Recently, Vietnamese Minister of Education and Training talked with Tuoi Tre (Youth) Newspaper about his plan to grant more universities with autonomous rights. According to him, there will be two important tasks to be prioritised by the Ministry of Education and Training in 2020. One is to adopt the new teaching and learning programmes reform, and the second is to improve autonomy in the tertiary education. He also mentioned about merger of small, inefficient public universities and the encouragement for more private universities to be set up in next year.

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Comments from Lien Ta, Senior Education Service Manager, British Council Vietnam:
Nowadays, leading autonomous universities in Vietnam are very active in developing partnership activities with foreign institutions. They see international partnership development as a vehicle to help them achieve autonomy in both academic and financial aspects, and most importantly they should aim for the improvement of teaching quality and students' satisfaction through different TNE programmes with foreign institutions, as it is the main purpose of MOET when grating autonomy to local universities. However, different universities have different agenda in implementing autonomy. Some are very open to all kinds of partnership, while some others are much more selective in choosing partners for particular partnership areas such as research, student exchange and progression. Besides, not all autonomous universities are capable to implement all types of partnership activities that they wish to (i.e limited number of quality of teachers, number of potential students, low English level of students...). When reaching out to autonomy-granted institutions to discuss about partnership opportunities, UK institutions, therefore, should not forget to learn about their strategy in implementing autonomy, because such information will give a lot of useful implication for the two partners in developing partnership/TNE activities that fit with the mutual needs and abilities. For some institutions, it will take time to work with them in different steps.