On September 11, the Kochi Prefectural Board of Education announced the results of its public school teacher hiring exam for 2027 appointments. Elementary school teaching posts have seen a string of resignations among successful candidates in recent years — seven in ten declined the year before last, and six in ten declined last year — so this time the board notified 221 people that they had passed, more than double the number of positions actually available. The prefecture has also moved up the timing of its supplementary exam by a month compared with last year. On the 5ch thread, comments poured in from all angles — from puzzlement over why people decline offers after passing, to debates over temp hiring, the now-scrapped teaching license renewal system, and the realities of teacher pay and retirement benefits.
Elementary Teachers Keep Declining Even After Passing: Kochi Notifies 221 Candidates — More Than Double the Planned Hires — as 70% Declined the Year Before Last and 60% Last Year
Yomiuri Shimbun
The Kochi Prefectural Board of Education announced on the 11th the results of its selection process for the public school teacher hiring exam for 2027 appointments. Of the 1,128 people who sat the exam, a total of 382 passed across elementary, junior high, high school, and other prefectural schools. For elementary schools, where successful candidates have frequently turned down offers in recent years, the board notified 221 people that they had passed — more than double the planned number of hires. A supplementary hiring exam, anticipating further declines, will also be held on November 15, a month earlier than last year.
Source: yomiuri.co.jp / Original article here
Because it's just a backup option (a safety net in case their real preference falls through).
Maybe they're applying to multiple places at once?
Did you seriously only ever apply to one school and one job when you were job hunting?
If you want to go permanent, the only way is to take the teacher hiring exam.
You'll pass if you take it — anyone who actually wants to go permanent just needs to sit it.
If even full hiring looks like this, there's no way tons of people are signing up as substitute teachers.
I'd love to see the face of whoever came up with the teaching license renewal system.
They scrapped it out of nowhere and still haven't given any real review or apology.
Meanwhile the ones who went permanent burned out and dropped away…
What's actually different about being a temp? Club activities? Being homeroom teacher?
I had a classmate from elementary school, probably the same Ice Age generation as you, who passed straight through and got hired straight into a permanent elementary post. It was brutal — nonstop overwork on top of student guidance and club duties — and a few years in she had a mental breakdown and quit three years later.
Her husband tells her not to push herself, but she doesn't even have the energy to start a new job, so it looks like she's just going to end up a stay-at-home wife.
Sorry, missed the last part.
But yeah, "the permanent ones burned out" is exactly right.
Is there anywhere else to work besides teaching?
Given the labor shortage, maybe an education faculty at a decent university can still land you something?
Plenty of people quit and move into other fields.
If you burned out as an elementary teacher, there's nowhere left to go but elsewhere.
People at Japanese liberal-arts universities barely study anything anyway, so your faculty doesn't really matter.
Plenty of education-faculty grads end up in the private sector too.
Liberal arts students are just there to goof off anyway, so the faculty doesn't matter at all.
It's just hard to get an elementary teaching license outside of an education faculty.
You can just pass the elementary teacher qualification certification exam instead.
No student teaching required, and anyone with a high school diploma can take it.
Actually, you do need student teaching for that one.
That's fine too, and you can even get it through a correspondence course — but people burn out in year one without knowing what's going on.
Going permanent now would just mean more work, and I'd end up worn down mentally and physically for nothing.
Non-permanent experience doesn't translate into great salary terms anyway.
I'm planning to change careers next year.
Well said, old-timer temp teacher ("rinsai ojisan" — slang for a veteran non-permanent hire).
Is that a rural municipality? In the cities the pay isn't much different from permanent staff.
That system cost us a lot of things for nothing.
The whole setup assumed Ice Age generation salarymen and civil-service hopefuls would just keep sprouting up endlessly.
You won't find many countries this dumb about it.
I think the Ministry of Education really needs to seriously look back at the teaching license renewal system and figure out what that was even for.
Do you really like the risk of being on a contract and getting let go on short notice?
Private elementary schools basically only exist in the greater Tokyo area.
The pay's good, but it's still just as busy.
Even someone who made it all the way to principal is looking at maybe 30 million, if that.
Civil servant retirement payouts have been getting worse and worse for 30 years straight.
Working straight from graduation to retirement gets you only around 20 million. And most people drop out along the way anyway.
What decade are you living in, lol.
Working all the way to retirement gets you 16–20 million.
You clearly don't know the payout multiplier keeps getting cut at every four-year revision — total keyboard-warrior take.
Major corporations pay out 50 million, though.
All that complaining is exactly what led to fewer people wanting to become teachers, and here we are.
Elementary teachers these days are mostly grads from schools you've never heard of (bottom-tier "F-rank" universities), and now even they've stopped coming.
If people are serious about fixing public education, it's about time they dropped the idealism and faced reality.
The point is that school teachers are tied up hand and foot and can't push back on anything, whereas private cram schools are different.
Picking your customers isn't something only cram schools do — plenty of other industries do it too.
Actually, private schools do the same thing, and it's precisely because they choose their students that they can deliver a good education.
You can't provide a good education if you have to take absolutely everyone who walks in.
Private schools only care about students with top grades.
Character doesn't matter to them at all.
Anyway, more importantly — have you figured out what cram schools can and should actually be doing?
Exam history, pass history, hiring history.
Are they a permanent hire or a year-to-year contract instructor?
Parents should get to choose which school to enroll in based on that.
No matter how impressive that résumé looks, it doesn't mean they're a decent human being.
Homeroom teachers aren't announced until the first day of the new term anyway.
With the labor shortage these days, it's completely normal for a first-year homeroom teacher to just be someone covering for a teacher on maternity leave.
And it's hit or miss — sometimes you get a genuinely great veteran — so you really can't say either way.
For the kids it's a homeroom-teacher lottery ("tannin gacha"), and for the teacher it's just as risky — a kid lottery and a parent lottery right back.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The number of people who “pass” a teacher hiring exam doesn’t necessarily match the number who actually get hired. With elementary schools facing a growing shortage of people willing to become teachers, 70% of successful candidates declined before starting the year before last, and 60% declined last year. This time, Kochi Prefecture is trying to fill the gap by notifying 221 candidates that they passed — more than double the number of positions actually planned. Behind this lies the fact that even though the teaching license renewal system was abolished in 2022, the burden of long working hours and club-activity supervision hasn’t changed, and cases of teachers leaving within just a few years of being hired permanently remain common. The thread showed a split between those criticizing the system design that produced this situation and those framing it as a rational choice by teachers who deliberately stay non-permanent. It’s also easy to overlook that a rise in the number of passing candidates doesn’t necessarily mean the teacher shortage is actually being resolved.
※ This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “[Kochi] Elementary Teachers Keep Declining Even After Passing — 221 Notified, More Than Double the Planned Hires — as 70% Declined the Year Before Last and 60% Last Year.”
