Regine Schwarzhoff is dismayed. Her 13-year-old granddaughter has not had geography or history lessons at her high school near Düsseldorf for several months. There is no substitution for the teacher who is on maternity leave.
There is no prospect of a resumption of the two subjects in the new school year either. “These aren’t trivial things, they’re central subjects for general education,” says Schwarzhoff. “Very few children will now take the textbook during the unusual hours and read what happened in the Renaissance period.”
Schwarzhoff is an engineer and architect, mother of three children and seven grandchildren – six of them of school age and with similar problems. Schwarzhoff has been involved in education policy for 30 years. Since then, the school system has continued to go downhill.
“The situation in our schools has never been as precarious as it is at the moment,” says Schwarzhoff, who, as vice chair of the North Rhine-Westphalia Parents’ Association, receives calls from desperate parents almost every day. Widespread complaints: The children come home too early or are only kept in the after-school care center. The gaps caused by Corona would not be made up. Just last week, a mother called and complained that her first grader’s timetable resembled his teeth – gaps wherever you looked.
At the latest at the start of the new school year, the dramatic extent of the teacher shortage in German schools emerges. Experts expect that in just a few years every third position will be vacant. Classes are canceled in rows. According to estimates by the German Teachers’ Association, there will be a shortage of up to 40,000 teachers at the start of the school year.
When will things get better with the shortage economy in German schools? “Then I’m no longer on duty,” the Berlin Education Senator Sabine Busse (SPD) recently confessed in an interview with WELT.
At least ten difficult years lie ahead for students, parents and teachers. In Berlin alone, only 40 percent of the new hires in the past school year were fully trained teachers.
Those who have to manage the shortage of schools often feel mentally no longer able to do their job meaningfully. According to Isabell Probst, who herself was a teacher at a Bonn high school for English and history for a long time, it was like this. Until she applied to be dismissed from her civil service.
“Being a teacher means not being able to go to the toilet when you have to and not being able to bite your bread when you’re hungry,” says Probst. She herself had a great time at school in the 90s and then became a teacher herself, full of ideals. “When I finished my legal clerkship in 2010, I realized that being a teacher means, above all, assembly line work. It is simply not possible to provide meaningful educational support for 200 students at the same time.”
Today, Isabell Probst is a coach and advises teachers who want to leave their profession and also those who want to remain teachers and change something at their school. “Today we are a team of six and have already accompanied more than a thousand teachers,” says Probst. “We simply have to acknowledge that social conditions have changed fundamentally and that schools do not do justice to them.”
Probst knows the longing for the old school system with teacher-centred lessons, outdated exam formats, learning by heart, especially from parents with children in high school. “It just doesn’t work anymore today, we have a heterogeneous student body, we have become a migration society; the financial pressure is enormous and the social gap has widened considerably.”
These changes must be reflected in the school system: massive training for existing teachers and the use of multi-professional teams with administrative staff, IT specialists and psychologists are needed. However, a modern personnel policy is hampered by bureaucratic hurdles.
Henriette Burkard, however, only knows the problem of the teacher shortage from the past – from her time as headmistress at a primary school in Schwedt, Brandenburg. Today she works as a teacher at a small, single-stream elementary school in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin: there is only one class per year.
“It’s simply a great place to work, and although our sponsor – the Evangelical School Foundation – doesn’t pay as well as the Berlin Senate, we have enough applications and a very committed staff,” says Burkard.
The changes Probst is calling for have long since taken place at her school. Around half of the colleagues are career changers – and it works. “There is a lot of openness from the experienced colleagues. We do a lot of teamwork, meet once a week with the entire staff and exchange ideas.”
The career changers would get a kind of training during the job. “Around half of our teaching staff consists of educators, so we usually work with a double layer in the class,” says Burkard. “In such a good environment, the children can learn very well independently.”
Burkard’s approach is to make himself superfluous. “Many colleagues and parents have to rethink, today we need a different way of learning and open work,” says Burkard. “You have to make clear statements and be very relaxed at the same time. If a child only draws a whole day, then that’s okay if it has other, intensive and high-performing days.” At her school, grades are only given from the fifth grade.
The children would then do well in secondary school. “Then, at best, they have problems,” says Burkard, “that they are no longer allowed to have a say.”
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