The Korean Educational Development Institute (한국교육개발원) issued its "Education Policy Forum" on Sept. 4. In it, the number of teacher protection committee deliberations for the 2024 school year is put at 4,034. Compared with five years earlier, that is 3.4 times as many.
Of the deliberations in the 2024 school year, 59% came from middle schools.
In middle schools, students deliberately disrupting class was named as the main type. In elementary schools, repeated unreasonable interference by parents was cited as the most common form, and a little more than three out of every ten elementary school deliberations over infringement of educational activity involved guardians.
A teacher protection committee is convened at the school or the district office of education when an infringement of educational activity occurs. It deliberates on whether to acknowledge that an infringement took place, how to protect the teacher, and what measure to impose on the student. Once the procedure runs its course, a record remains and a measure is issued.
Traces of classrooms becoming harder are stamped on other statistics as well. School safety accidents tallied by the School Safety Mutual Aid Federation (학교안전공제중앙회) rose for three years in a row, from 193,177 in 2023 to 211,650 in 2024 and 220,136 in 2025. These are matters different in nature from committee deliberations, but the fact that more of what happens at schools is being filed through official procedures each year is the same.
Detailed figures have been released only through the 2024 school year. The number of committees held in the 2025 school year was covered as well, but it is not at a stage where the breakdown by school level or the types can be examined.
About half of the committees under the Ministry of Education did not hold a single in-person meeting during 2025. Nine committees have had no substantive activity for four years. The Educational Facilities Policy Committee, which deliberates on safety and maintenance standards for educational facilities, has been run only through written meetings in 2026.
The figure of 4,034 is also a signal that a channel for protecting teachers has opened. Matters that a homeroom teacher would once have swallowed alone now become items on a committee agenda. That in itself is progress. Procedures for the teachers and students, and the teachers and guardians, who have to sit facing each other again in the same classroom after a deliberation ends have not thickened to the same degree.
What has to be checked when the next data comes out is, more than the size of the increase, how the schools that went through deliberations fared afterward. If the record of measures and the course of events after them are released together, there will be grounds for designing what follows punishment.
