Consequently, families, schools, and local communities must fulfill their respective roles and the work together as one to resolve these problems. Under the leadership of their principals, schools must endeavor to establish systems for student guidance in which the whole school works in unison to understand schoolchildren better and to enable them to enjoy their time at school.

For that purpose, MEXT is pursuing measures from the following perspectives:

## (1) Achieving Easy-to-Understand Classes, Enjoyable Schools and Augmenting Emotional Education

Schools must be places where children can enjoy learning and energetically engage in activities, and also gain a true sense of their own identity and discover the pleasure of self-actualization. In connection to this idea of enhancing education by cultivating individuality, new steady efforts should be made to ensure that education achieves the aims of the new Course of Study and the five-day school week.

MEXT is working to enhance education in various ways, promoting moral education to nurture students' rich humanity by encouraging hands-on activities both in and out of school, and supporting small-group teaching and instruction suited to students' individual levels of proficiency.

## (2) Improving Teachers' Student Guidance Skills

To prevent or at least to discover quickly problem behavior, and resolve it, all teachers must have a correct understanding and accurate awareness of problematic student behavior and have the ability to provide schoolchildren with guidance. Teacher training centers not only provide supervisors with knowledge on problems encountered in student guidance, but also offer training to ensure teachers can cope with issues arising in student guidance, and to help teachers to serve as training instructors themselves and provide instruction and advice to schools based on the training they received. Training on student guidance is also offered at training sessions for new and experienced teachers by prefectural boards of education.

## (3) Enhancing Educational Counseling Systems

Educational counseling systems must be established by schools, cities, towns, villages and prefectures to ease the anxieties and worries about school education felt by schoolchildren, parents/guardians, and teachers.

Since FY1995 MEXT has sought to assign clinical psychotherapists – “emotion specialists” – as school counselors. This number of school counselors has been increased steadily to enhance the functions of educational counseling systems at schools. “The Program to Subsidize School Counselor Utilization” began in FY2001, and providing funding to prefectures and designated cities for survey research projects on problems encountered in the use of school counselors (funding offered to 8,500 schools in FY2004). The allocation of school counselors has achieved numerous successes, proving beneficial in both preventing, discovering and eliminating problematic student behavior and providing advice to parents/guardians and teachers on interacting with children.

Counselors for children and parents have also been assigned to elementary schools from FY2004, and research is being conducted on the prevention of, or early discovery of and response to, school non-attendance.

## (4) Cooperation among Schools, Families, Communities, and Relevant Organizations

It is crucial that schools, families, communities and other organizations join together in resolving problematic student behavior. To develop responses tailored to individual case of problematic student behavior, MEXT has been establishing support systems in communities by, for instance, forming support teams comprising of schools, boards of education, and relevant organizations. MEXT is also carrying out programs tackle problematic behavior by promoting cooperative action by communities, which involves research on the availability and functions of support inside and outside school to deal with non-attendance among schoolchildren due to truancy or more serious example of delinquency. A project to establish schooling support networks (SSN) in communities is also underway to deal with non-attendance among schoolchildren in a more detailed manner.