Bureaucracy: Thuringian teachers fight for time for students!

Bureaucracy: Thuringian teachers fight for time for students!

Rudolstadt, Deutschland - In Thuringia, there is a worrying picture: The teachers are under the pressure of an overwhelming bureaucracy that prevents them from their actual work. This becomes particularly clear at the Rudolstadt-Schwarza primary school, where the provisional director Anne Glaser points out the enormous requirements. For each of the three further training measures annually, teachers have to fill out a business trip, which is a real frustration factor for many. MDR reports that the teachers want to spend more time with their students instead of struggling with the bureaucratic effort.

A survey among association members illustrates the topic: excursions and school trips are associated with enormous bureaucracy. In school trips, transfers to the school account must be precisely checked and, if necessary, even pissed back. The teachers agree: a school administrative assistant could take on valuable administrative tasks and thus offer teachers more freedom for their pedagogical work.

bureaucratic hurdles in the school system

The situation is not only reflected in Rudolstadt: schools across Germany fight with similar challenges. A report of the German school portals emphasizes that the complexity of the administration has increased in recent years. More and more guidelines have to be complied with, which further increases the burden on the teachers. The initiative "One for everyone" is an attempt to simplify the processes and to expand the digital services in the fields of education by 2024

The main goal of this modernization is to improve access to public services. However, the relief of the teachers remains inadequate, which is alarming in view of the increasing demands in everyday school life. Both teachers and school management fight with bureaucratic tasks such as the documentation of statistics on teaching and number of students. Here the establishment of effective structures could be the key to a sustainable school organization, as not only described in the specialist literature

The future of school administration

The planned abolition of regular assessments for teachers by the state government offers a positive outlook, since these are considered superfluous. This would give teachers more space for school development and innovative educational concepts. A working group to reduce bureaucracy in schools should enable this and at the same time improve the audit situation for teachers. In practice, however, it remains to be seen how effective these measures are actually implemented.

At its core, the teachers want more trust in the planning and implementation of excursions and less bureaucratic hurdles. Your goal is clear: more time for the students, more space for creativity in class and less time to fill out forms. But whether this will be possible in the long term depends on the implementation of the announced reforms.