5% of NSETs in public schools break their contracts.

In the Korea Times, Kang Shin-who writes "More native English teachers quit," and that

More native English teachers are breaching agreed working terms in contracts made with public schools and are leaving Korea.

According to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, the number of foreign teachers who failed to complete their working contracts last year rose to 425 from 283 a year ago. This year as well, 252 native English speakers have already left schools as of July, according to Rep. Kim Se-yeon of the governing Grand National Party (GNP) who asked the ministry to submit the statistics to the National Assembly.

According to numbers provided by the article, those 425 account for 5.01% of native speaker English teachers in South Korean elementary and secondary schools, up from a 3.7% rate a year earlier.

Meanwhile, the Korean wire service reported that roughly one-third of NSETs quit within the first six months, a percentage that will take into account hagwon and post-secondary teachers as well:

More than a third of the native-speaking English teachers in South Korea quit after six months or so on the job, challenging the effectiveness of language immersion programs installed nationwide, a report said Wednesday.

The report submitted by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology to the parliament showed 42.4 percent of native instructors ended their contract after six months last year, up from 34 percent in 2008. The rate again fell to 34 percent as of the end of July of this year.
About 22 percent of them quit to study or because they find other jobs, while an average of 15.4 percent left without prior notice, the report said.

The Korea Herald has more, while posters on Dave's ESL question the veracity of those numbers. Interestingly, looking back at the Korea Times article it appears they're talking about roughly one-third of teachers who broke their contracts did so within the first six months, not that one-third of all teachers left halfway through:

Particularly, nearly 30 percent of the foreign teachers who ended their contract worked for less than six months. Some 22 percent of them quit to study or transferred to other jobs, while about 15 percent left without prior notice and others for various reasons including difficulties in adapting to their schools, illness, and being involved in crimes.

There are no doubt teachers whose immaturity and lack of cultural sensitivity lead them to "breach agreed working terms" and leave their contracts early. But for a more effective, complete study of the 5% of teachers leaving contracts early---a fairly small number, actually---it'd be healthy to find out why exactly those teachers have left. Did they leave because of professional dissatisfaction? Did they leave because of personal issues with coworkers? Did they leave because the schools themselves didn't uphold terms of their contract? Those issues and complaints are common enough on blogs, message boards, and dinner tables to anecdotally account for a good number of those 5%, and need to be taken into account when looking at retention rate of NSETs.

But when thinking about retention rate of NSETs, I always have to go back to a Kang Shin-who article from 2008 titled "Half of Native English Instructors Quit After a Year":

According to Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, Tuesday, 144 of 273 foreign English teachers who were eligible for a renewal of their contract have signed to stay on another year.

Lee Young-chan, an education Ministry official in charge of native teachers said it was not necessary to renew every contract. ``They are neither regular teachers nor lecturers who can conduct classes independently. They are `assistant teachers,' hence their teaching experience doesn't matter much,'' he said. ``Rather, it's better for students to have more new teachers so that they can meet various kinds of foreigners,'' he added.

GREAT!



* Here's an update a few hours later.