150,000 tablets should have been delivered to students in the fifth and sixth grades in the winter semester. Only three quarters of them have arrived. Functional deficiencies and performance issues have queued the €250 million order from the Department of Education. A tablet costs around 400 euros, 300 euros of which come from taxpayers’ money, 100 euros are paid for by the parents of the students. “As the headmaster concerned, I regret that we have to continue to wait for the devices. The alternative would have been to explain to 200 parents that they would have to pay a deductible of 100 euros for defective devices. The parents can understand that too,” says Georg König, Chairman of the Headmasters of the AHS Upper Austria.
“Curriculum too ambitious”
The director of the Economics Realgymnasium and Oberstufenrealgymnasium of the Franciscan nuns in Wels (WG/ORG) sees another problem area popping up on the educational screens: the school subject “digital basic education”. As headmaster, he is to oversee the implementation of the curriculum in the fall, which has been under review for about a week.
“The corresponding training courses will not start until autumn. Many people will probably feel the same way I did that we cannot explain to our teachers how these skills should be taught to the children,” says König.
“Digital education” has been a long-standing demand of the headmasters. “We are also planning to include them in the distribution of subjects for the next school year, even if the legal basis for this is still lacking,” says König. After an initial review, the curriculum for digital education seemed a bit too ambitious. “I’m missing basic things like the ten-finger system in the curriculum for the first grade. But that’s the prerequisite for being able to work with these devices. And I don’t think that this skill is learned in elementary school,” says King.
“Involve headmasters at last”
König also calls for headmasters to be “consistently involved” in the future. Both in the case of decrees and regulations of the Ministry of Education. “It would be good to be seen as a partner, not an executive,” he says. The education directorates have now also become “postal control centers”. Both representatives of the headmasters in Upper Austria asked Minister of Education Martin Polaschek (VP) for an appointment, but did not receive one. “He doesn’t have to. But there is probably no company in Austria that consistently does without the experience of top-level managers,” says König. (against)
Source: Nachrichten
