The National Education Commission is reviewing a plan to keep lower-grade elementary school students in school until 3 p.m. For first-graders at Seoul elementary schools, dismissal times vary by school and by day of the week, but the median falls between 12:50 p.m. and 1:40 p.m., based on 223 schools in the 2026 academic year. Now a paper has challenged the statistical reasoning behind a proposal from the National Assembly Futures Institute to expand instruction time.
A paper by Kim Min-kyu, a teacher at Bonwon Elementary School, published on the 16th in the Korean Journal of Teacher Education, the journal of the Korean Society for the Study of Teacher Education, found that the institute's July proposal to extend class hours for first- and second-graders has limitations in both its statistical basis and its feasibility. The paper is titled "Is Expanding Regular Class Hours a Valid Means of Closing the Childcare Gap?"
The institute said at the time that Korean elementary schools provide an average of 655 hours of instruction a year, 190 hours less than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average of 845 hours, and proposed raising class hours for first- and second-graders to the OECD average in phases.
Kim countered that the OECD's published average for elementary schools in 2025 was 804 hours, 41 hours lower than the 845 hours cited by the institute.
That narrows the gap between Korea and the OECD average to 149 hours rather than the 190 hours the institute presented, he said.
Korea's elementary instruction time also appears shorter because the OECD converts each country's class hours into 60-minute units for comparison, according to the paper.
A class period in Korean elementary schools runs 40 minutes, and students take an average of 982 periods a year. Converted into 60-minute units, that comes to 655 hours.
"Looking only at the number of class periods, Korea is on par with the countries at the top of the OECD rankings for instruction time," Kim said. "It is not appropriate to conclude that educational and childcare functions are inadequate simply because annual instruction hours are short."
He noted in particular that OECD instruction-time statistics measure only the regular curriculum, excluding after-school care, which limits their usefulness as an indicator of childcare gaps.
He also argued that childcare gaps stem from a mix of factors, including parents' working conditions, children's adjustment to school and the need for an adult to accompany them to and from school, making it difficult to conclude that longer regular class hours alone can solve the problem.
Before extending class hours, Kim recommended weighing other policy tools such as expanding childcare facilities outside schools and shortening working hours for parents of young children, while taking account of regional staffing conditions for teachers and students' developmental characteristics.
The commission held a policy forum on the 3rd of last month with the National Assembly Futures Institute and other organizations to discuss extending instruction time for lower elementary grades.
Teachers' groups subsequently argued that longer instruction time would shift childcare responsibilities onto schools and increase students' study burden. Last month, more than 54,000 people signed a statement opposing the 3 p.m. dismissal plan.
The commission plans to deliberate and vote within the coming month on whether to proceed with a process for gathering and reconciling public opinion on the 3 p.m. dismissal system.