It’s just that time again. A corona case occurred at Britta K.’s elementary school in Dortmund. So the pregnant teacher has to stay at home. For 14 days, according to the company medical service, no one wants to take any risks. K. already had Covid at the beginning of her pregnancy and had to inject blood thinners. Nevertheless, K., who would rather not read her name in the newspaper, has a guilty conscience towards her colleagues. “It’s unfortunate for everyone involved,” she says. “But now that masks and tests have been abolished, there are hardly any protective measures in schools.”
The problem is also driving the German School Management Association. Doctors are currently banning pregnant women from working much faster than usual, says Chairwoman Gudrun Wolters-Vogeler. “Since the colleges are very young in many places, up to five female colleagues can drop out in large schools. Against the background of the shortage of skilled workers, this is devastating.”
The schools are threatened with an autumn and winter of discontent anyway. They start the new school year with a whole bunch of problems – if not catastrophes. According to estimates by the German Teachers’ Association, there are 30,000 to 40,000 vacancies. Some subjects cannot be taught for months. In fact, students need more support than ever. Many carry serious learning gaps from the Corona years with them.
In addition, there are more than 160,000 refugees from Ukraine in the classes, who now have to be permanently schooled and graded. Several hundred Ukrainian children are still waiting for a school place in Berlin alone. And during the gas crisis, the schools were classified as particularly worthy of protection in order to ensure attendance. But they should also save energy.
“I have hardly experienced a school year that starts as badly as this one in terms of staff,” says the Saxon GEW boss Uschi Kruse. “The reports that reach us from the federal states at the beginning of the school year reveal the full force of the extent of the political failures in recent years,” confirms Udo Beckmann, head of the Education and Training Association. Lessons, larger learning groups, the cutting of funding offers and the reduction of the timetable are the order of the day.
Next week the last week of vacation begins in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Then Sebastian Rüger, deputy director of the Ritter-von-Spix-School in Höchstadt near Erlangen, will lock himself in with a colleague to work on a timetable. Many retirees and career changers are currently being recruited as temporary workers. Other teachers increased their part-time work but can only work at certain times. “That makes creating the timetable even more complicated,” says Rüger.
“Without a digital timetable management like EduPage, this is not possible. It doesn’t get any easier, and the additional remuneration is minimal.” That’s one of the reasons why more than 1,000 headmaster positions are vacant. As for the Ukrainian students, it can only be planned from day to day. Some would have said before the holidays that they would stay, others wanted to go home. “We will only see how many we will have in the coming school year after the holidays.”
Without a change in previous school practice, regular school operations no longer seem possible. A Berlin elementary school, for example, wants to start lessons half an hour later, and school hours are to be reduced to 40 minutes. In Saxony-Anhalt, Education Minister Eva Feußner (CDU) has called on secondary schools to test “additional freedom in conceptual lesson planning” in order to deploy teachers “in the best possible way”. A school week should be divided into four days of face-to-face learning and one day of distance learning, Feußner wrote to all headmasters in May. So far the response has been very muted. Most reject the concept.
Dario Schramm doesn’t understand the skepticism. He is a speaker at Simpleclub, a company that has developed an educational app with explanatory videos and exercises. “We don’t want to and can’t replace a teacher,” says Schramm. “But before the lesson even takes place, we can pick up on the students and help them progress better than a non-specialist teacher can usually do with worksheets.” Using a special algorithm, the learning app recognizes what the student has already mastered, so individual learning can be enabled will.
Together with other start-ups, Simpleclub founded the initiative of German digital education providers. “We are in ongoing talks with the education ministries of various federal states,” says Schramm. Initial talks were held with the chair of the Conference of Ministers of Education, Karin Prien (CDU), Minister of Education in Schleswig-Holstein, about funding the federal states for digital educational offerings. But there is not much hope for a quick decision.
Schramm himself took part in the KMK for several years as spokesman for the federal school. “The decision-making processes are so slow and the willingness to innovate is so low that most of the time there is only a minimal consensus,” he admits. “It’s hair-pulling.” In any case, Schramm has the blessing of Heidi Kluge, mother of three school-age children from Meerane in Saxony. “The children could work better with digital means instead of lessons being cancelled. But the reservations of some teachers are still so great,” criticizes Kluge. There is currently no replacement for the English teacher of your seventh grader who is ill for a long time. Last year his physics lessons were canceled for several months.
Months ago, the Saxon Education Minister Christian Piwarz (CDU) announced that the situation in the provision of lessons would remain tense, the distribution of hours would have to be optimized, i.e. the timetable reduced. A few days ago he called on schools to save energy and at the same time promised that no child would have to freeze in winter.
Bigger problem “I don’t share the optimism of our Minister of Education,” contradicts Annett Hertel, Vice Chair of the Saxon State Parents’ Council. “If the window is left open for five minutes in winter, the room temperature, which is already low due to energy savings, drops and the children will of course end up freezing.”
For the new school year, all Saxon schools were equipped with 45,000 CO2 traffic lights. As soon as they jump to red, ventilation is required. But the traffic lights cost a lot of electricity, and their use may have to be reduced. Because compared to the corona pandemic, the energy crisis currently seems to be the bigger problem. Still.
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