Berlin The new President of the Conference of Ministers of Education, Berlin’s Education Senator Astrid-Sabine Busse (SPD), assumes that the current students will no longer completely close the corona gaps during their school days. “We have to be realistic: we won’t be able to catch up entirely,” said the social democrat to the Handelsblatt in her first newspaper interview.
However, the federal states have launched additional learning aids, and she is “confident that with the nationwide start opportunities program we will have further instruments in our hands to give the children and young people who had a particularly difficult time in the pandemic additional support to support”. As President, she would like to “support students and all school staff, in particular to counteract the psychosocial consequences of the pandemic”.
Busse will take over the office of President of the Conference of Ministers of Education (KMK) in mid-January, replacing her Schleswig-Holstein colleague Karin Prien (CDU) as scheduled. Her year at the top faces enormous challenges: schools must continue to integrate hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian students, the pandemic is not over yet, and schools are suffering from record teacher shortages.
In addition, a study commissioned by the KMK recently showed that the performance of primary school students, which has been falling for a decade anyway, has continued to collapse as a result of the pandemic. Due to the particularly long closing times in Germany, fourth-graders lag behind by around six months in German and three months in math.
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Only 58 percent achieve the desired standard in reading. Experts keep pointing out that the weaknesses are hardly eradicated in secondary schools and are ultimately carried over into professional life.
The Standing Scientific Commission (SWK) of the KMK, set up in 2021, is therefore urging schools not only to offer vacation and support courses to catch up on what they have missed. They call for systematic individual support for all primary school children – based on data that is to be collected through regular digital tests in the classes. The Netherlands, for example, is a role model for this, where this has been practiced with good results since 2007. The gut feeling of the teachers is often not enough.
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The new KMK President welcomes the SWK’s suggestion: “The schools must work consistently with assessments of learning levels.” Berlin’s schools are already “increasingly data-supported”.
Financing the support courses could become a problem: The “Catching up after Corona” program, for which the federal government had made a total of two billion euros available, was only intended for the years 2021 and 2022.
The SPD politician is a Senator for Education in Berlin
(Photo: IMAGO/Political Moments)
However, the new “Starting Chances Program” announced by Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP) is not scheduled to start until 2024. It is intended for 4,000 schools with a high proportion of socially disadvantaged students, i.e. about every tenth.
The outgoing Minister of Education Prien had therefore demanded that the federal government must soon expire Extend the catch-up program with a further 500 million euros until the end of the 2023/2024 school year. Stark-Watzinger has so far not shown any willingness to do so.
The federal government’s starting opportunity program is intended for the weakest students
The federal and state governments agree that the Startopportunities program “should primarily benefit those who need this support the most,” says Busse. However, she points out that “if possible, the schools should not be additionally burdened by an overly bureaucratic application for funds”. The background is the ongoing negotiations between the federal and state governments about the specific social criteria that a school or its students must meet in order to receive the extra funding. The talks are rather difficult, it is said behind the scenes.
The chairman of the SWK, Olaf Köller, sees the reason for the sluggish negotiations in the fact that the school ministers would have spent the money from the catch-up program largely at their discretion and not for the students who particularly need it.
The education system in Germany is considered unfair in many areas.
(Photo: imago images/wolterfoto)
In addition, the expansion of primary schools into all-day schools is a challenge. The federal states do not have much time for this, because from the 2026/27 school year there will be a legal right that has already been postponed by one year. It will initially only be introduced for the first graders. The higher grades will be added gradually, so that it will also apply to fourth graders from the 2029/30 school year.
KMK President wants to improve the quality of the all-day primary school
Busse therefore wants to focus on the “qualitative further development of all-day schools in the primary level” during her presidency. The all-day school not only offers a better work-life balance and thus helps to secure the need for skilled workers in Germany. “A good all-day offer that children enjoy promotes both the social and cognitive skills of the students,” she said.
The SWK pointed out to the Ministers of Education that elementary school not only had to ensure basic knowledge of German and math. In addition, “the promotion of social-emotional skills must also receive more attention – this is why the report by the SWK also fits in well with the main topic of the Berlin KMK presidency,” assures Berliner.
For her KMK presidency, Busse does not see the fact that the capital regularly comes in one of the last places in the various student tests as a problem: After all, “we are not doing so badly when it comes to school digitization or support and support”.
The legal entitlement to all-day schools had already been postponed once.
(Photo: dpa)
Of course, the latest results of the fourth-grader tests were also “disastrous” in Berlin. “I don’t even want to blame it on the pandemic, under the impression of which the works were written. Either way, Berlin would not have ended up in the top third,” admits the long-standing headmistress. However, as a city-state with a very heterogeneous student body and parents, Berlin has other requirements than a non-city state – “Berlin isn’t Bad Kissingen after all”.
The latest primary school report by the KMK consultants also clearly shows that the school challenges that city states in particular have struggled with up to now, “are increasingly occurring in the German non-city states. So it’s a good thing if Berlin can contribute the experience it has already gained here,” says the senator.
However, it is unclear whether Busse can complete the entire year of the Berlin KMK presidency. Due to the various mishaps in the most recent election, the election to the Berlin House of Representatives will have to be repeated in February 2023. If Busse does not become a school senator again, her KMK presidency will also end.
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