Teacher policy in East Asia
©Kim Yeji, Republic of Korea
Gwang-Jo Kim, Director of the Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education in Bangkok recently presented teacher policy issues in East Asia at a conference ‘Learning from the International Experience: Lifting U. S. Students to World Class Levels of Performance’ organized by the Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard Kennedy School, Massachusetts, USA.
The presentation focused on high-performing countries and topics such as international learning assessment, overview of teacher policy in East Asia, and issues and challenges.
“Ensuring that teachers are properly trained, resourced and supported is the single most important requirement for raising learning achievement,” Mr. Kim quoted a statement from the Education Global Monitoring Report 2011.
Based on UNESCO Bangkok’s Regional Seminar on Teacher Polices in Asia-Pacific in 2010, in Singapore, pre-service teacher training programmes are highly selective due to limited available space. About 20 per cent of applicants will be selected and almost all become teachers. Also student teachers receive paid salary during in-service training.
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In Korea, secondary school teachers are over-supply and there is severe competition to be a teacher. There are 11 Public Education Universities and 1 Private University delivering pre-service training programmes, and student quota are controlled by Ministry of Education.
For beginning teachers in Japan, induction training during the first year, 60 days at school and 30 days outside of the school, became mandatory. For teachers with 10 years service, the 10th year training for 40 days became mandatory.
All teacher licenses became effective for 10 years. To renew the licenses, teachers are required to take courses for 30 hours at the universities or receive in-service training organized by the boards of education.
According to the UNESCO Regional Seminar on Teacher Polices in Asia-Pacific, in Japan most of the boards of education have established teacher evaluation system. In 2006, 450 teachers were evaluated to lack competence and sent for training. An award system for excellent teachers was also introduced in many provinces.
