The Ministry of Education held a regional education innovation field roundtable at Gunwi Middle School in Gunwi-gun, Daegu, on the 10th, and presented the "Basic Plan for Education Innovation Leading Districts (draft)" and "Measures to Raise Regional Educational Capacity through Small School Innovation." The core is to abolish the "Recommendation Standard for Fostering Appropriately Sized Schools and Reorganizing Branch Schools" created in 2015, and to let regions set for themselves the criteria and procedures for whether or not to merge schools. It means the ministry will drop the practice in which the central government specified that schools below a certain number of students should be consolidated.
Education Innovation Leading Districts refer to regions that build an educational ecosystem where students can receive quality education in the place where they were born and raised. The Ministry of Education plans to designate about 40 of them, divided into about 30 population-declining areas and areas of population-decline concern, and about 10 others outside the metropolitan area. In the leading districts, the fostering of hub schools through school mergers, methods in which several schools jointly operate curricula, and specialized programs linking schools with local communities will be pursued.
Behind this is a change confirmed daily in classrooms. First-graders in elementary school in 2026 will fall short of 300,000, and the total number of elementary, middle and high school students has dropped below 5 million. The Ministry of Education expects the total number of students to fall to the 3 million range by 2031.
Indicators on the school side draw the same curve. The share of small schools among all schools rose from 23.0% in 2016 to 31.3% in 2025, and as of 2025 there are 3,720 small schools nationwide. Taking population-declining areas alone, that share is 60.1%, meaning six out of every ten schools fall into this category. Under the Ministry of Education's classification, a small school is one with 60 or fewer students in townships (myeon) and remote island or mountain areas, 120 or fewer elementary students in town (eup) areas, and 180 or fewer secondary students.
The heavier side is the list of new students. The number of schools with not a single incoming student rose each year, from 58 in 2021 to 78 in 2022, 102 in 2023, 132 in 2024 and 148 in 2025. That figure has more than doubled in five years.
The support method concentrates benefits on regions that choose consolidation. When schools are merged, 5 billion won for dormitory construction, 4 billion won for building multipurpose school facilities and 2 billion won for the use of closed schools are attached as a package, and if three schools are merged into one, financial support of about 40 billion won is provided along with infrastructure such as dormitories. The amount going into a single leading district is written differently depending on the document, as 10 billion won over up to five years and as 2 billion won, and the documents do not state whether this is the figure for national funding only or the total including the package. The timing of designation is likewise mentioned both as designation this year and as full implementation in 2027.
The reason this policy was announced in Gunwi is also clear. Kang Eun-hee, superintendent of the Daegu Metropolitan Office of Education, said that in the course of Gunwi-gun being incorporated into Daegu in 2023, the number of students fell by about 100. In Gunwi, the strengthening of educational capacity at elementary, middle and high schools, international and future school programs, and IB education have been introduced and are in operation. The Ministry of Education plans to take this place as a model for leading districts and expand the project to population-declining areas nationwide.
The plan also reflects the point that money and buildings alone do not revive a school. It includes expanding the authority of the superintendent of district offices of education, providing official residences to teachers newly assigned to farming and fishing villages, and letting regions organize teachers' learning communities on their own. Underlying it is the recognition that unless conditions are created for teaching staff to stay, even a merged hub school will have difficulty holding out for long.
The success or failure of the system ultimately depends on how regions write the criteria for consolidation. Whether the voices of parents and residents will fill those criteria after the central recommendation standard disappears, or whether the size of the budget will take over that role, may differ from region to region. The circumstances of children whose commuting distance grows and children who will enter dormitories also have to be dealt with within those criteria.
What the adults seated at the Gunwi Middle School roundtable discussed was the question of how many schools to leave, but where that decision lands is the morning walk to school of children who shoulder their bags and leave home. In a country where schools with zero incoming students have reached 148, the state has for the first time written down "which places to grow." From the moment the list of 40 comes out, this transition will be drawn on the map.
