Human resource investment in lower secondary education has become a crucial issue due to the decline in enrollment and the increase in small-sized schools. Taking the lower secondary education system in Taiwan as an example, this study aims to explore the core issues of human resource investment in terms of the structure of teachers, staff, and gender diversity that might impact the allocation. To explore this issue, this study collected a series of data from the Statistics Office of the Ministry of Education from 1968 to 2020. Gender diversity was transformed by Becker’s discrimination coefficient (D) to detect the patterns of teachers and staff in lower secondary education. To predict the future trend, the ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) was used to build forecasting models for the student teacher ratio (STR), student staff ratio (SSR), and teacher staff ratio (TSR). The findings suggest adjusting the related ratios following our predicted values can provide a reasonable balance between teacher and staff demand for quality lower secondary education. This study provides useful information for policymakers to intervene current lower secondary education system. The design of this study may provide an example to tackle a similar issue in other education systems.
Relation:
ICIC Express Letters Part B: Applications 14(2), p.141–150
