Mr. Riecke-Baulecke, you have been president of the Center for School Quality and Teacher Training (ZSL) in Baden-Württemberg for three years. What are the central tasks of this newly founded center?

Heike Schmoll

Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for “Bildungswelten”.

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The most important task is to ensure good teacher training in the country and also good advice.

This means that we are responsible on the one hand for the technical and pedagogical support of the teachers, on the other hand for school psychological advice.

We also have the task of supervising the teacher training in the second phase, i.e. the seminars.

How do you take on this mammoth task?

The ZSL is a center with several thousand employees, many of whom are seconded teachers.

How do you actually work?

The ZSL emerged from a change in personnel from various departments, from some employees of the four regional councils, the 21 state school authorities, the Ministry of Education and from the former state institute.

There are a total of 4,500 people, but many of them are teachers who work for the ZSL with just a few credit hours.

This is one of the tasks we want to tackle.

We want fewer staff with more working hours in order to make professionalization possible, especially in the area of ​​teacher training.

Three teachers' associations in Baden-Württemberg have criticized this construction, complaining that functioning structures have been smashed without making the new ones really workable.

What do you think?

For the past two years I've been having discussions with the teachers' unions every three months, it's not just the three unions, and I'm very grateful that the three teachers' unions have picked up on certain suggestions that I've been making over and over again.

Above all, this means that we have sufficient staff available in the so-called higher service for further training at primary school and lower secondary level, who can invest a lot of working time in the schools.

That was hardly possible in the past ten to fifteen years because many did a very good job but didn't have time to deal intensively with strengthening the basic skills in mathematics and German.

Your center was set up because Baden-Württemberg has fallen further and further behind in performance comparisons.

Where do you see the main deficits?

The biggest deficit became clear in March 2020 - before the outbreak of the corona pandemic, there was a considerable backlog in digitization.

Synchronous e-learning was almost impossible.

Many schools are now using Moodle, provided by the ZSL, and Big Blue Button for video conferencing.

We had 450,000 users during the lockdown and we completely switched teacher training to digital formats.

90,000 teachers have made themselves fit for this in digital training courses.

Do you actually feel that you have enough support from the Ministry of Education for such revolutionary reforms?

I have the impression that the new head of office will deal very intensively with the issues raised after the state elections in 2021 and also want to make progress here.

In retrospect, it was certainly difficult to start building up the ZSL during the state election campaign and in the first phase of the corona pandemic.

You were previously in Schleswig-Holstein and made sure that better learning outcomes were achieved there.

Can your experiences there be transferred to Baden-Württemberg?