Yes and no. Portugal has a contest model and it's a country wide system. You can try only in your area but if you had just started there is a good possibility that all the spots will be taken by experienced teachers.
In some areas, this is so well known that the new teachers will need to accept to be randomly put anywhere in the country. You can end up 6 hours away. And this is a yearly occurrence. Next year go back to north etc. sometimes if you want to stay close they only give you a work schedule that is less than full-time which will make it worse for you if you actually want to move up your career as a teacher.
The schools don't choose, it goes by your number in the contest that goes up or down by the hours you worked, your teaching grade and a few other things.
Currently a bit better because of a huge teacher shortage but it still happens in the big cities of course. It only gets better when you have 10+ years of experience then you'll likely stay in your residence area (can still be almost 1h from home though)
Thank you for your input! It sounds like a similar system. Sounds like the teachers are placed countrywide rather than prefectural wide in Portugal. Sorry for a further question, but is education controlled centrally or managed by each prefecture?
Centrally! Portugal is a small country, it doesn't need to be by prefecture!
As a teacher you can choose what prefecture you want to work but there is not a guarantee you get a spot.
A big thing is that in Japan a lot of people get moved in a company to different offices as well. I find it insane cos it massively impacts families and marriages as well as stopping a lot of relationships.
In the US the school district can move you if there’s a real need or shortage in a specific school but usually not. You still see many teachers at the same school for years. However, it’s taken to another extreme in Japan and I don’t know why Japanese teachers accept the system. It’s crazy to me the teachers have no stability and could get shipped out to some far away place weeks before a new school year
They accept it because they work for the BoE, not the school. The thought process behind it is that it keeps teachers motivated, keeps education fair (you can't gather all the "good" teachers in one school), and allows for more exchange of ideas between teachers which improves the education system as a whole
It’s crazy because as someone in a rural school with more difficult students, teachers adapt to the students and learn how to control them and then get swapped out for teachers who have no idea how to handle the students, leading to a whole year of complete chaos and dropped grades. It seems moreso that at least teachers in these chaotic schools only have to count down the years until they get shuffled.
At the end of the day though, if you say, these students are difficult so we can't transfer the teachers, then they will never be able to do it. The vast majority of kids aren't anything crazy difficult to teach....so you basically risk a few falling through the cracks for a year or two to benefit the rest. It sounds harsh, but I feel like when compared to America, it is a much fairer system. Also, in most cases, only about 15-20% of the staff is transferred in one year, so the remaining staff can be there to help the new teachers deal with the real problem kids.
I disagree completely. It is placing a huge amount of undue stress on these teachers who get transferred in, especially this year when by chance the ichinenbu is all new teachers. It’s not just a couple kids, it’s entire classes who lose the run of themselves. I don’t see at all how it is any fairer than other systems (I’m not american so idk about america).
At the end of the day, the teacher controls the class, if a shit teacher comes in, its on them....some classes are hopeless, but I have been teaching here for 9 years, 2 as a licensed JTE, 5 as an ALT, and 2 as eikaiwa/college, and I have seen 1 class that was beyond fixing out of the 18 schools I have been too and 15000+ kids I have seen.
Some teachers are just better than others, which is why these shifts needs to happen.
What do you mean by "far away?" A BoE doesn't want to pay a ton in travel expenses so they try to avoid great distances between home and workplace.
A lot of teachers are happy to move. It keeps it fresh, they can try new things, etc.. They also know when they're moving and where to well before they actually move, so maybe you didn't know a teacher was moving until a couple of weeks before, they absolutely did.
Prefectures can be as big as some countries, I've known a teacher that was moved to an island that required a long ferry trip or a plane so I didn't see them for a couple of years.
I understand this keeps the rural schools from being completely bad, so not opposed to it on principle, but I wish they had more lead time to plan things out, they seem to only be told at the beginning of the year.
What? Everyone finds out on the same day in my prefecture at the high school level. They found out about two weeks before the next school year starts. It's, of course, more usual to get an inconvenient placement that's like 2 hours away from your house or something than to get shipped off to an island or the mountains, but it still happens here.
