Even when a child cannot go to school, the desire to learn does not simply disappear.
Some children find it difficult to enter a classroom but can focus at home or in another place where they feel safe. When the pressure of relationships and pace is reduced, they may be able to show strengths that school does not easily reveal.
According to a 2024 survey by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), the number of elementary and middle school students absent from school for thirty or more days reached 353,970 — a record high and the twelfth consecutive annual increase. One in every twenty-seven elementary school students now falls into this category.
The scale is no longer compatible with the framing of school refusal as an edge case. It is a structural feature of Japan's current educational reality.
In response, MEXT has shifted its policy stance significantly. Support is moving away from treating school re-entry as the only goal and toward building environments in which children can continue learning in ways that work for them. Central to this shift is the formal recognition of ICT-based learning as a legitimate educational path. MEXT has set a target of providing online classes to all school-absent students who request them by the end of fiscal year 2026.
What ICT Attendance Recognition Changes
Under current MEXT guidelines, when a school-absent child engages in ICT-based learning activities at home and certain conditions are met, those activities can be recorded as attendance in the student's official school record. This is not a workaround — it is a formally recognised pathway. For children and families who feel that nothing is accumulating while the child is absent, this recognition carries significant practical and psychological weight.
Why Computer Learning Suits Children Who Struggle with School
For children who find it difficult to match the pace and structure of a group environment, self-directed learning is not a fallback — it is often the most effective mode. Programming and digital creation on a computer have specific properties that make them particularly well-suited to this context.
The most important is immediate feedback. Write a line of code and the screen responds. Change a parameter and the sound changes. Immediate, observable consequences of action are rare in most learning environments — and they are what make programming uniquely compelling for children who have lost confidence. When something fails, the reason is usually visible and fixable. This cycle of small experiments and small successes — distinct from the diffuse, delayed feedback of most classroom work — is what rebuilds self-efficacy: the sense that effort produces results.
Educational support organisations working with school-absent children report consistent patterns. A middle-school student who built a maze game in Scratch and later presented it at a school event. A high school student who created a household budgeting tool in Python and was thanked by their family. The act of making something — and having it work — restarts time that had been standing still.
School Re-entry Is Not the Only Goal
One of the most persistent limitations in the discourse around school refusal is the assumption that returning to school is the only meaningful outcome. For some children, school as it currently exists may not be the right environment, and they will grow up and enter the workforce having spent significant time outside it. In those cases, the skills accumulated away from school become their actual foundation.
Programming, AI tools, video editing, and digital design are skills in concrete demand in today's labour market. The period when a child cannot attend school does not have to be a gap in their record. It can be a period of genuine development — one that produces capabilities that do not appear on a school report card but are clearly recognised in the world beyond it.
At Digital Kodomo BASE, we offer a space in Ota Ward that is open to all children — including those who are not currently attending school. We provide computers free of charge to children who do not have one at home. Our aim is to be a place where a child can say: "I can't go to school, but I can come here and do something." That matters — and it is enough to start.