Berlin German schools have difficulties saying goodbye to the “Cretaceous period” and integrating new media into the classroom. Not only education experts see it that way, but also many parents – as an exclusive study shows.
The network for the digital society (D21), a partnership between business and politics, asked more than 2,400 parents with school-age children how things are going with digitization in schools. The answer is: Many German schools made noticeable progress during the corona crisis. However, from a position of catastrophic deficit.
In most federal states, chalkboards and overhead projectors are still the didactic means of choice – out of necessity, because the equipment with modern media is often not even satisfactory according to the parents. The evaluation now shows which federal state is how far along in the digitization of schools.
There’s a surprise winner and a region that’s clearly lagging behind. Education experts explain why this is and how the digital backlog can be caught up as quickly as possible.
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When it comes to the question of which federal state in which students use digital applications most frequently in class, one federal state stands out positively: Bremen.
86 percent of the parents surveyed agreed with the statement that computers, tablets or smartboards are used in the classroom. This puts the city-state well ahead of the second-placed state of North Rhine-Westphalia (81 percent).
The reason for Bremen’s lead lies in a clear objective and the will to invest in the digital education of the students. “Bremen had set itself the goal of making it possible for students and teachers to be equipped one-to-one with tablets,” explains the study’s project manager, Sandy Jahn.
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To do this, the city-state used the “immediate equipment program” of the “Digital Pact for Schools” and topped up the money with state funds. Socially disadvantaged students in particular should benefit in this way.
Jahn is positive that Bremen has cleared the fundamental hurdle of a satisfactory digital infrastructure. “This is the absolute minimum that should be available everywhere,” says Jahn. The next step for Bremen is now to set up the curricula digitally and to train the teachers accordingly.
Other states are not quite there yet. They first have to meet the “absolute minimum”: provide the digital infrastructure.
The equipment shows that on average just half of the parents are satisfied with the equipment in their children’s school. Here, too, the exception is Bremen, the “striving state”, followed by Hamburg, which was the only other federal state that was able to achieve an approval rating of more than 60 percent.
Study author Jahn points out: “The city states often have central procurement contracts.” This would give them an advantage over large territorial states. However, the expert also finds it worrying how far the parents’ assessments of digital teaching differ.
“Equal living conditions are agreed in the Basic Law and in the coalition agreement, then it cannot be that the place of residence has such a great influence on the quality of education,” complains Sandy Jahn.
The new federal states in particular are lagging behind – for example when it comes to internet connections in schools. There, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Saxony bring up the rear. In all three federal states, just under half of the parents surveyed say their child’s school has internet access. In Bremen it is 75 percent.
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This also coincides with studies that examine access to high-speed Internet in general. The bottom line is that where there is no good Internet access for the population, the schools are also undersupplied.
“Without such access, however, the students have no opportunity to use applications such as cloud services, learning platforms or the streaming of learning videos,” criticizes the study. They could not learn to research information on topics online themselves or to check the quality of information and its sources.
Parents in eastern Germany, in particular, still see major hurdles when it comes to staffing and financial resources. Saxony-Anhalt and Berlin perform worst here, followed by Brandenburg. All in all, according to the parents, this point is the second biggest obstacle to digitization – after a lack of digital equipment.
One of the few positive results of the study: Overall, most parents see that the pandemic has brought a sudden surge in digitization. Karin Prien, President of the Conference of Ministers of Education, therefore calls for learning from the pandemic, equipping schools with infrastructure and technology and investing in “teaching-learning processes for a culture of digitality”.
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This may also be important for other reasons. Because, as the study states: “A higher degree of satisfaction with the current digital equipment at the child’s school also goes hand in hand with greater trust on the part of the parents in the state.”
Jahn, the author of the study, puts it even more drastically: It is “worrying” if parents get the impression that the state is not fulfilling its role of preparing children for the 21st century.
More: Experts are already calling for digital education in daycare – and criticize the negative view of new media