My wife is a public school teacher, and while the official employer is different, the union is the same, so I'm finding it hard to believe that the terms of their contracts are so vastly different. I suspect it's the same as teachers working insane hours of overtime. They have more rights than they're sticking up for.
Maybe??? I doubt it. Your wife is working for a specific BOE, which might be municipal or prefectural. In my prefecture, it's literally announced all at once at the same time. It being the positions of all high school teachers. I guess it's possible this is illegal and thousands of teachers all agree to let it slide but I simply doubt it
They can and will move teachers far away from where their families are located. These are usually teachers who made the wrong person angry, though. The last teacher I knew who suffered something like that was moved because he got a new fiancée. A week after she graduated from being in his home room. I work in private schools now, so this isn’t really a thing. Not the creepy teachers, the repercussions.
I'm in a prefecture with a bunch of islands. Every teacher has to do their time on them. What I always wonder is what about those teachers' families? Do their kids have to move too? What about the kids' school and social lives? What about their spouses? Do these families just have to spend years living apart?
In the US, you tell someone to move to some island hours away from their wife and kids for several years, chances are they'll tell you to fuck off, and that'll probably be seen as an unreasonable request if you try to fire them over it too. I know it's a lot more normal for families to be separated for work here, but I don't think that's a good thing.
One of the English teachers I'm friendly with has a pair of twins in elementary school, and both her and her husband are teachers at different schools. Every year they're worrying about whether they're gonna be moved in such a way that they can't live together, and what they're gonna do about the kids in that case, and how to make sure their kids' lives aren't disrupted, et cetera.
It’s probably not going to happen. They might need to spend more time on the commute, but unless something horrible is going on, they’ll be with their families.
My thoughts exactly. I’m not exactly sure what the benefits are, but it does make me sad when good coworkers have no choice but to transfer schools. The system certainly feels unique but I have no experience with school systems aside from the US and Japan.
The fairness part should make sense to you as an American. In Japan, a single school within a BOE can’t hoard all the best teachers so they can be “elite” over decades.
The idea being that good teachers can rotate and teach a greater variety of students should, in theory, be way better than the US. It does suck to see coworkers leave, but you aren’t there to be friends with your coworkers.
Because there is stability and it’s not random. Without requesting a transfer the first school you go to is 4 years, then 8 for the second (usually).
I’ve seen teachers at the same school for 10+ years.
>I don’t know why Japanese teachers accept the system.
1. Public teachers work for the BOE, not a specific school. To begin with they only choose the prefecture they work in, not the school, so while some may wind up attached to the school, others are just as likely to be happy to move. Some even consider the regular movement as a perk that changes things up every few years.
2. The point of the system is to prevent accumulation of teachers by any one school, as well as to prevent entrenchment. Banks do the same thing. Having teachers not be entrenched in the community means they're less likely to have personal connections that create a conflict of interest. Public teachers in particular are also public servants, with special privileges that make entrenchment a more significant risk.
3. The moving around thing is primarily part of the public system. Teachers who specifically want to work at one school for a decade or more have the opportunity to do so in the private sector. In other words, you don't even need to accept the system to become a teacher, it's just that teachers who dislike that system gravitate towards the private sector.
TL;DR: it's not all teachers, nor is it done without reason. Teachers in the public sector either know this or don't care, and the ones who are set on the idea of not being moved about will generally gravitate towards the private sector.
This is similar to the military. If someone was performing poorly or don’t get along with the other teachers, it gives them a chance to try again with people who don’t have the same low judgment of them already. If they’re getting promoted, they get to start fresh without the baggage of former peers being jealous or trying to ask for exceptions, leniency, favors, etc. There can also be reasons that a teacher wants to transfer to another school or region, like being closer to relatives who are older or in poor health.
But yeah, very different from what I remember of US schools where teachers can teach the same grades for decades or their whole career.
Some of it may be just to give kids different experiences with different styles of teaching. Hard to say for certain.
