Today, I decided to take on the task of making a post about the structure/staff hierarchy of UA High School in Boku No Hero Academia. While its structure is similar to a lot of schools in general, there’s a few things that are specific to Japanese high schools that are a little hard to miss if you’re not familiar with the way things work.
I’ll be discussing here where, according to Japanese school hierarchy and what’s shown in the canon materials, each staff member falls, as well as an explanation regarding the different departments/classes of students.
this is going to be a very image heavy post, since I made graphics for each part of the UA staff breakdown, so once we get to the heroics class, I’ll put things under a readmore.
To start off with, this is the most generalized version of the hierarchy. We’ll be getting more specific, but this is to show that even though there’s different departments, there is one staff member that precedes over everything else.
Here, I’ve broken things down into different departments. The four departments of students that kids (and staff) in UA are divided into are heroics, general education, support, and business. All these departments are on the same level as each other and though the show focuses on the heroics department and UA is billed as a hero school, each department is just as important as the other.
This can be thought of in terms of say, majors at a college, or even departments at a college. Students are supported into different departments like humanities, liberal arts, physical sciences, and each department/major has its own set of staff, but the hierarchy at the college remains the same general structure throughout each department.
There’s also staff that do not fall into any of the departments. We’ll get to them after each of the departments, but these are staff members like the medical staff at the school and the administrative staff.
And like in a college, we have our head of the school–Nezu. Nezu is referred to as the principal and for all intents and purposes, he’s the absolute authority at the school. Theoretically, everything has to go through him and be approved by him.
At UA, there doesn’t seem to be any second in command or vice principal, so we’ll move down the structure.
Because heroics is focused on the most at the school, it’s the only department where we have the full departmental hierarchy.
This is where things start to differ and run into territory where if you aren’t familiar with the Japanese school structure, you might not realize what’s going on.
In Japanese schools, homeroom teachers are seen as the head of their students. The subject teachers work under them. They are the heads of their students and anything that regards their students will go through them, whether this is in regards to academics or anything having to do with their individual students. This is the same in BNHA.
For reference, I wrote a big post about homeroom teachers’ role in Japan and how that relates to BNHA here. If you want to get the full understanding of why I listed Aizawa and Vlad King as the heads of the heroics department, I suggest reading that.
Next down are the regular subject teachers. It’s unclear whether or not they teach other students in their relative subjects besides heroics department, so I just listed them as heroics teachers. As of note, Midnight is both the modern art history teacher and the person who subs for Aizawa. Ectoplasm is also the head of the security department. Mic is weird and we’ll get to him later.
Below the regular teachers are the student council members. These are essentially the students who are the liaisons between teachers and their class. Student council is important in Japanese classrooms. For class A, Tenya is the class president, with Momo as the vice president. In class B, Kedou is the class president and the vice president is unknown.
After that are the rest of the students.
Broken down, the hierarchy for singular departments is principal–>head of department (homeroom teachers)–>regular teachers–>student council members–>students. In class A, that chart goes Nezu–>Aizawa–>teachers under Aizawa–>Tenya and Momo–>Class A.
discoholicmusic
blakekathryn
stormborns
gracieabrams
ellievsbear
