In recent months, numerous studies have been published on the situation of children and young people in and outside of school, all of which come to a similar conclusion: a large number of German schoolchildren, aggravated by the pandemic, lack basic knowledge of mathematics and German.

Hundreds of thousands have difficulties with basic arithmetic, spelling and understanding texts.

This is what the IQB Education Trend and the National Education Report report.

Uwe Ebbinghaus

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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And in addition to cognitive and motor deficits, there are deficits in social behavior.

Mental health problems, the COH-FIT study finds, have reached worrying levels among children and adolescents.

The much-cited gap between students from educationally disadvantaged and educationally close homes continues to widen.

The feedback is so persistently bad that teachers, parents and students are already threatening to become numb in the transition to the new school year.

Politicians have recognized these problems and are trying to counteract them with various federal and state programs.

Their most important (unanimously referred to as the "biggest learning support program of the last decades") is called "Catching up after Corona for children and young people".

Half of it – for more social projects – is borne by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs and the other half by the Ministry of Education.

There is a shortage of staff everywhere

A total of two billion euros are available for two years, with the billion for the learning support program being distributed among the federal states according to a key that the Federal Ministry of Education itself describes as “very complicated”.

Only the Ministry of Finance knows how high the calculated amounts in the millions are for the individual countries, as the sum is made available via a special financial equalization for sales tax.

Request to the Ministry of Finance: They don't know the exact country totals either;

the calculation is “very complex”, but ultimately the distribution is strictly proportional to the number of inhabitants in the federal states.

At least the money seems to be arriving somehow.

In their interim report on the catch-up program, the receiving federal states do state specific euro amounts.

If you take a closer look at this interim report, it gets even more complicated.

Although there are concrete proposals from the Standing Scientific Commission (SWK) - which advises the Conference of Ministers of Education - almost every federal state uses the money from the catch-up program as it sees fit.

Instead of using transparent terms, different program titles such as "tailwind" or "lion's strength" are used at the expense of comparability.

There is also a significant difference in the management of funds: while individual federal states pass on large parts of the catch-up money to the schools as subject-related budget increases (e.g. Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia), the others require extensive project planning.

The strange thing is that if you ask teachers how the catch-up program is being accepted at their respective schools, few have an answer ready - which is just one paradox among many that accompany the catch-up program.

All the experts agree that learning support is only useful if it takes place in close coordination with the class and subject teachers.

These are usually fully utilized, and after three years of the pandemic and the Ukraine war, which is also putting pressure on the schools, they are often overwhelmed.

Due to miscalculations on the part of the Minister of Education, there is a lack of staff for coordinated additional tasks.

When the catch-up program widens the education gap

In practice, the catch-up learning support is therefore often carried out by hastily instructed educational assistants, teacher candidates and students.

Above all, however, external training providers, who often work online, fill the funding gap, which is of course subject to the same staff shortages as schools.

Pupils who suffer from bad, missing or inefficient distance teaching due to home conditions are now being fobbed off with digital tutoring, of all things, says Heinz-Peter Meidinger, President of the German Teachers' Association, in an interview with the FAZ