The exception being private schools in Japan- you go the other extreme there. Most of the retiring teachers this year had spent close on forty years at the school. This is almost unheard of in UK private schools.
There are some positives. Since it’s difficult to fire the bad apples, it keeps them moving around so they don’t cause too much damage at any one place.
This happens in Europre for 100s of years, so the way teachers get moved made me think of this. Its like how French police were not able to be police in the area they grew up with and had to moved every few years, it has good and bad things, Stops corruption but also stops police being part of the community.
I don't know other countries, but here, there are slight differences between prefectures. Basically, the flow of personnel transfers is as follows. Mid-December: Teachers at each school submit their wishes for the next year to the principal. Late December: The principal summarizes this and adds their own thoughts and then presents it to the Board of Education. From January...the Board of Education begins to work on personnel changes based on the principal's opinion. At the same time, they are also tracking retirees (other than those who have reached retirement age). Late January: Appointment examinations will be held for candidates for management positions for the next fiscal year. (Principal, then vice principal, etc.) It will be finalized in late February. Transfers will be announced from mid-March (Principal, Vice Principal, Superintendent, General Teachers around the 25th) Everybody is informed of the length of service at each school, the placement of subjects, and if the school has received "special research designation," the teacher doesn't move. Various considerations for this like extracurricular activities and it's more common in high school. In some cases, wishes may come true, and in others, they may not. The Board of Education makes its own decisions. You can choose your destination, however, there is little chance that this wish will come true. Personnel changes at the Board of Education are a clerical task, like moving pieces. My local government is an ordinance-designated city with a population of 1 million. Faculty personnel transfers are managed by four personnel officers.
Teachers do move schools in British Columbia, where I grew up. I don't know the specifics, though. I suspect it's a couple things. A mix of policy and teachers switching to schools that are better located for them or openings to teach the grade they prefer. I don't think it's that odd to move teachers around a bit.
The thing that Japan does that I find odd is the teachers teach different grades every year. Grade six one year, then grade 2 the next. One teacher I worked with complained about it. He wasn't able to iterate or improve specific lessons since he'd be teaching a different grade the next year. It could be years before he taught that grade again.
I was going to say this too. I'd like to add to your answer though - from my observations teachers in Korea can at least request their next placement - my former co-teacher told me how she requested a specific school.
Japanese teachers don't seem to have this freedom though. They go where they get sent, based on whatever backroom deals are made between the various superintendents.
Yeah. I was surprised by this system too. Some of my teachers back in the uk had been at their school for decades.
The moving around also happens at the city halls. It is definitely not a successful model. It means that no one ever becomes experienced at their job and so everything takes twice as long and never gets done correctly.
Yeah I spoke to teachers about how how in the UK a teacher could spend their whole life at one school if they wanted to and they found that weird, but they can still move if they want. I would have found it weird if every year half of my teachers left the school and we got new ones.
In the US, my district does this so that principals and teachers don’t get too “relaxed”. I think it just depends on your district’s elected officials.
Public school teachers in Korea also rotate roughly every 5 years. I’ve been told they can be reassigned to a school within an hour drive of their residence. There’s also some kind of point system in place. Teachers can opt to move after one year but if they do they have no choice in where they go. The longer they stay at one school the more preference they have in their next assignment. Schools in less desirable areas (lower income/less central) are worth more points. Also if you take certain roles/responsibilities (Head teacher) you earn points.
Imagine settling down, building a house etc., and then you get moved to the other side of the prefecture on the whim of some bureaucrat once a year. It's insanity.
Yes and no. Portugal has a contest model and it's a country wide system. You can try only in your area but if you had just started there is a good possibility that all the spots will be taken by experienced teachers. In some areas, this is so well known that the new teachers will need to accept to be randomly put anywhere in the country. You can end up 6 hours away. And this is a yearly occurrence. Next year go back to north etc. sometimes if you want to stay close they only give you a work schedule that is less than full-time which will make it worse for you if you actually want to move up your career as a teacher. The schools don't choose, it goes by your number in the contest that goes up or down by the hours you worked, your teaching grade and a few other things. Currently a bit better because of a huge teacher shortage but it still happens in the big cities of course. It only gets better when you have 10+ years of experience then you'll likely stay in your residence area (can still be almost 1h from home though)
Thank you for your input! It sounds like a similar system. Sounds like the teachers are placed countrywide rather than prefectural wide in Portugal. Sorry for a further question, but is education controlled centrally or managed by each prefecture?
