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German class sizes are in line with the international average, but the number of teaching hours for teachers is lower
Photo: Patrick Seeger / picture alliance / dpa
Praise for vocational training, critical remarks on the general school system - and a warning call regarding the shortage of teachers: Germany's education system does only partially well in an international comparison.
This emerges from the report "Education at a Glance", which the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) presented on Tuesday.
The study is 584 pages long and full of data on the national education systems of 48 countries and regions worldwide.
The evaluation for the German school and education system shows contradicting results:
The authors of the study praise
vocational training in Germany
.
"Vocational education is one of the strengths of the German education system", write the authors.
They predict that this area will play a key role after the corona-related economic downturn.
A vocational qualification is also something of a guarantee for employment: 88 percent of 25 to 34 year olds with a vocational qualification have a job.
more on the subject
Labor market: how to get started in vocational trainingA column by Hermann-Josef Tenhagen
Labor market: number of trainees reaches new low
But:
Those who have completed a degree or a technical college also achieve this value - but they receive significantly more money.
"Adults with a tertiary degree earn around two-thirds (61 percent) more than workers with an upper secondary degree," the report said.
The number of those who are
completing
a
degree or a technical school education
, the so-called tertiary level, has increased significantly in Germany over the past ten years - from 26 percent in 2009 to 33 percent in 2019 among 25 to 34-year-olds.
The researchers note that this is a positive trend.
But:
Despite this increase, Germany's higher-level educational qualifications are still well below the average for the OECD countries.
Here, 45 percent of people in the same age group get a degree or a comparable exam.
Not a question of money
When it
comes to
spending on educational institutions
, Germany does above average: On average, every full-time student from elementary school to university spent the equivalent of 13,529 US dollars (around 11,456 euros) per year - the OECD average is only 11,231 US dollars (about 9510 euros).
But:
Despite this higher expenditure, Germany only landed in the upper midfield in the current Pisa school performance test, and the results were even worse in some individual areas.
More money for education does not automatically mean a better school system with better student performance.
The distribution of expenses across the various types of school has also met with criticism in recent years.
The new education report confirms that significantly less money is made available for primary school children than for older pupils.
The annual expenditure in Germany is the equivalent of 9572 US dollars (about 8,105 euros) for each elementary school pupil, 11,975 US dollars (about 10,144 euros) for young people in grades 5 to 10 (lower secondary level) and 15,466 US dollars. Dollars (about 13,101 euros) in upper secondary level.
Situation of teachers
One chapter of the education report deals with the work situation of teachers.
This shows that Germany pays above-average salaries.
The average annual wage for a full-time elementary school teacher is the equivalent of 74,407 US dollars (about 63,030 euros) - on the OECD average, however, the countries only pay a salary of 43,942 US dollars (about 37,223 euros).
When evaluating the teaching obligation, however, a completely different picture emerges: teachers in German primary schools work an average of 698 teaching hours per year - in contrast, the OECD average is 778 hours.
The teachers in Costa Rica have the highest workload in all school types.
In terms of class sizes, Germany ends up almost exactly at the OECD averages.
In primary school, an average of 21 children are taught together, in secondary schools up to grade 10 there are 24 children.
For comparison: the smallest primary school classes are in Luxembourg with 15 children, the largest in Chile with 28.
Teacher shortage as a serious problem
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International Education Day: Almost 70 million teachers are missing from Franca Quecke worldwide
The authors of the education report are sounding the alarm with regard to the supply of schools with well-trained teachers.
A large number of teachers will retire in the coming years and will then have to be replaced.
"In 2018, 41 percent of primary and secondary school teachers in Germany were over 50 years of age and only 7 percent under 30." According to the OECD study.
The shortage of teachers is already a huge problem for the federal states - and is likely to worsen considerably in the coming years.
Consequences of the corona crisis
In a special evaluation, the researchers deal with the effects of the corona crisis on schools and the education system.
"The cost of school closings for individuals and society is very high," emphasize the OECD education researchers.
However, a prerequisite for reopening schools in times of the pandemic is the ability to ensure a safe distance between the children and the teachers: "For countries with smaller class sizes, it may be easier to comply with the new requirements for social distancing."
For Germany, the report calculates that schools were effectively closed for 17 weeks - three weeks longer than the international average.
For elementary school pupils this meant 323 missed attendance hours, for young people in lower secondary level it was 408 teaching hours.
An attempt was made to compensate for this lack of attendance hours by switching to digitally supported teaching, but this was "more difficult" to implement in Germany than in other countries, according to the OECD report.
Only one third of the school administrators agreed with the statement that an effective online platform for learning support was available in Germany.
On the OECD average, however, said this was 54 percent, in Denmark and Singapore even more than 90 percent of school administrators.
Previously, an international survey among parents and students in six countries, which looked at how well the schools managed to switch from classroom to distance learning at short notice, had also found poor results for Germany.
According to this, a good change in Germany was only possible for every tenth student - in the case of the front runner Singapore there were three times as many.
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