks in the near future,” Hiep said.
Meanwhile, Thân Thị Châm, Principal of Kinh Mon High School, affirmed that her teachers are ready to adapt and access new information, striving to enhance teaching effectiveness during this transition. However, she acknowledged that not all teachers fully understand the new administrative system, underscoring the need for the education sector to organize training sessions and develop supplementary materials to support teachers during this period of change.
Beyond curriculum content, staffing remains a central concern. The Ministry of Education and Training has called on provincial People’s Committees to maintain stability and ensure adequate numbers of teachers, staff, and workers in public educational institutions for the upcoming school year. According to Vietnamnet, the ministry has directed continued recruitment of teachers and the implementation of various solutions to guarantee staffing for preschools and general education, in line with the Prime Minister’s directive 61/CT-TTg.
Where recruitment is not yet complete, provincial authorities are instructed to arrange funding and implement labor contracts, transfers, separations, or inter-school arrangements to ensure full staffing. The ministry also requests that provinces promptly execute contract replacements for teachers on sick leave, maternity leave, retirement, or resignation, supplementing missing staff as needed. In addition to work regulations and overtime pay policies, MOET urges provinces to review and renovate public buildings, improve facilities, and implement support policies to ensure adequate living and working conditions for teachers, especially those affected by transfers and inter-school assignments.
When it comes to class sizes and teacher-student ratios, the current system for calculating teacher norms by region will remain in place until new guidance is issued following the administrative mergers at the commune level. For primary and secondary schools facing special cases—where the number of students per class is significantly below or above the regional average—the provincial People’s Committees have the authority to decide appropriate student norms, as stipulated under Circular 20, Article 3, Clause 2. The process involves school principals calculating and proposing student norms to commune-level People’s Committees, which then review and report to the provincial Department of Education and Training for final approval by the provincial People’s Committee.
Throughout this period of uncertainty and adjustment, the resilience and resourcefulness of Vietnam’s educators stand out. Teachers, administrators, and officials are working together—sometimes improvising, sometimes waiting for official word, but always focused on the goal of delivering quality education to students in a rapidly changing environment. As the new school year dawns, the hope is that these efforts will pay off, allowing students to learn with clarity and confidence, despite the shifting lines on the map.