Centrally! Portugal is a small country, it doesn't need to be by prefecture! As a teacher you can choose what prefecture you want to work but there is not a guarantee you get a spot.
Wow! Thanks so much for the reply!
A big thing is that in Japan a lot of people get moved in a company to different offices as well. I find it insane cos it massively impacts families and marriages as well as stopping a lot of relationships.
In the US the school district can move you if there’s a real need or shortage in a specific school but usually not. You still see many teachers at the same school for years. However, it’s taken to another extreme in Japan and I don’t know why Japanese teachers accept the system. It’s crazy to me the teachers have no stability and could get shipped out to some far away place weeks before a new school year
They accept it because they work for the BoE, not the school. The thought process behind it is that it keeps teachers motivated, keeps education fair (you can't gather all the "good" teachers in one school), and allows for more exchange of ideas between teachers which improves the education system as a whole
It’s crazy because as someone in a rural school with more difficult students, teachers adapt to the students and learn how to control them and then get swapped out for teachers who have no idea how to handle the students, leading to a whole year of complete chaos and dropped grades. It seems moreso that at least teachers in these chaotic schools only have to count down the years until they get shuffled.
At the end of the day though, if you say, these students are difficult so we can't transfer the teachers, then they will never be able to do it. The vast majority of kids aren't anything crazy difficult to teach....so you basically risk a few falling through the cracks for a year or two to benefit the rest. It sounds harsh, but I feel like when compared to America, it is a much fairer system. Also, in most cases, only about 15-20% of the staff is transferred in one year, so the remaining staff can be there to help the new teachers deal with the real problem kids.
I disagree completely. It is placing a huge amount of undue stress on these teachers who get transferred in, especially this year when by chance the ichinenbu is all new teachers. It’s not just a couple kids, it’s entire classes who lose the run of themselves. I don’t see at all how it is any fairer than other systems (I’m not american so idk about america).
At the end of the day, the teacher controls the class, if a shit teacher comes in, its on them....some classes are hopeless, but I have been teaching here for 9 years, 2 as a licensed JTE, 5 as an ALT, and 2 as eikaiwa/college, and I have seen 1 class that was beyond fixing out of the 18 schools I have been too and 15000+ kids I have seen. Some teachers are just better than others, which is why these shifts needs to happen.
What do you mean by "far away?" A BoE doesn't want to pay a ton in travel expenses so they try to avoid great distances between home and workplace. A lot of teachers are happy to move. It keeps it fresh, they can try new things, etc.. They also know when they're moving and where to well before they actually move, so maybe you didn't know a teacher was moving until a couple of weeks before, they absolutely did.
Prefectures can be as big as some countries, I've known a teacher that was moved to an island that required a long ferry trip or a plane so I didn't see them for a couple of years. I understand this keeps the rural schools from being completely bad, so not opposed to it on principle, but I wish they had more lead time to plan things out, they seem to only be told at the beginning of the year.
Maybe it depends on the prefecture, but in Hokkaido they are told after the school year ends. So 10-14 days before starting. It's really stupid.
What? Everyone finds out on the same day in my prefecture at the high school level. They found out about two weeks before the next school year starts. It's, of course, more usual to get an inconvenient placement that's like 2 hours away from your house or something than to get shipped off to an island or the mountains, but it still happens here.
My wife is a public school teacher, and while the official employer is different, the union is the same, so I'm finding it hard to believe that the terms of their contracts are so vastly different. I suspect it's the same as teachers working insane hours of overtime. They have more rights than they're sticking up for.
