Stuttgart (dpa / lsw) - In view of the lack of staff and a high number of young refugees from Ukraine, Baden-Württemberg's Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann (Greens) does not completely rule out larger school classes. Kretschmann said in Stuttgart on Tuesday and again defended his most recent fire letter to schools on teachers' working hours.
"But of course we still have something in the bag to solve that. That would be increasing the class divider." Apart from allegations and criticism, he received no suggestions from teachers' associations as to what could be done in this "acute shortage". The class divider is the benchmark from which a class is divided into two classes. It has been defined as an arithmetic variable since 2004 and serves as the basis for teacher assignment.
The Baden-Württemberg Minister of Education Theresa Schopper (Greens) said in an interview a few days ago: "The class divider is currently something like the last cartridge." She doesn't want to fill up the classes, she told the "Mannheimer Morgen". But she is aware that there are quite a few injustices. "We have small elementary schools that never come into contact with class dividers, while in cities like Mannheim or Stuttgart, classes are bursting at the seams."
In Baden-Württemberg, the lower limit for a class size is currently 16 children or young people in all types of schools. In elementary school, an upper limit is set at 28 pupils, in Hauptschule, Realschule and Gymnasium at 30.
