Overview
- The Central Council on Education published a draft on Monday that would create a “adjusted class-hour” system letting elementary and junior high schools reduce standard hours for targeted subjects by up to about 15 percent.
- Hours freed by those reductions could be reallocated as discretionary time of roughly up to 70 lessons per year per school, with about 35 lessons reserved for teacher research and training.
- The draft also formalizes a special curriculum for students who are absent from school or who show exceptional talent, allowing learning at education support centers, flexible assessment, and access to higher-level classes while staying enrolled.
- High schools would see unit counting broken into smaller blocks by redefining one unit as 17 lessons, a change that would raise the numeric graduation-unit total in the draft as part of broader flexibility for school-designed subjects.
- Officials and educators warn of practical challenges before rollout, including revising textbooks to match shorter lesson allocations and gathering and sharing workable school-level examples drawn from pilot sites such as Nagoya’s Hibino Junior High.