New mandatory reading training program for elementary schools in southwest Germany

Elementary school children in Baden-Württemberg should receive targeted reading training. The Ministry of Education announced on Friday in Stuttgart that reading promotion concepts will be mandatory in elementary schools for the next school year. The program strengthens one of the most important core competencies, said department head Theresa Schopper (Greens).

Among other things, the students should read aloud twice a week in class. According to Schopper, this is of particular benefit to those who do not speak German regularly at home or for whom reading at home was not a matter of course – and who therefore naturally find it more difficult in the first years of school.

With the initiative, the minister is reacting to the poor results of the IQB education study. In the nationwide survey last year, schoolchildren in the south-west performed disappointingly when it came to reading. Almost every fifth child (19.1 percent) did not reach the minimum standard in this area.

In the 2023/2024 school year, every public elementary school in Baden-Württemberg must now prove that it has a reading promotion concept. The ministry already has a proposal for the funding strategy ready: “BiSS-Transfer” (“BiSS” for education in language and writing).

The Federal Ministry of Education and the federal states had developed this concept on the basis of scientific studies. 402 elementary schools in Baden-Württemberg are already implementing it. The standards of the “BiSS transfer” are now to be introduced at all of the almost 2,400 public elementary schools.

The program relies, for example, on “loud-reading tandems” in which the children support each other. Pupils who are strong in reading work in pairs with those who are weak in reading so that they can read more fluently, as the Ministry of Education further announced. Reading to children at fixed times in the timetable also helps.

According to the announcement, the schools are supported by six “BiSS” regional coordinators and around 50 “BiSS” language trainers. In addition, there will be around 90 further training events in the coming school year on how to promote fluent reading and reading comprehension.

Associations, state parents’ council and opposition criticized that the idea would not change much and, above all, would not solve problems such as a shortage of teachers and classes that were too large. Oliver Hintzen from the Education and Training Association noted that all elementary schools have strategies to promote reading – albeit sometimes more, sometimes less intensively. “So this is not such a new and groundbreaking idea at all,” he shared.

The Education and Science Union (GEW) called the planned program “nicely meant and at the same time helpless”. “The real problems in the elementary schools are not being tackled,” complained the GEW state chairwoman Monika Stein. In order to strengthen primary schools, she insisted on a faster expansion of study places, a stop to the emigration of teachers through better pay and more management time for the school management.

The SPD parliamentary group emphasized that it had already called for mandatory daily reading times at primary schools a few months ago. “Mandatory tutoring and pre-school language tests are other tools that are urgently needed now,” said school policy spokeswoman Katrin Steinhülb-Joos.

For the FDP parliamentary group, enough primary school teachers are the central element. “Only then will measures to improve – not only – reading skills be able to take full effect,” said education policy spokesman Timm Kern. Rainer Balzer from the AfD parliamentary group called for better framework conditions such as no non-teaching tasks for teachers, homogeneous and small classes.

The spokeswoman for primary schools in the Greens in the state parliament, Nadyne Saint-Cast, defended the program as “one of many pieces of the puzzle” that overall improved primary schools in terms of quality and quantity.

(dpa)