Maybe??? I doubt it. Your wife is working for a specific BOE, which might be municipal or prefectural. In my prefecture, it's literally announced all at once at the same time. It being the positions of all high school teachers. I guess it's possible this is illegal and thousands of teachers all agree to let it slide but I simply doubt it
They can and will move teachers far away from where their families are located. These are usually teachers who made the wrong person angry, though. The last teacher I knew who suffered something like that was moved because he got a new fiancée. A week after she graduated from being in his home room. I work in private schools now, so this isn’t really a thing. Not the creepy teachers, the repercussions.
I'm in a prefecture with a bunch of islands. Every teacher has to do their time on them. What I always wonder is what about those teachers' families? Do their kids have to move too? What about the kids' school and social lives? What about their spouses? Do these families just have to spend years living apart? In the US, you tell someone to move to some island hours away from their wife and kids for several years, chances are they'll tell you to fuck off, and that'll probably be seen as an unreasonable request if you try to fire them over it too. I know it's a lot more normal for families to be separated for work here, but I don't think that's a good thing. One of the English teachers I'm friendly with has a pair of twins in elementary school, and both her and her husband are teachers at different schools. Every year they're worrying about whether they're gonna be moved in such a way that they can't live together, and what they're gonna do about the kids in that case, and how to make sure their kids' lives aren't disrupted, et cetera.
It’s probably not going to happen. They might need to spend more time on the commute, but unless something horrible is going on, they’ll be with their families.
My thoughts exactly. I’m not exactly sure what the benefits are, but it does make me sad when good coworkers have no choice but to transfer schools. The system certainly feels unique but I have no experience with school systems aside from the US and Japan.
The fairness part should make sense to you as an American. In Japan, a single school within a BOE can’t hoard all the best teachers so they can be “elite” over decades. The idea being that good teachers can rotate and teach a greater variety of students should, in theory, be way better than the US. It does suck to see coworkers leave, but you aren’t there to be friends with your coworkers.
Very true. I can see how transferring teachers may even out the teaching talent for all students. US public schools definitely lack that.
Because there is stability and it’s not random. Without requesting a transfer the first school you go to is 4 years, then 8 for the second (usually). I’ve seen teachers at the same school for 10+ years.
There isn’t though… teachers I worked with didn’t know which schools they’d be placed in weeks before the new school year
They’ll say “oh who knows” but really they have a pretty good idea.
The thing is teachers request a place and might not get and can be moved to a worse place.
Yes or denied. Still there is a usually time frame in which they can expect a transfer. It’s not just year to year.
>I don’t know why Japanese teachers accept the system. 1. Public teachers work for the BOE, not a specific school. To begin with they only choose the prefecture they work in, not the school, so while some may wind up attached to the school, others are just as likely to be happy to move. Some even consider the regular movement as a perk that changes things up every few years. 2. The point of the system is to prevent accumulation of teachers by any one school, as well as to prevent entrenchment. Banks do the same thing. Having teachers not be entrenched in the community means they're less likely to have personal connections that create a conflict of interest. Public teachers in particular are also public servants, with special privileges that make entrenchment a more significant risk. 3. The moving around thing is primarily part of the public system. Teachers who specifically want to work at one school for a decade or more have the opportunity to do so in the private sector. In other words, you don't even need to accept the system to become a teacher, it's just that teachers who dislike that system gravitate towards the private sector. TL;DR: it's not all teachers, nor is it done without reason. Teachers in the public sector either know this or don't care, and the ones who are set on the idea of not being moved about will generally gravitate towards the private sector.
This is similar to the military. If someone was performing poorly or don’t get along with the other teachers, it gives them a chance to try again with people who don’t have the same low judgment of them already. If they’re getting promoted, they get to start fresh without the baggage of former peers being jealous or trying to ask for exceptions, leniency, favors, etc. There can also be reasons that a teacher wants to transfer to another school or region, like being closer to relatives who are older or in poor health. But yeah, very different from what I remember of US schools where teachers can teach the same grades for decades or their whole career. Some of it may be just to give kids different experiences with different styles of teaching. Hard to say for certain.
