The school librarian's position between law and practice in Vietnam and Poland: Evidence from Vietnamese primary school principals, 2021

Abstract

This article presents ten accounts of Vietnamese primary school principals on school librarian conditions against the legislative framework that classifies the position. The corpus, 210 question–answer units from semi-structured interviews conducted in 2021 across seven provinces of the Red River Delta, is analysed through directed content analysis using five predetermined codes drawn from Vietnamese law. The study sits within the socio-legal gap-study tradition, treating principals' testimony as evidence of the gap between legal intent and operational impact. The analysis distinguishes prescriptions by how they are administered. Those administered above the school (salary scale, the grade IV professional title, external recruitment authority) are set by national instruments and lie outside the school's authority to alter. Two findings go beyond that: all ten principals describe the librarian holding concurrent duties, an arrangement the staffing circular in force at the time permitted but did not mandate, and the Charter of primary schools' inclusion of the librarian in the professional group is observed at two of the eight schools whose accounts address it, the other six grouping the librarian with office staff. Conditions set as standards but left to local enforcement (room area, collection adequacy) vary with local circumstance, as do matters no instrument reaches, such as partnership relationships. Poland, which places the teacher-librarian inside the teaching profession by statute, serves as a parallel-by-category comparator: its statutes show what the teacher category entails once granted. The principal–librarian literature presumes the principals to be the ones who control hiring and budget; the article extends it to centralised state-employee systems and shows that reform directed at downstream symptoms leaves the prescriptions administered above the school untouched.