A big change for our education programme in Vietnam started two years ago. We made the decision to move our programme's focus from building teachers' capacity for using child-centred methodologies (CCM) to promoting social accountability in the education sector of Vietnam.

CCM differs from traditional teaching in Vietnam in that it focuses on the needs of the students and encourages children to develop their own voice in an enabling environment for active learning. Our CCM work in Vietnam has helped poor children in disadvantaged areas, especially ethnic minority children and girls, to get good primary education.

Getting everyone to agree to the change has not been easy, even I was not too convinced not to mention our education partners at national and provincial levels.

For my team and I, the change was particularly difficult because we had just started to see our hard work pay off after nearly two decades of promoting CCM. At that point, there were plenty of reliable signals that the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) wanted to officially introduce Oxfam model nationwide. We therefore wanted to build on the success that our CCM projects had already achieved and did not want to miss this opportunity.

Like in a football game, we had the golden opportunity to score our dream goal after 20 years of challenging advocacy. The team's determination had resulted in CCM national summer training sessions in 2010 and 2011 for resource teachers and education managers from the 41 poorest provinces. Meaning that the CCM model will now reach many disadvantaged groups of boys and girls, teachers, male and female, and ethnic minority schools in the remote areas of Vietnam.

Although moving from building capacity to promoting social accountability was hard, looked at from a child-centred perspective it makes perfect sense: most of the important CCM activities had been designed for and implemented by adults' groups such as teachers, parents, school heads etc. with an assumption that if their capacities could be significantly improved, the school children would be benefited consequently. With this assumption, our kids had been playing their role passively. They received programme benefits indirectly from the adults' actions and efforts. Imagine, what if they could be able to engage in designed activities in an active manner as active citizens?

With the shift to promoting social accountability, our education programme's aim still remains its focus to support ethnic minority children to access basic quality education, but in another way.

The new approach is harder to 'sell' in many ways to partners and even donors. When we first discussed the shift with MOET, a "conservative" senior official challenged us, asking: "Do you think we are not accountable enough and good enough in education governance?"

Traditional donors also prefer to give money for something visible such as purchasing tables and chairs, shoes and clothes directly to the ethnic children, or providing financial commitment for teaching reform.

Despite remaining debates, we have switched our focus to governance. Now, I feel we are doing the right thing, even though our team is busy building a solid foundation for launching the first social accountability and good governance projects in the education sector.

We have also started to see a change in attitude amongst senior education leaders. Last month, at the launch event for the new project on promoting social accountability in the education sector, the Director of Lao Cai Province Department of Education and Training (DOET), Mr Truong Kim Minh shared his belief that we could go further than building capacity for teachers.  "We are enjoying a lot of signals for the successes of the new choice which aims to improve school governance and accountability practice for education managers at all levels." said Mr. Minh. "We are on the right track".

I now think focusing on governance work is just another "classic" challenge, like many years ago we first introduced CCM and faced a lot of constraints at that time. One day in a near future, you will be invited to see the new profiles of our ethnic minority students. They will actively plan and implement most of our project activities in coming months. They will become active citizens of our country from those far away mountain. A change of focus should bring happy endings.