Education: Teacher unions demand: Continue the school digital pact

2023-07-21 07:28:42

Education Teachers’ unions demand: Continue the school digital pact

10th grade junior high school students work with tablets in a lesson. photo

© Uli Deck/dpa

The digitization of schools is expensive. The federal government therefore supports the federal states in financing. But the “digital pact” will soon expire. However, there are no plans for a new edition.

Teachers’ unions are pushing for continuation Digitalpakts Schule and demand sufficient funding from the federal government. “In my view, we urgently need a digital pact 2.0,” said Maike Finnern, head of the Education and Science Union (GEW), the “Stuttgarter Zeitung” and the “Stuttgarter Nachrichten” (Friday). “The federal government must now commit to this and budget accordingly,” there should be no funding gaps, she warned.

The chairman of the Education and Training Association (VBE), Gerhard Brand, also demanded that the federal government continue to support digitization in schools. A third of the schools still do not have broadband and WLAN, he told the newspapers as a reason. “Follow-up financing for the digital pact for schools is urgently needed and it should have been initiated much earlier,” he reprimanded. “The federal government must help so that poorer cities and communities in particular are not left behind when it comes to digitization in schools,” Brand demanded.

The Digital Pact School is a support program for the technical expansion of schools – for example with WLAN or tablets. It will run until 2024. In the coalition agreement, the traffic light had announced that it would launch a “Digital Pact 2.0” with the federal states, which would include the “sustainable new acquisition of hardware, the replacement of outdated technology, and device maintenance and administration”. So far, however, there are no concrete plans.

Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP) wants to ensure that the federal government makes its contribution to a “Digital Pact 2.0”. However, she recently referred to a stipulation in the government, according to which future support measures for the states – schools are a matter for the states – the federal government’s share of funding may be a maximum of 50 percent. So far, the federal government had borne the lion’s share of the digital pact, while the federal states had to contribute ten percent of their own.

dpa