Verena Pausder, founder of the company Fox & Sheep and the HABA Digitalwerkstatt, is one of the defining voices in the debate about digitization and education in Germany. She also volunteers for digital education - and for ensuring that young people dare to develop ideas, found companies and network in the start-up scene. She is one of the Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum and last year, with the homeschooling-corona.com portal, she showed a way of quickly offering parents and teachers help with digital learning. Incidentally, there are two great men who have made Federal Republican history in Verena Pausder's family: Federal President Gustav Heinemann - her great-grandfather - and Johannes Rau, his foster son.

Most of the federal states are still on summer vacation while there are heated discussions about how the coming school year will go. In particular, the question of whether there will be alternating lessons again preoccupies many - i.e. digital lessons. Has Germany made any progress in the field of digital education in the past year?

What we have experienced in the last twelve months was not digital learning, but mostly analogue teaching via digital channels.

At first, that was the only feasible option.

The schools had to adapt quickly, had no or too few devices, and were not prepared for homeschooling.

But in the long term, of course, the goal cannot be that you now have devices but only use them as video conferencing tools or to open a PDF.

The task now is to train teachers for digital learning and to rebuild structures that have already changed as a result of the pandemic.

At the moment, it cannot be assumed that the schools will remain open throughout the next school year.

Politics must now create reliability for children and parents.

In the first lockdown, I understood that it took a certain amount of time to assess how the pandemic was developing and what options there are to keep schools open.

But we have known the answers since the end of last summer vacation.

Now the schools must also be helped, and that is happening too slowly.

In summary, does that mean: No viable strategy in the past school year, none for the next?