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Japan’s National Daily Since 1922
August 29, 2022 (Mainichi Japan)
Japanese version
TOKYO — Japan’s education ministry has decided to implement a new “school affairs support system” that allows teachers to unitarily handle work such as absence notifications and managing grades on their personal computers in a bid to reduce their long working hours.
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology will unify the system nationwide so that data can be quickly handed over when children change schools, leading to seamless guidance. To change the analog working style of teachers with digital technology, 1 billion yen (roughly $7.21 million) for costs such as launching pilot projects will be included in the fiscal 2023 budget request.
According to a 2016 education ministry survey, about 30% of teachers at public elementary schools and 60% at junior high schools worked overtime of “more than 80 hours a month,” which is considered to be the threshold for determining death by overwork. In public schools in Japan, there are cases in which teachers receive notifications of student absences by phone, or have to print out documents to share information on paper, because they do not have their own work email addresses. Such an analog working style is considered to be one of the reasons behind the issue.
To improve work efficiency, 70% of local governments across Japan have introduced an “integrated school affairs support system” to manage students’ attendance records, health conditions, learning status and other data, but most of it can only be accessed from devices installed in the staff room. This has also led to trouble such as the loss of students’ personal information after teachers transferred it onto their USB flash drives for when they work outside the school.
Furthermore, compatibility among the systems is low, as there are differences in the systems used by each school and education board, and the difficulty of handing over data between schools when a child transfers or advances to another school is also becoming a problem.
To tackle the issue, the education ministry aims to create a new school affairs support system nationwide to manage the data using cloud computing. In addition to enabling teachers to work outside of the school by connecting to the system from their personal computers, it will be made possible for teachers to receive absence notifications sent from students’ personal computers.
The Japanese government has been implementing its “GIGA School Program,” which supplies one digital device per student at elementary and junior high schools. Learning data will also be accumulated by connecting the digital device with the new school affairs support system. The education ministry says that by gathering information on abuse and public assistance records, teachers will be able to understand a student’s home environment and learning situation collectively, and use it for guidance and support.
The ministry will launch pilot projects at public elementary and junior high schools in six municipalities in the 2023 academic year, and aims to implement a unified system across Japan by the 2030 academic year. Other advantages of adopting a cloud system apparently include enabling teachers who are busy with caring for an elderly person or with child rearing to work remotely, and to prevent the loss of data even if the school is hit by a natural disaster.
Due to the sluggish popularity of the teaching profession, the number of public elementary school teacher exam-takers was 2.6 times the number of positions available — a record low. A senior official at the education ministry explained, “We want to appeal to people that this is not an old-fashioned workplace, and make the job of a teacher more attractive.”
(Japanese original by Makoto Fukazu, Tokyo City News Department)
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