The number of foreign children of elementary or junior high school age living in Japan who were not or may not have been in education amounted to 8,432 as of May 2024, an education ministry survey showed Thursday.
This represents a decrease of 169 from the previous year's survey.
The total number of foreign children registered in Japan as residents eligible for education at elementary or junior high schools stood at 163,358, up by 12,663.
Of the total, 114,792 were elementary school students and 48,566 were junior high school students, marking year-on-year increases of 8,252 and 4,411, respectively.
The survey covered education boards in 1,741 municipalities nationwide.
In the first survey conducted in 2019, nearly 20,000 foreign children in Japan were identified as possibly not attending school. Since then, local education boards in each municipality gained a better understanding of the actual situation, with the number standing at around 8,000 since 2022.
The ministry believes that the decrease came from local governments' efforts to grasp the situation of school attendance and to spread information on securing school attendance opportunities.
The proportion of municipalities with one or more foreign-registered children was 74.0%, while that of municipalities with 10 or more was 42.3%, both up from the previous survey.
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