The digital pact for schools has pushed the overdue digitization of school lessons. However, changes to the concept and the consolidation of funding are necessary for the program to be able to take full effect.
The Federal Court of Auditors is something like the guilty conscience of the public sector. If money is wasted somewhere, the Bonn authority urges people to be more economical and efficient – sometimes in places where you would not have expected it. For example, with the school digital pact. It is unanimously welcomed by all political parties and educational institutions. But not from the Federal Court of Auditors. He criticizes the digital pact as inefficient and too expensive. The auditors complain that the federal government is not responsible for the IT equipment in the schools and that the money is not distributed according to needs, but according to a fixed key that does not take into account which schools are already well equipped. In the federal states, the Federal Court of Auditors sees the allocation of funds inconsistent and fragmented, the verification procedure is incomplete and ineffective. Since the grievances could not be remedied, the digital pact should not be extended.
What about the digital pact?
Strong tobacco. Is the digital pact, which is supposed to catapult Germany’s schools into the 21st century, really that bad? One can argue about that. But there is agreement on one thing: the digitization of schools is really bad. And this is exactly where the 6.5 billion euros should help. The status report “How digital are our schools?” by the IU International University in Erfurt shows that the money is needed.
98.5 percent of school staff state that their schools are connected to the Internet, although the vast majority do not have it in all the rooms they need. Digital media such as videos are used at least regularly in 57.0 percent of schools and at least sporadically in another 35.1 percent. That’s not enough for many parents: 51.6 percent think that digital media are used too seldom in their child’s school. And they want better equipment with tablets and laptops. In her experience, only 32.2 percent of schools have tablet class sets that can be used when needed. 65.7 percent of the headmasters see the greatest hurdle of digitization in the adequate equipment of the students with digital devices. State subsidies are all the more relevant: 41,
money is not everything
So you can’t do it without more money. On the other hand, money doesn’t solve everything: “The often lacking equipment mostly has structural causes,” says Prof. Ulrike Lichtinger from the IU International University. Schools and municipalities are often advised by partners who do not have the necessary expertise at the interface between digitization and education. In addition, the handling of devices such as Smartboards is very complex and teachers cannot cope with them.
For Christian Büttner, the digital pact makes an important contribution to social justice. Many parents could not afford their own device for their child. Büttner is the director of the Institute for Education and School Psychology in Nuremberg and knows the problem firsthand. There are 65,000 students in the city, more than a quarter of them live in households that depend on social support services. Education politicians are making an effort to solve this. “Currently, however, the funding models are very heterogeneous,” says Büttner, “and therefore there is not one digital pact, but 16, since almost every federal state has its own interpretation of the digital pact. This also means that the school authorities have to act differently.
“The digital pact only works if everyone pulls together.”
The challenges are well known. This was shown at the status conference on the digital pact for schools, which took place in Bonn in June 2022. Büttner speaks of a spirit of optimism and many good best practices. The conferences should be continued, he recommends, but the group of participants should be opened up and not just limited to school authorities, schools, federal states and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Access should also be granted to industry and providers of educational material. Büttner does not share the fear that they only want to do business. “The digital pact only works if everyone pulls together.”
Digital Pact 1 expires in 2024. The federal government’s coalition agreement states that there will be a successor and that this will be financed until 2030. In a survey, the partners of the Bündnis für Bildung eV stated what they wanted from the follow-up pact: opening up the financing of software and IT services, simplifying application and billing, and sustainable financing.
