QUALITY ASSURANCE CHALLENGES: A study of quality assurance in private secondary education in Vietnam
Authors: Hoang Quynh-Anh Giang 
Published: March 2020

Due to the developing of science and technology, education is fundamental for a country to develop human resource, talent resource and improve the knowledge of people. UNESCO extremely stress on the importance of education, which is the obvious human right for whole their life. Moreover, this right must be shown in the term of quality (UNESCO, 2017). Especially in the context of the twenty-first century, globalization is a community-oriented process for advancement, yet it is an effective procedure as far as ensuring national interests, particularly in developing nations like Viet Nam. The global monetary rivalry is turning out to be progressively wild and severe, well off nations are gradually generous thus of their upper hand in preparing the first HR and in examining and creating propelled innovation. ICT is utilized as a part of all zones of social life, and are gainful in instruction. The education framework is open; distance learning allows students to learn at any time, any place, at all levels and for all, which has turned into an exceptionally powerful answer to taking care of the expanding demand for instruction in the public arena (MOET, 2015).Besides the global aspects, the primary mission for the school is to ensure the quality of the school to provide a good learning environment for students to develop. In the past, there are many researchers who proposed the theories and frameworks to help the school in term of quality assurance. Among those theories and frameworks, the quality of the school life (QSL) framework should be noticing because students spend most of their time in the school so that the quality of the school life is a part of the quality assurance in the school. Vietnam is one of the countries which spend a lot of money on education. However, the education system of Vietnam has been focusing on the student’s performance for many years, especially in secondary education, not the quality of the student life. Within the scope of this thesis, the researcher aimed to identify issues related to the school life of secondary school students in Vietnamese private schools, to assess the current level of school life of the students and proposed recommendations for quality improvement to achieve the student satisfaction. To ensure this goal, the researcher used a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, in which the survey is an important part. From the survey of students who have been studying at the school, the researcher collected the data using the QSL questionnaire to have the comparison with the previous studies about the quality of the student school life, which will contribute to the future research.Based on the analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data, we clarified the positive quality of school life in a secondary school in Vietnam. There are positive relationships among the perception of teacher, the opportunity to learn, the perception of student status, and the student satisfaction and the quality of the student school life. However, there is no positive relationship between gender and the quality of school life. On the other word, the females and males perceive the quality of school life equally. In comparison with public secondary school, we found out the differences between school type. In overall, the private secondary schools have more neutral and negative feedbacks than the public secondary schools due to the more autonomy in this school type. While the public schools focus more on the learning environment so that the pressure for the students in public school are high, the private schools focus more on the development environment so that the pressure and the competitive aspects are less. The students in private schools concern about the tuition fee, the rector, the school policies, whereas the students in public school concern about the uniform, the competitors. There are also some negative issues in private secondary schools which are the teacher behaviours, school policies, so that makes the student feel not good about school.According to the results of quantitative and qualitative data, the researcher proposed the recommendations to improve the quality of the school life to gain student satisfaction based on the Deming Wheel.