Schools and universities have a long history of partnerships for a variety of educational purposes. School-university partnerships are advocated as “the most frequently recommended approaches to educational reform” (Dyson, 1999, p. 411). A school-university partnership tends to be defined as a “planned effort to establish a formal, mutually beneficial inter-institutional relationship” (Goodlad, 1991, p. 59). The overarching aim for most school-university partnerships is to minimise the gap between theory and practice in teacher education (Walsh & Backe, 2013). School-university partnerships are reflected in various activities (e.g., teacher education and educational research) between stakeholders from both schools and universities on the collaborative basis (see Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1998; McLaughlin & Black-Hawkins, 2007). 

The past decades have witnessed an increase in school-university partnerships, alongside the process of massification of higher education in many countries. This increase has been documented in the publications on school-university partnerships in specific contexts, for example, Australia (Green et al., 2020) and United Kingdom (Handscomb et al., 2014). In response to this burgeoning of partnerships, a good range of studies on these partnerships within and across countries are needed to inform the stakeholders (i.e., policy makers, schools and universities) of the strategies to improve the quality and effectiveness of partnerships and to address inherent challenges and tensions in initiating, implementing and sustaining partnerships. This range of studies should include general analyses of policy and practice to provide a landscape of current partnerships forms and case-based research on specific partnerships to enable more specific understanding.

Our local knowledge in Vietnam suggests an emergence of various partnerships between universities and schools in the past two decades, arguably reflecting the expansion, massification, and diversification of the country’s higher education system (Mok, 2008; Phan and Doan, 2020; see also World Bank, 2019). The study, which this chapter is based on, was conducted to provide a broad understanding of school-university partnership forms documented in the system-level policies of Vietnam and those forms enacted at the institutional level. The current study complements case-based research to enrich insights into school-university partnerships in Vietnam. The current paper aims to address the following two research questions.    

• What forms of school-university partnerships are currently documented in the system-level policy of Vietnam?
• What forms of school-university partnerships are implemented at the institutional level? 

Addressing these questions is important in evidencing forms of school-university partnerships in policy and practice in Vietnam. Framing the discussion within an international context, the paper will also highlight the issues and challenges associated with these partnership forms and accordingly make recommendations to capitalise on the expertise and resources of schools and universities to achieve mutual goals. 

This paper draws on an analysis of relevant policy documents and reflections on the activities of school-university partnerships of a major university in the central region of Vietnam. The analysis of relevant policies at the system level enabled us to have an overview as to what extent school-university partnerships are reflected in these documents. The reflections provided an idea of the forms and implementation of school-university partnerships at the university level. 1. Policy documents We conducted a search of policy documents using Google and Google Scholar. This practice identified a range of 40 documents that were available online for public use. These documents outline current laws, circulars, decisions, and official dispatches issued by the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training in the past two decades. They were included because their content touches upon, of varying degrees of depth and explicitness, aspects relevant to school-university partnerships. These documents discuss the issues concerning general education in Vietnam, compulsory education, higher education, and teacher education. We categorically arranged these documents into groups: (1) graduate attributes of pre-service teacher education programmes, (2) preparation and development of teachers and school leaders, (3) research in education, and (4) community education. Our analytical process of policy documents involved extracting all details relevant to collaborations between schools and higher institutes of education in an Excel file. We took detailed notes to ensure a good understanding of contexts of extracted details. All of these details were noted in the original language – Vietnamese. 2. Secondary data from a university of education The second sources of data were obtained from the data available for access at a Vietnam-based university named as VNEdu. This university is a major provider of teacher education in the central region of Vietnam. We collected secondary data relevant to the collaborative activities of the VNEdu and schools in Vietnam. These data included information on the university’s website, curricula of study programmes, and accessible reports. We synthesised and analysed relevant details from these sources of data in Vietnamese. We categorically presented three themes in English, to highlight VNEdu’s partnership areas and activities with schools.

The paper uncovers four key forms of school-university partnerships, namely (i) pre-service teacher education, (ii) in-service teacher education, (iii) research, and (iv) community education. The partnership in pre-service teacher education is clearly a predominant form as compared with the other forms of partnership. It is evident through collaborative activities between university lecturers and school teachers in supporting pre-service teachers’ practicum-based learning. A critical look at this insight underscores some noteworthy issues. Firstly, the entire practicum time in preservice teacher education programmes in Vietnam arguably remains rather limited in quantity. Most four-year pre-service teacher education programmes provide two compulsory practicums, with a total of around eleven weeks. The review of Darling-Hammond (2014) suggested 30 weeks of supervised practicum and teaching opportunities for teacher candidates in each pre-service teacher education programme. Secondly, the partnership in pre-service teacher education between universities and schools in Vietnam seems to be of ‘complementary’ tendency, rather than, of ‘collaborative’ nature (see Furlong et al., 2000). We hardly found evidence on the roles and practices of the key partnership members in collaboratively designing, delivering, and evaluating practicum-based learning opportunities. Thirdly, the partnership is pre-service teacher education is mainly school-based and uses schools as a site for practicum-based learning. Fourthly, the other forms of school-university partnerships (ii) (iii) and (iv) appear to be encouraged, of varying degree of explicitness, in Vietnam’s education policy. However, we hardly found any support mechanisms outlined in the reviewed policy documents to promote these partnerships. Fifthly, most of these partnerships were driven by universities’ needs for schools as sites for practicum learning and research. Based on these insights and issues, our presentation will discuss major recommendations, in consideration of the evidence from the international literature, inform the process of improving these partnerships to optimise their potential benefits.

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