The declining birthrate in Taiwan continues to affect the education sector, and is becoming more serious with each passing day.
Elementary-school student enrollment is expected to decrease to fewer than 1 million by 2029 and to about 779,000 by the 2039 academic year, the Ministry of Education’s 2024-2039 student number estimation report showed.
From the start of this academic year, the average number of elementary-school students would decrease by 29,000 each year over the next 16 years.
If every class has an average of about 29 children, then about 1,000 classes would be lost each year.
That is a frightening statistic.
The negative effects of these developments would gradually pass on to middle schools, high schools and universities. Media reports have predicted that 40 universities would face the threat of closure due to declining enrollment.
To confront the severe effects of this wave of decreasing student enrollment and school closures, the Ministry of Education should take precautions by implementing suitable countermeasures.
Dramatic decreases in class sizes that cause school closures have a vast and profound impact.
The ministry should focus on two points to mitigate the effects of the falling birthrate and to enable schools to develop in a more sustainable way: the quality of education and the difficulty in opening up positions for new teachers.
As elementary-school enrollment numbers plummet, now is the perfect time to promote and implement concepts that improve the quality of education.
The Ministry of Education should appropriately reduce class sizes each year. It should seek to emulate advanced Western countries, and decrease the number of students in each class from 29 to about 20. This has two benefits.
First, it would slow the negative effect on existing teaching staff.
Second, decreasing the number of students would increase teachers’ understanding and scope of care of their students, thus increasing the efficacy of their instruction and mentorship. Huge class sizes make elementary-school education resemble a general store, but reducing class sizes should allow it to become more like a boutique.
Next, the declining birthrate has led to a phenomenon where schools are unable to hire new teaching staff.
In the past couple of years specifically, there has been a lack of substitute teachers across all counties and cities, and that would only worsen.
Schools are experiencing a situation in which old teachers are not leaving and therefore there are no openings for new teachers, a situation that leads to stagnation in the teaching body of a school.
Taiwan should follow Japan’s example by requiring teachers to transfer to another school in their locality once they have reached a certain number of years of service, thereby allowing the school to bring in new teachers. If Japan can do it, so can Taiwan.
The newly appointed minister of education should sincerely and steadfastly address this problem, using wisdom and courage to plan suitable countermeasures to the birthrate crisis, and allowing the situation to make a turn for the better. Schools should not be harmed by the declining birthrate. Instead, the government should take this opportunity to help elementary schools improve.
Tsai Jr-keng is a retired elementary-school principal.
Translated by Kyra Gustavsen
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