EduCareer StaffBlog"Rinjin Blog" | "EduCareer"Supporting your career in English teaching in the Japanese school system

Primary School Education

2009/09/28

I have been thinking recently about primary school education after reading an article on a British Education website a few days ago. The article reported that 4 out of every 5 applications for primary school teaching positions in the UK are from female applicants. After looking at one set of statistics I was interested to find out more and had a quick search on the internet and found a rough set of international statistics. Here are some selected countries and their results from 2008;

After looking at the statistics Japan also has a quite high ratio of female to male teachers, although not as high as a lot of European countries, at 64.9 to 35.1. The only country with a higher ratio of men than women is Turkey, with a 46.8 to 53.2 ratio. Possibly the most obvious statistic is that of Russia, where a mere 1.5% of primary school teachers are male.

Looking back to my own primary school days as far as memory serves me I had a male teacher for only 1 year out of 7 and have never thought of it being unusual. The argument on the website I looked at was that children need male role models in school, especially if they don't have a father figure at home, this is especially important for male students

This leads me on to thinking about the rate within the native English teacher community here in Japan. While I think it is fair to say that there are more male English teachers than female ones, I also think that there are generally more male elementary school teachers than female teachers. Of course I am solely basing this on date from our company so these are not the most accurate statistics rather assumptions, but I was wondering if this ratio is due to teacher preference or just happens to be wherever the teacher was placed if they are sent through a dispatch agency...

So how about all of you teachers out there? Has being in Japan made you consider a career in teaching? Or maybe the complete opposite, so if or when you go home you never want to step foot inside the classroom ever again?! How about those of you who came here with a valid teaching license or experience, how has teaching been in Japan for you?

I would love to hear from you all, I look forward to be able to write about your experiences in my next blog.

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