The number of defector-students attending South Korean schools has increased by 161 over the last year, reaching an all-time high of 2,183.
According to a new, 2014 Ministry of Education report on the defector-student population, 1128 (51.7%) of these are elementary school students, 684 (31.3%) are attending middle schools, and 371 are in high school (17.0%). The total, 2183, is nearly double the number in the period 2008-9, when the government began to gather the statistics in question.
Within these figures, the number of children born in third countries to defector parents increased by 139 students to 979, meaning that such students now make up 44.9% of all defector-students.
At the same time, the dropout rate for defector-students has continued to decline; from 10.8% in 2008, 6.1% in 2009, and 4.9% in 2010, then all the way down to 3.5% in 2013 and 2.5% this year. Problematically, however, the dropout rate increases in the higher echelons of state education; for elementary school students it is just 0.6%, but creeps up to 3.1% in middle school, and hits 7.5% at the high school level.
The Ministry of Education attributes the declining overall dropout rate to mentoring programs tailored to needs of defector-students, increasing availability of supplementary teaching materials, and training for school faculty members aimed at managing problems specific to the defector community.
