All good things come to pass – and this year’s Vietnam National English conference was, sadly in some ways, the last in its line. More optimistically though, the conference marks the new “independence” of VTTN (Vietnam English Teacher and Trainer Network) aka the end of an eight-year British Council funding, the launch of Access English in Vietnam, and the 75th anniversary of the British Council all in one.

VTTN trainers formed the backbone of the 400 English professionals from 45 Vietnamese provinces and 18 countries who came to Hanoi on January 16 and 17.

Olha Madylus set the ball rolling with a provocative session on creativity – and was followed by excellent presentations, many delivered by British Council trained teachers and trainers.

The event attracted a huge press and TV coverage with highlights on eight news programmes and documentaries on five national and local TV channels altogether.

The atmosphere was more like a family reunion than a conference; quotes from participants make clear just how good the conference was:

"This is the best conference I’ve ever been too.”

“This is a special chance that helps me find motivation in teaching English.”

“I’ve learnt a lot from this. We really need to have more conferences like this.”

“Everything ran like clockwork”

“Things went so smoothly – you made it look easy, but I know it takes effort”  

Inevitably the goodbye to VTTN was sentimental - after all, the project has been a huge success.

"VTTN has had a great impact on both our professional and personal development. It is a milestone in our life and surely extremely memorable. What VTTN has done is brilliant. We VTTN teachers and trainers have all benefited a lot from the project. It has become part of us and we have brought VTTN to different places: to our classrooms, to national conferences and to overseas conferences. Now we have grown up, become more confident and can stand on our own feet.’ – Ms Nguyen Thi Minh Huong, a VTTN trainer from Hue City.

“Even though the budget of VTTN has been very small, the impact has been great - it's been a low cost high impact project.” – Mr Le Van Canh, Director, Office for International Relations and Cooperation, University for Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University.

Over the past eight years, the project has catalysed a change from traditional teaching methodologies to communicative teaching approaches in Vietnam with 9,500 out of all 60,000 teachers in Vietnam being trained. Most important of all, a cadre of 120 trained expert Vietnamese trainers will now continue the good work.  

Of course, we look forward to hearing more of future successes and growth in the project. In the meantime, we look forward to Access English, now established with a Ministry of Education portal to support all Vietnam’s teachers and Classroom Language training starting from March this year, much of which will be carried out by established VTTN trainers.