The government has formulated plans to abolish the mandatory 10-year renewal rule that has applied to the licenses of teachers in kindergarten, elementary, junior, and senior high schools, thereby making it so that teaching licenses are essentially valid indefinitely.
The move is meant to save teachers from the time and hassle of license renewals -- a system the government concluded has not been an effective means of improving the overall quality of the educator pool, as intended when the rule was introduced a little over a decade ago.
In exchange for removing the expiry dates from licenses under the plan, local boards of education will be asked to expand and enhance periodic professional training programs for active teachers.
The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry plans to present its policy proposal to the Central Council for Education, an advisory panel for the education minister, in August, after which point the ministry hopes to submit a bill to the ordinary Diet session next year that would amend the relevant law.
The license renewal system was set into motion with law revisions introduced in 2007 by the cabinet of then first-time Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who advocated the "revitalization of education" during his tenure in office. The system went into effect in fiscal 2009.
The 10-year renewal policy was conceived as an inducement for teachers to continually brush-up their professional acumen and improve, rather than as a penalty for underperformers.
According to an education ministry survey, 99.43% of those actively working teachers whose licenses were up for renewal at the end of March last year were able to successfully renew their credentials, including teachers who were specially granted extensions as asterisked cases.
Under the system, when a teacher's license nears the renewal date, teachers must attend a 30-hour license renewal seminar, hosted by universities and other institutions across the country. After completing coursework on subjects ranging from changes in the government's education policy to targeted guidance on teaching specific subjects, teachers can file for renewal with their local board of education, which will then issue a renewed license.
Teachers and schools have said that the seminar content does not have practical relevance to their classrooms, and that the material often overlaps with the separate training given by local education boards. Others have also noted the seminar's time and financial burdens. Difficult to fit into busy schedules, the seminars also cost tens of thousands of yen.
There has been concern that these burdens might exacerbate the nation's teacher shortage. Questionnaires distributed by the education ministry from April to May to currently working teachers found that 36.8% of the nearly 2,100 respondents said the thought of having to continue attending the renewal seminars into their 50s would be a factor that would "induce teachers to retire early."
Regarding the effectiveness of the renewal courses, the education ministry itself is concerned that the decadal system would not be frequent enough to stay current to the changing times.
As a result, education minister Koichi Hagiuda gave a push to reexamine the system in March, when he submitted a petition to the Central Council for Education, asking the council to reconsider approaches to continued teacher training, including a fundamental review of the license renewal rules.
In a bid to enhance the quality of teachers, the education ministry thus plans to expand the in-service training given by local boards of education, which offer the benefit of being possible to conduct more frequently than the 10-year seminars. The ministry is also considering deploying technology to better tailor the content of training to individual teachers, by keeping track of training courses each teacher has completed in the past. It will also expand the offering of online training courses that can be attended remotely, wherever and whenever the teacher has time in their schedule.
The specific content to be covered in the retooled local board of education training courses will be discussed at a future meeting of the central council.
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