The district of Ebersberg had good experiences with a so-called dashboard during the peak phase of the corona pandemic. With the help of the dynamic overview platform, those responsible in the district office were able to follow the developments in terms of infections, hospital occupancy and vaccination progress on a daily basis – and derive further measures from them. The district authority has now created another dashboard, but this time on a completely different topic: detailed information about the current occupancy of the secondary schools is compiled on the freely accessible website.
This may not sound very useful at first, but on closer inspection it is an important building block in terms of education policy. “The purpose of this tool is to enable you to make good decisions,” said Brigitte Keller, Head of Department for Central Affairs and Education at the district office, when she presented the new tool to the district councilors at the most recent meeting of the responsible committee. This is on the District Office website under the “Life” and “Schools and Education” sections.
It is possible to forecast the number of pupils up to the year 2035
The dashboard not only shows the current number of students in the grammar schools, junior high schools and special schools in the district, but also the development of the past few years can be read there. However, the outlook is likely to be particularly useful for political decision-makers, because the new tool can also be used to create a forecast up to the year 2035. Based on this, the district councils can see with just a few clicks whether the capacities of the educational institutions will be sufficient in the future or whether improvements need to be made in one or the other area.
In addition to the pure numbers, the dashboard also shows the places where the students live – even broken down by individual schools. For example, it can be read that exactly one student from Kirchseeon attends the Markt Schwaben high school, or six students from the Rosenheim district go to the Max Mannheimer high school in Grafing. This information can also be used by the district councils to identify developments and derive political measures from them. “I hope that you can make wise decisions based on this database,” said Brigitte Keller to the members of the district committee.
The digital tool should be constantly updated and expanded
Finally, Ulrich Proske (SPD) wanted to know whether the dashboard could also be refined and middle schools and day-care centers included in the list. According to Keller, this is possible in principle, but the district office would have to be provided with the data from the individual communities. It is also conceivable that the school authority will deliver the data for the middle schools every year. In any case, the digital tool should be constantly further developed, because not all available data has yet been entered into the system. However, this will change in the coming weeks, so that a digital overview of the schools in the district will then be available to all interested parties.
If you want to take a look at the new dashboard, you can go to the homepage of the district office at https://www.lra-ebe.de/leben/schulen-bildung/ find it.