It is important to create an environment in which children of foreign nationalities can receive appropriate education, just as Japanese children do.
The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry's panel of experts has compiled a report on supporting foreign children to attend school. One of the pillars is the institutionalization of a system allowing the situation of school attendance to be grasped.
Boards of education should produce lists of children of foreign nationalities who are at the ages of compulsory education. Boards will distribute school enrollment information to households of such children, and parents who do not respond to such information will be encouraged through individual visits or by telephone to have their children attend school. The report called for such efforts.
Currently, the way of dealing with children of foreign nationalities varies from one municipality to another, with some municipalities not even checking whether they are attending school.
The ministry should quickly draw up unified guidelines to ensure that boards of education properly monitor school attendance of children of foreign nationalities. Each board of education should work with its local government section in charge of resident registration to make sure that children of school age can be identified.
It is only natural that the report emphasized improvement of Japanese language teaching.
There are children of foreign nationalities who take classes with Japanese children. However, there are also many cases in which they are often taught separately in different rooms away from their classmates if they are not good at Japanese. It is necessary to secure teachers who are in charge of dealing with these students as well as private-sector support staff who can serve as interpreters.
The native languages of children of foreign nationalities are increasingly diverse, including Portuguese, Chinese and Tagalog. Another idea is to seek, through local international exchange associations, the cooperation of foreigners who are fluent in Japanese.
In some areas, schools may not be able to secure the necessary personnel. It is hoped core schools will be designated at which Japanese teaching support staff are assigned for Japanese lessons that include students from multiple neighboring schools and from which teachers and support staffers visit other schools to teach Japanese.
Another issue is how to help children of foreign nationalities enter high schools.
Half of the prefectures have high school admission quotas for foreign students who do not have sufficient Japanese language ability, and they take entrance exams separate from ordinary students. In many cases, the number of test subjects is reduced. In some cases, successful applicants are selected only through interviews and essays.
Some schools are giving extra consideration to students of foreign nationalities, such as printing furigana syllabic characters next to kanji characters to indicate pronunciation in entrance examination questions.
It is hoped that opportunities are expanded for students to advance to higher education and that meticulous guidance continues to be provided after entering the school.
With the increase in the number of foreigners working in Japan, the number of children of foreign nationalities enrolled in public elementary, junior high and high schools has exceeded 100,000. It is essential to improve school education for those children because they can become a valuable human resource supporting Japanese society in the future.
-- The original Japanese article appeared in The Yomiuri Shimbun on March 31, 2020
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
