2016 Volume 42 Pages 36-52
The improvement of educational finance for public compulsory education in recent years has been facing difficult conditions because the reform of class sizes is not making any progress and a policy of decreasing the number of educational personnel is also needed in response to the declining number of children. It seems there is no sustainable method to improve the quality and quantity of educational finance for compulsory public education.
Nevertheless, the Ministry of Education and the Central Council for Education have been trying to make efforts to introduce a new strategy for improving the number of teachers in schools for the past two years. However, it is impossible to improve the number of educational personnel without evidence, which is required by the Ministry of Finance and the Fiscal System Council.
Knowledge of the difficulties of education reform in advanced countries including Japan is derived from evidence-based policy. The test scores of students tend to be valued in both evidence-based policies and merit- based policies. In this situation, improving the fixed number of educational personnel by the traditional method of cutting down of class sizes may trivialize the discussion on the correlation between test scores and class sizes.
In this difficult situation, new methods to improve the strategies for improving the number of teachers in schools are envisaged flexibly.
In this article the new phase of Japanese education policy is defined as follows: “Improving teacher and staff numbers for children's issues” in section 2. In section 3, the structures of the Act on the Standard and Fixed Number of Educational Personnel of Public Compulsory Education are digested and some new formulae options noted to reflect “improving teachers and staff numbers for children's issues” on teachers and staff numbers.
In section 4, a vision to actualize the new reform of teacher and staff numbers in school is discussed and the new “standard” of public compulsory education in this new reform is considered
