Promoting girls’ interest and participation in STEM 

Background of this project

The British Council Vietnam identified the following gaps in STEM education for girls in Vietnam:

• Of more than a thousand Vietnamese patent applications, fewer than 9 percent were from women. At the same time, there’s a glass ceiling for women to gain professorships. Even though half of all university faculties employ women, only 11 percent gain professorships, with those in the STEM fields considerably lower
• Limited chance for female academics to excel beyond the initial level in form of scholarship
•  Lack of initiatives to encourage more girls to study STEM subjects at school level 
• No career orientation advisory on future of work at school level 

The project Promote school girls’ interest and participation in science and innovation through STEM education and digital skills ran from October 2018 to March 2019 and it aimed at providing opportunities to allow more girls from secondary and high schools in Vietnam to explore their potential and empower them to pursue STEM subjects as a career of choice at higher level of education, addressing Vietnam’s gap in STEM human resources to respond to IR 4.0 challenges through a UK STEM ambassador network approach. 

The Ambassador network includes STEM students, early career researchers and teachers. The STEM Ambassadors aimed to achieve the following:

• Deliver a 3-day cascading training to at least local school students (30 participants/training)
• Mentor and coach for at least 2 STEM groups of school students per school to develop projects solving local problems and to submit projects to the School Lab competition

The STEM Ambassadors were based and focused on five locations: Hanoi, Danang, Hue, Ho Chi Minh City and Mekong region including 15 pilot schools under the British Council STEM project funded by the Newton Fund in 2016-2017.

Boot Camp

We had a three-day Boot Camp to develop STEM Ambassadors. We wanted to develop good role models, who can understand gender issues and are capable of leading sessions with younger students. Many girls don’t even consider STEM careers as they feel it is “not for people like me”. Having girls and women in front of them delivering science activities is one way to combat this way of thinking. 

From our scoping visit it emerged that STEM activities in Vietnam seem to be mostly happening in the private school sector and are at best a bolt-on to the school curriculum as opposed to being embedded within it. There seems to be little opportunity to explore and develop scientific ideas in mainstream classrooms.  

Research findings suggest that girls are far more likely to have an interest in STEM if the activities are relevant to their, or others’, lives. In the Boot Camp we used real life problems and resources in conjunction with CollaboratED‘s TRIAL framework to take people through a structured approach to scientific problem-solving.

STEM Ambassadors and engagement in schools

Throughout the months following the Boot Camp we shared good practice in STEM learning and girls’ engagement with STEM subjects through a monthly newsletter. The STEM Ambassadors also showed a whealth of activity on the STEM Ambassador Vietnam Facebook group that the British Council created for the ambassadors to remain in touch and share good practice. 

The schools involved carried out really effective projects and our STEM Ambassadors were able to enthuse students and support them in developing STEM skills. But one of the most exciting outcomes for us was the way that our programme changed the opinion of school leaders. Most school principals were highly sceptical about STEM education before the project and the general view was that developing STEM skills is a waste of time, because it doesn’t help students pass their exams. However, after our Ambassadors worked with their teachers and students, these school leaders could see first hand the benefits of STEM skills and expressed the view that the whole curriculum should have STEM skills embedded in it.

The slides below are a summary of the outcomes of this project.