Political discussions do not usually take place in craft businesses. However, the CDU parliamentary group and the CDU state executive committee had chosen the roofing business of the Chamber of Crafts President Helmut Zimmer in St. Wendel as the venue for their joint closed meeting on Sunday. The focus was on vocational training and thus also the future of the craft industry in Saarland. Among other things, they had come together between machines and heavy equipment to adopt a position paper on strengthening and further developing vocational training in Saarland. This was also necessary because this topic was completely neglected by the SPD state government, as the CDU parliamentary group leader Stephan Toscani explained. This was also confirmed by the fact that the vocational schools had once again come away empty-handed in the redistribution of vacant positions this school year.
Toscani sees major problem for economic development of society
Every year, 50,000 young people across Germany leave school without a qualification and therefore without a chance of getting an apprenticeship. The shortage of skilled workers threatens to get worse, warned Toscani. “We have not a small problem here, but a really big one, for the life path of individuals, but also for our society and the economic development of our society,” explained the parliamentary group leader.
Language support is an integral requirement
The adopted position paper is therefore not only an educational policy one, but also an economic policy one, stressed the education policy spokesperson of the CDU parliamentary group, Jutta Schmitt-Lang. Together with Stephan Toscani and Frank Wagner, education politicians of the CDU parliamentary group, she presented the CDU’s central demands. The CDU attaches integral importance to the topic of language. The vocational training system is being expanded to include its own language competence centers for acquiring basic German language skills. Successful completion of these should form the basis for entry into training preparation and vocational school. “In training preparation in particular, we have entire classes that cannot speak German, that have a curriculum and specialist training that is simply not possible to implement,” stressed Jutta Schmitt-Lang. “We are playing with the fate of young people and have resources that we are not using for our country. Every individual has a right to the education they can afford, and that is not possible without the appropriate language skills.”
CDU calls for establishment of an institute for vocational training
In addition to the vocational schools being well equipped with teachers, they are also being supported by the use of different professions. “We are calling on the state government to free up more capacity for school social work and the use of language support teachers, language mediators and more special needs school teachers,” said Frank Wagner. The CDU parliamentary group is also calling on the state government to set up an institute for vocational training based on the model of other federal states. This should better network the actors involved in training and further education and also be centrally responsible for expanding and strengthening educational and career advice. This is currently still decentralized and is primarily designed to provide advice on further education. The introduction of a Saarland “Crafts Day” at general education schools, especially at grammar schools, could also give students a better understanding of crafts and their advantages, suggests the CDU.
Some of the measures called for can even be implemented without additional costs, Toscani stressed. Instead, existing resources must be used more intelligently. This is the case, for example, with language support, which is currently being implemented in a scattergun manner rather than systematically and in a targeted manner, as Jutta Schmitt-Lang explained.
