Education
Teacher President: Not all Ukrainian students integrated
Elementary school students from Ukraine sit in the classroom of a school in Saxony-Anhalt. photo
© Robert Michael/dpa
Since the arrival of war refugees from Ukraine, a number of hurdles have also had to be overcome in the field of education. But according to the teachers’ association, there is a lack of qualified staff in the schools.
The outgoing President of the German Teachers’ Association, Heinz-Peter Meidinger, has complained about problems with the school integration of some Ukrainian students and identified insufficient efforts on the part of the states as the cause. Around 200,000 Ukrainian children are reasonably accommodated in schools.
However, their motivation for German lessons is “very different, depending on whether you expect to return soon or not,” he explained in the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung”. “The promise made by school politicians that now, at the end of the school year, all Ukrainian refugee children would have caught up with the learning level of regular classes – that’s already clear – cannot be kept.”
Today, the Conference of Ministers of Education advises, among other things, on the integration of Ukrainian students and other educational policy issues.
According to the head of the association, there are not enough qualified teachers for the special task of integrating war refugee children. “Teachers with special qualifications for German as a foreign language are in short supply,” he explained. The countries also made too little effort to recruit such specialists. Extracurricular teachers with a qualification for “German as a second language” are “only offered poorly paid contracts and fixed-term contracts”.