Declaration of the Minister of Education: school students as soon as possible after flight

Almost 110,000 refugees from Ukraine have now arrived in Germany, including many children and young people, but also students and scientists.

This puts the schools in an ordeal.

They want to do everything to enable the often traumatized children to have a regular everyday life with other children and young people, at the same time teachers and school management have burned out after more than two years of the pandemic and are already suffering from an extreme shortage of staff.

Heike Schmoll

Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for “Bildungswelten”.

• Follow I follow

In a Lübeck declaration, the culture ministers of the federal states have agreed with the federal government to ensure that refugee children receive schooling and that refugee teachers from the Ukraine are also involved, if they so wish.

The President of the Conference of Ministers of Education, Schleswig-Holstein Minister of Education Karin Prien (CDU), also knows that this will not be enough, and points to established structures from the wave of refugees in 2015.

At that time, however, mainly young men who had to escape military service in Syria came to Germany; now it is women and children.

Fortunately, Ukraine has digitized almost all of their schools' textbooks.

The Conference of Ministers of Education (KMK) is now trying to get the licenses and is considering offering Ukrainian students in their final classes online lessons by Ukrainian teachers in order to guarantee them a school-leaving certificate.

A task force is to solve central problems "so that each question does not have to be clarified 16 times individually," said Prien.

Teacher shortage worsens

In addition, the Standing Academic Commission is to be tasked with developing proposed solutions to the problem of teacher shortages and the recruitment of teachers.

According to the current projections, every tenth high school graduate would have to start a teaching degree, said Hamburg's school senator Ties Rabe (SPD), who coordinates the social-democratic states.

For the integration of the refugees, however, it would have to be every fifth high school graduate, which is completely illusory.

At the same time, Rabe called for a fairer distribution of the refugees across the federal states, which applies above all to Berlin, where a good 10,000 women and children still arrive every day.

The educational unions in the German Civil Service Association, including the German Philologists' Association and the Vocational School Teachers' Association, as well as the Education and Science Union, called for multi-professional teams with psychologically trained experts, teachers with German as a foreign language or German as a second language, and appropriate rooms.

For students and scientists from the Ukraine, the federal and state governments, together with the scientific organizations, want to set up a science bridge to Germany, where all information on concrete support measures is to be made accessible in a bundled form.

The administration of the platform is to be taken over by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

In addition, the universities have called for institutional cooperation with state institutions from Russia to be suspended.

"We offer our full solidarity and support to those in the Russian science system who are currently at risk of persecution because of their position against a war of aggression," assures the KMK.

"Hostilities and threats against people from Russia have no place at our universities."

For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, the KMK has agreed on a date for the end of the corona measures in schools.

Prien announced that all restrictions such as the obligation to wear masks and regular series of tests without cause should be ended by the end of May, depending on the situation on site.

The KMK agreed that the schools should take a “careful path to normality”.

At the moment, however, there are still some uncertainties regarding the legal framework.

Because on March 20, the current Infection Protection Act expires, which means that the basis for all previous corona protection measures is no longer applicable.

A new version is being discussed at federal level and between the federal and state governments.

The aim is to ensure that basic protective measures such as masks are retained beyond this date.

However, there is still no agreement on this.