Japan to Reduce Teachers’ Burden of Handling School Lunch Fees

August 15, 2018

Tokyo- In a bid to save teachers from heavy workloads, the education ministry will compile by the end of next March guidelines on how to reduce their burden of collecting and managing school lunch fees, informed sources have said.

As part of work style reforms for teachers, the guidelines will show, among other things, cases in which school lunch fees are managed by municipalities, rather than by schools themselves, the sources said.

One factor that makes the fee collection work burdensome is that teachers need to deal with delinquencies. They often have to meet parents or guardians at night or over the weekend to ask them to pay overdue fees, being forced to work extra hours.

Late last year, the Central Council for Education, which advises the education minister, suggested that entities other than schools, such as local education boards, should take charge of collecting and managing school lunch fees in principle.

The ministry believes that teachers' workloads can be reduced if school lunch fees are managed by municipal governments and staff of local education boards deal with parents or guardians who have not paid fees.

The guidelines will also show how municipalities with remote islands deploy staff for the lunch fee-related tasks and an example in which an electronic system is used to indicate how collection is going, according to the sources.

Tips for helping collect overdue fees will be also be included. In one case to be in the guidelines, education board staff successfully collected overdue fees by cooperating with a debt- and tax-linked department directly under the head of the municipality, the sources said.

In addition, the ministry will present effective ways to persuade parents and guardians to accept a switch to automatic transfers of lunch fees from their deposit accounts, from the existing system of collecting the fees from students at schools, the sources said.

According to a sampling survey by the ministry, 60.3 pct of schools managed lunch fees on their own in fiscal 2016, while 39.7 pct had municipalities take care of them. Jiji Press