Japan’s parliament, the Diet, voted this week to make public high school free for all children. Tuition fees had been abolished in 2010, but then reinstated in 2013. The new measure, approved in the budget, will expand equal opportunity in education, and should increase education access and certainty for children of parents with unstable incomes or from immigrant and other marginalized backgrounds who sometimes struggle with the bureaucracy of tuition subsidies.
The initiative was pushed by the small opposition Japan Innovation Party, whose votes the minority government needed to pass the budget. Currently, Japan subsidizes public high school tuition up to $800 annually for students from households earning less than $60,000. The new measure removes the income threshold, aiming to offer free public high school education to all.
International children’s rights law, enshrined in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, obligates countries to progressively make secondary education available and accessible to every child. The United Nations Human Rights Council is now considering efforts to draft an update to this treaty to guarantee all children the right to free public secondary education with the same urgency as the guarantee of free primary education, long ensconced in international law.
Until now, Japan was the wealthiest country in the world, in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, without guaranteed free public secondary education for all. It also spends among the lowest GDP percentage on education among OECD countries. Moreover, access to free education had become increasingly inequitable across the country due to important initiatives by the Osaka prefecture and Tokyo Metropolitan governments to make secondary education free for children in their jurisdictions.
However, the new system maintains inequities in subsidy levels for children who attend public schools versus private schools, who in some circumstances receive greater financial support to cover the higher cost of private education.
Impressively, Japan has almost universal enrollment in schooling, although less so among recent immigrants. But the new measure is an important development in meeting Japan’s international obligations. It is important that the Diet pass an amendment to the Fundamental Law on Education to enshrine this expansion of free education so that these gains are secure from the whims of future governments.