The exception being private schools in Japan- you go the other extreme there. Most of the retiring teachers this year had spent close on forty years at the school. This is almost unheard of in UK private schools.
In Canada this is a thing for higher up admin staff, like principals. Principals switch out every 3 years or so.
There are some positives. Since it’s difficult to fire the bad apples, it keeps them moving around so they don’t cause too much damage at any one place.
They're contarcted to the BOE, not individual schools.
I hear they also rotate police, so you’re at a koban just for a while. Theory is to reduce corruption.
This happens in Europre for 100s of years, so the way teachers get moved made me think of this. Its like how French police were not able to be police in the area they grew up with and had to moved every few years, it has good and bad things, Stops corruption but also stops police being part of the community.
I don't know other countries, but here, there are slight differences between prefectures. Basically, the flow of personnel transfers is as follows. Mid-December: Teachers at each school submit their wishes for the next year to the principal. Late December: The principal summarizes this and adds their own thoughts and then presents it to the Board of Education. From January...the Board of Education begins to work on personnel changes based on the principal's opinion. At the same time, they are also tracking retirees (other than those who have reached retirement age). Late January: Appointment examinations will be held for candidates for management positions for the next fiscal year. (Principal, then vice principal, etc.) It will be finalized in late February. Transfers will be announced from mid-March (Principal, Vice Principal, Superintendent, General Teachers around the 25th) Everybody is informed of the length of service at each school, the placement of subjects, and if the school has received "special research designation," the teacher doesn't move. Various considerations for this like extracurricular activities and it's more common in high school. In some cases, wishes may come true, and in others, they may not. The Board of Education makes its own decisions. You can choose your destination, however, there is little chance that this wish will come true. Personnel changes at the Board of Education are a clerical task, like moving pieces. My local government is an ordinance-designated city with a population of 1 million. Faculty personnel transfers are managed by four personnel officers.
Teachers do move schools in British Columbia, where I grew up. I don't know the specifics, though. I suspect it's a couple things. A mix of policy and teachers switching to schools that are better located for them or openings to teach the grade they prefer. I don't think it's that odd to move teachers around a bit. The thing that Japan does that I find odd is the teachers teach different grades every year. Grade six one year, then grade 2 the next. One teacher I worked with complained about it. He wasn't able to iterate or improve specific lessons since he'd be teaching a different grade the next year. It could be years before he taught that grade again.
Korea does this. Usually teachers can't stay at a school for more than 5 years.
I was going to say this too. I'd like to add to your answer though - from my observations teachers in Korea can at least request their next placement - my former co-teacher told me how she requested a specific school. Japanese teachers don't seem to have this freedom though. They go where they get sent, based on whatever backroom deals are made between the various superintendents.
Japanese teachers do actually request where they want to be spent, its just probably unlikely as its normally something others want.
Yeah. I was surprised by this system too. Some of my teachers back in the uk had been at their school for decades. The moving around also happens at the city halls. It is definitely not a successful model. It means that no one ever becomes experienced at their job and so everything takes twice as long and never gets done correctly.
Yeah I spoke to teachers about how how in the UK a teacher could spend their whole life at one school if they wanted to and they found that weird, but they can still move if they want. I would have found it weird if every year half of my teachers left the school and we got new ones.
In the US, my district does this so that principals and teachers don’t get too “relaxed”. I think it just depends on your district’s elected officials.
Public school teachers in Korea also rotate roughly every 5 years. I’ve been told they can be reassigned to a school within an hour drive of their residence. There’s also some kind of point system in place. Teachers can opt to move after one year but if they do they have no choice in where they go. The longer they stay at one school the more preference they have in their next assignment. Schools in less desirable areas (lower income/less central) are worth more points. Also if you take certain roles/responsibilities (Head teacher) you earn points.
Imagine settling down, building a house etc., and then you get moved to the other side of the prefecture on the whim of some bureaucrat once a year. It's insanity.
Its one of the many things that makes it harder to have a family in Japan.
No it’s not