In 2009, the Japanese government introduced “bridging schools” to help in the educational integration of migrant children whose parents were affected by the 2008-2009 global economic crisis.

The programme was launched in 2009 to mainly support school-aged migrant children who were not attending school, often due to family financial difficulties caused by the 2008-2009 global economic crisis. The schools were designed to provide six months of free education to help these children to learn Japanese and other key subjects to enable them to transfer smoothly into Japanese public and other schools. To complement the bridge schools a review of Japanese-as-Second-Language (JSL) education was conducted in order to provide Japanese teachers with practical and online resources.