Students stay from six months to two years at the Hangyoreh school before making the transition to a regular school, or starting a job.

Some critics say more should be done to prepare the young defectors for the country's grueling education system and its cut-throat job market.

Hangyoreh has been pushed to its limits due to an ever increasing number of defectors. About half of the 14,000 North Koreans who have defected to the South since 1989 have arrived in the last three years.

The school, situated in hills overlooking farmland about an hour's drive from Seoul, has modern classrooms, a well-equipped gym, language labs and dorms where students live four-to-a-room.

The students usually take new names in the South because the North regularly sends relatives of defectors to prison to deter others from leaving the destitute state.

The escape route from North Korea is via China which regards these defectors as economic refugees and forcibly repatriates them home where rights groups say they are usually imprisoned in brutal conditions.

YANKEE IMPERIALISTS

Han left North Korea to join an aunt who had already made her way to the South. She reached South Korea via China and Vietnam.

"We were taught in the North that schools in the South were tightly controlled and sometimes students there were killed by Yankee imperialists," she said.

Han, who said she loves her new life, hopes to be an English teacher. But she is wary of the challenge of South Korea's intensely competitive education system.

"Competition can be good if it motivates me and challenges me to be better, but here you have to step on others to climb up the ladder," she said.

For most of the students, the time at Hangyoreh is a respite ahead of a new life in the South, where defectors are often treated like strangers who happen to speak the same language.

A few graduates have managed to obtain places at South Korea's top universities but many of the Hangyoreh students have scaled down their career dreams.

"I wanted to be a doctor back in the North, but I've come to realize after I got to the South that I might not be competent enough," said Hangyoreh student Jang Jung-sim. "Now I've set my sights on becoming a kindergarten teacher."