Chungcheongbuk-do to place NSETs in every school by 2014

[Update: And in a human interest story, Herald Gyeongje reported today that a foreign affairs police officer in Geumsan, Chungcheongnam-do was contacted through Kakao Talk by an elementary school native speaking teacher last Friday who asked if he knew how to find her bag which she forgot on a bus. Her friend apparently knew the officer and connected them, and he managed to track down the bag through the company and return it to her Monday.]

Yonhap reported on July 20 that Chungcheongbuk-do plans to place native speaking English assistant teachers in all of its schools by 2014.

According to the Chungcheongbuk provincial education office, from second semester this year to first semester of 2014, around 30 native speaking teachers will be added each semester until there is an NSET in each school.

Currently there are 285 NSETs in 408 of the 470 schools in the province. They've been placed in 256 elementary schools, 125 middle schools, and 27 high schools. The office of education plans to increase the number of NSETs to around 400 by 2014.

The education office's school policy commissioner said, "To increase students' proficiency in English we decided to place native speaking English assistant teachers in every school."

So not every province is following the lead of Gyeonggi-do, Seoul and Busan in cutting foreign teachers, but then most provinces never had the placement rates these cities did. As pointed out in this post, the chart posted here shows that in 2010 Chungcheongbuk-do had the second highest number of students per NSET in the country and the lowest percentage of schools with NSETs. As we see above, with 285 NSETs in 408 schools, there are a lot of teachers working in at least two schools. The increases in NSET placement over the next two years is obviously intended to reduce the number of schools they work in to just one.

Also of interest might be this Newsis article from May 17 titled "Native speaking teachers effectiveness is high at elementary and middle school level"

A study has found that native speaking teachers are more useful in elementary and middle schools than in high schools.

According to a study released by the Seoul education research and information center on May 17 titled "English education effectiveness and utilization of native speaking assistant teachers," the higher the grade of the student, the more they had a negative perception of the NSET's class.

It goes on to state that perceptions of NSETs were highest among elementary school students and lowest among academic high school students.