Education
18,800 francs per child per year: That’s how expensive kindergartens and schools in Thurgau are
A report from the Thurgau Office for Elementary Schools shows that as the number of students increases, so do the costs. The cost for special school students is many times what is spent on a child in regular school.
In small school communities like Berlingen, schooling per child tends to be more expensive than in large ones.
Image: Reto Martin
586 million francs. This is how much regular school in the canton of Thurgau cost in 2022. This emerges from the “School Finances 2022” report, which the Office for Primary Schools published before Christmas. The report also shows: In the last ten years, education spending in mainstream schools has increased by 78 million francs – in 2012 it was 508 million francs.
The statistics show the biggest jump between 2021 and 2022. During this period, not only costs but also the number of students rose by 2.8 percent: “The high increase of 880 students corresponds to the strongest growth since records began 25 years ago.”
Ukraine children in almost all schools
There is an explanation for the above-average increase: the war in Ukraine. In the summer of 2022, 540 children from Ukraine attended school in Thurgau, and at the end of the year there were 470. Throughout the year, 77 of the 87 Thurgau schools educated children who had fled the Russian attack.
The long-term development – since 2014, more children in Thurgau have been going to school every year – is also evident regardless of this. In 2022 there were 32,012 students, and by 2030 there will be around 35,100 according to the current population scenarios from the Statistics Office. “With the current class sizes, this would require over 170 additional school classes.”
According to the forecast, the curve will flatten after 2030: Statisticians expect a further increase of just 500 students and a total of around 35,600 by 2040. If the forecast is correct, the old record from 1997 will be broken in the coming years broken: At that time, 34,800 children attended Thurgau schools.
18,800 francs per school child per year
The more children attend Thurgau kindergartens, primary and secondary schools, the higher the overall costs become. They have increased from 508 to 586 million francs per year since 2014. During the same period, the costs per student also increased: from almost 18,000 to 18,800 francs per year. Of this, 60 percent goes to teachers’ salaries, 21 percent to buildings and maintenance, 11 percent to administration and 8 percent to material costs in teaching.
The almost 800 special students are not included. An additional 82 million francs were spent on them in 2022 – over 100,000 francs per child.
How much it costs to educate an individual child in a regular school depends on the infrastructure, the class composition and the individual performance requirements of a school community and does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about the quality of teaching, the report says. In any case, the differences are considerable: “The most expensive school district had kindergarten costs that were more than twice as high as the corresponding least expensive one.”
2024-01-04 17:10:23
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