Education
Survey: Schoolchildren are more annoyed by poor WiFi than by a lack of teachers
An 8th grade student operates a learning platform on a notebook. Furthermore, the students complain about “poor technical equipment”. photo
© Marijan Murat/dpa
The “Digital Pact School” – a failure story? Poor technical equipment, no planned learning content, unqualified teachers: students express clear criticism.
According to the pupils affected, the technical equipment in schools in Germany leaves much to be desired, despite billions being invested through the “Digital Pact for Schools”. In a representative survey commissioned by the digital association Bitkom, 87 percent of the young people surveyed between the ages of 14 and 19 said it was bad or missing WLAN as the most urgent problem at their school – well ahead of the teacher shortage at 59 percent.
Furthermore, the students complain about “poor technical equipment”. This was named by more than half of the respondents (56 percent) as one of the most pressing problems in their school.
In 2018, the then black-red federal government launched a five-billion-euro funding program with the “Digital Pact for Schools”. However, the federal states were only reluctant to access the funds. Digitization concepts in schools will be funded with the pact until the end of 2023. The total is now around 6.5 billion euros. The funds can be paid out until 2024. It is not yet clear whether the program will be continued as a “Digital Pact School 2.0”, although the coalition agreement of the traffic light government promised a new edition with a term until 2030.
In the current Bitkom survey, a large majority of schoolchildren said that they were more motivated (74 percent) by using digital educational media such as learning platforms. However, 42 percent criticized the fact that their teachers did not know how to use digital educational media sensibly in the classroom. Bitkom President Ralf Wintergerst said when presenting the study that the survey shows that the digitization of education is not just about infrastructure and devices. “Digital teaching and learning content and digitally qualified teachers are also very important to the students.”