The pandemic is adamant. After the summer and autumn holidays, the exceptional corona-related situation at the schools seemed to have calmed down, and many were able to enter a kind of consolidation phase. The missing air filters were out of sight, the tests in the schools were scaled back. In many places the old analog routines have been called up again. The words of the Federal President from July that the pandemic had "relentlessly disclosed" the weak points in digitization and that these should urgently be eliminated have faded away. At the start of the school year, other unresolved problems such as teacher shortages and missed lessons came to the fore. The Standing Scientific Commission of the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs outlined in a statement what the prerequisites for successful digital learning could look like.But the core requirements of the old strategy paper on digitization from 2016, which was still about infrastructure, have not even been implemented.

Uwe Ebbinghaus

Editor in the features section.

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Now, within a few days, the situation at the schools has worsened again. The incidence value is increasing exponentially, in Berlin the first elementary schools have already switched to alternating instruction. If this development continues, many schools without a viable digital strategy will be caught cold again. Because the school landscape is still very divided when it comes to digitization. A study by the University of Göttingen, the data of which goes back to the beginning of the year, differentiates between “digital pioneer”, “digitally oriented”, “average” and “laggard schools”. The latter two made up 62 percent of schools in Germany; only twelve percent belonged to the model schools. Meanwhile, there is great uncertainty among most students. The new high school graduate class,who has experienced the inadequate distance teaching of the past few years in full, would like to exchange the pre-pandemic system for participation in a rumbling “digitization push”.

The school as a "resilience center"

A congress on the “School of the Future” organized by the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Education fell into this confusing situation. The panel discussion after an impulse lecture, in which it was teeming with terms such as “skill set” and demands for “good leadership at school director level”, was remarkable insofar as digitization was viewed very critically by all those involved. For example, Hans Anand Pant from Humboldt University asked whether extensive digitization based on the Latvian model would even make sense in Germany.and Matthias Busch from the University of Trier drew attention to the possibilities for individual learning on the basis of AI software, but the next moment they raised problems with data protection and the desired equal opportunities. In view of the requirements of a pandemic, this result was surprisingly meager.

The school was praised above all as a “resilience center”, “sanctuary”, as a “relationship space”, “real laboratories” and a “Friday” are necessary to prepare for the challenges of the future and the upcoming multi-graphics. The spirit of optimism went in a more analogous direction. There was actually only disagreement on the question of whether we should move towards “school development” or “school transformation development”. It was up to Markus Warnke from the Wübben Foundation to remind everyone that in the end, all suggestions for improvement will be “about resources, about money”.

In her outlook, Education Minister Stefanie Hubig announced a double-digit million amount for the next three years to support pioneer schools.

There was no mention of additional teaching positions that the associations have been calling for for years.

Without them, however, without a significant increase in educational spending, there will probably be no real transformation process to wherever - on this all those involved in the system agree.