Students want more protection against corona: debate on compulsory attendance

Heike Schmoll

Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for the “Bildungswelten”.

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Perhaps it was therefore no coincidence that exactly these two state school conferences and the student representatives from Bremen were missing during the conversation with the President of the Conference of Ministers of Education (KMK), Schleswig-Holstein’s Minister of Education Karin Prien (CDU), on Tuesday evening. The student representatives from the other 13 countries were present, and Prien was visibly impressed by the constructive conversation with them. She had already met with the local student representatives thirteen times in Schleswig-Holstein during the corona pandemic and adopted many practical suggestions, she told the F.A.Z. on Wednesday. So the students had demanded tests for vaccinated and boosted after the Christmas break, Prien reports, and they also got them against the resistance of the responsible Ministry of Social Affairs.

All student representatives agree that children and young people were not heard enough in the corona pandemic, that politics has passed over them. “The students rightly demand to be heard in good time,” says Prien. They also complained about a much too late communication, “we all have to get better here,” the KMK president assured. Currently, the KMK is thinking about regular conversation formats with students, in which the KMK Presidium should also be involved. The students want to talk about the recruitment of teachers and the shortage of teachers, school social work, the digital Pact and school in pandemic times.

“Attacks on classroom teaching unacceptable”

The students disagree about the classroom teaching. The vast majority want to come to school, but some also worry about infections and feel extremely uncomfortable if individual teachers do not strictly follow the rules of hygiene or the frivolous classmates put pressure on the anxious ones. When advocating face-to-face teaching, the student representatives in the city-states refer to the children and young people from socially disadvantaged families, who have as little of a voice in student representatives as their parents in parent representatives.

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