“Very reasonable investment”
Teachers’ association sees the integration of Ukrainian children at risk
04/10/2023 10:29 am
More than 200,000 students from Ukraine are taught at schools in Germany. But a spokesman for the German Teachers’ Association fears that integration could fail if schools and teachers no longer receive support.
The German Teachers’ Association calls for more support for schools in the integration of refugee Ukrainian children and young people. “Politicians are threatening to crash the project of successfully integrating students from Ukraine in German schools,” warned Association President Heinz-Peter Meidinger in the “Stuttgarter Zeitung” and the “Stuttgarter Nachrichten”. “We urgently need additional support for schools that have taken in a particularly large number of refugee students – otherwise the integration threatens to fail.”
At many schools there is an admirable commitment to refugee children, said the teacher official. “But the vast majority of federal states largely let schools down when it comes to coping with these tasks.”
According to surveys by the Conference of Ministers of Education, around 205,000 students from Ukraine are currently being taught in Germany as a result of the Russian war of aggression against the neighboring country. There are around 11 million students in total.
“If you assume that an additional student requires around 7,000 to 10,000 euros in additional personnel and material costs, the federal states would have had to invest up to two billion euros in the integration of Ukrainian school children,” said Meidinger. But you would have “only invested very manageably”. He also called for long-term job offers for Ukrainian teachers and training opportunities for German teachers who work in schools with many refugee children.