Children have their meals at the school. Photo by VTV24.

The move came after a recent report by Vietnam Television (VTV) showed that hundreds of primary students at a boarding school in the northern Lao Cai Province were given poor meals after their food portions were cut.

According to the VTV's report, over 170 students at the Hoang Thu Pho 1 Primary School in Lao Cai's Bac Ha District were given poor meals after their food portions had been cut by two-thirds. The school’s toilets also lacked toilet paper, forcing the students to use leaves as substitutes.

In a dispatch signed on December 20, the government leader asked the Ministry of Education and Training to coordinate with relevant ministries and agencies and provincial people’s committees and centrally-run cities to direct and review the organisation and implementation of meals for preschool children and boarding and semi-boarding students in mountainous and ethnic-inhabited areas, and the implementation of other policies for them; and strictly handle collective and individual failures if there are violations.

The PM requested the strict implementation of regulations on financial and asset management, the purchase of education equipment, and teachers’ ethics.

The Government Committee for Ethnic Minority Affairs was asked to effectively use resources under the National Target Programme for socio-economic development in mountainous and ethnic-inhabited areas in the 2021-2030 period for education to ensure 100 percent of the schools and classrooms in extremely difficult communes and villages are solidly built.

Over the past years, the government has issued mechanisms, policies, programmes, and projects to support children and students and boarding schools in some difficult areas of the country.

Hoang Thu Pho 1 Primary School is among the schools in difficult areas which receive financial support from the government. Each student receives free accommodation at school, VND720,000 per month in cash and 15 kilos of rice monthly for meals.

However, VTV calculated that based on the meals seen at the school, the school was only spending some VND 40 million from the VND 120 million the government provided monthly to the students.