Expanding restrictions in Germany due to the pandemic have highlighted the needs and shortcomings of the education system, especially to pay attention to distance learners, while forcing them to find ways to support families and facilitate work-life balance. private.
Face-to-face courses were suspended for the second time in the pandemic on December 16 for the eleven million students in Germany due to the inability to contain the second wave of infections with the current restrictions, but in order to return to classrooms on January 11, after the Christmas break.
However, the personal resumption of classes is delayed – for the time being until at least February 15 – due to the still too large number of daily infections – today, over 12,000 – and a cumulative incidence in seven days of 111, 1 cases per 100,000 of inhabitants, still far from the 50 who are being pursued.
It is also probably not possible to return to the “normal functioning” with which schools opened after the summer and it is necessary, among other measures, to reduce groups to half the number of students and introduce, in the best of cases, a hybrid system of classes face to face and at a distance.
But if at the beginning of the 2019/2020 academic year there were 55,000 qualified teachers in Germany, according to the president of the German Teachers’ Association (DL), Heinz-Peter Meidinger, this deficit increased at the beginning of this school year by having to give up those teachers who belong to risk groups and only by age.
According to data from the Federal Bureau of Statistics (Destatis), of the 686,000 teachers who taught courses in public schools in 2018/2019, 12.5% were over 60 years old and 25% were between 50 and 59 years old.
Therefore, this return to “normal functioning” after the summer break was nothing more than an illusion, with an adaptation of the school curriculum and subjects taught to the number of teachers available and with groups and even entire schools quarantined for cases of contagion within the school community.
Digitization, broadcast pending in Germany
The need to teach virtual courses due to the impossibility of returning to face-to-face courses after Christmas highlighted another general shortcoming: the considerable delay in Germany in terms of digitization, both in technology and infrastructure, and in teacher training.
DL, among others, recently criticized the federal states, which are competent in education, for planning to return to classrooms after the summer betting on face-to-face courses, without taking into account the possibility of a new break in public life and, through hence the closure of schools.
In all these months – since the first closure of about 40,000 schools in Germany in mid-March last year – the authorities have not done enough to prepare schools for a virtual distance learning scenario, he said.
When the Christmas break returned, many digital platforms did not work well and servers crashed, the Federal Students’ Confederation (BSK) said, criticizing that “nothing has been done to improve digitization” over the holidays.
Increasing social inequalities
Meidinger recently warned of growing gaps in various educational subjects and an increase in social inequalities among students, depending on whether or not they come from educated homes, whether they can count on their parents’ support, or whether they live in a difficult environment. social.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that the hope of being able to make up for the shortcomings of the past school year this year and, at the same time, of not accumulating new deficits will not be fulfilled,” he said.
Closing schools is also a challenge for parents when it comes to reconciling work, family and school life.
Parents with jobs considered “relevant to the system”, such as firefighters, police, medical staff or employees in essential businesses, can continue to take their children to school, where minors are cared for.
For parents who have to combine teleworking with home care for their children, the German government has extended aid for sick leave to care for a sick child, from ten that each parent already has per year to twenty, for a total of 45 days. depending on the number of children.
These benefits for non-working days, for employees with public health insurance, can be claimed while schools and nurseries are closed, without the need for the child to be ill.
In the case of single-parent families, the days for caring for a child vary from twenty to forty, up to a maximum of 90 working days per year.
The number of positives from the first coronavirus contagion was announced in Germany at the end of January last year, totaling 2,134,936, and that of deaths, 51,870.