In addition to the external exam at the end of the year, the child’s learning status should be recorded after the first semester and parents should no longer be able to decide where the external exam takes place. In addition, the consequences of deregistering should be made clear to the parents in informative discussions.
According to the current, not final status, the front runners in school cancellations according to the Ö1 “Morgenjournal” are Lower Austria with 1,400 cancellations and Styria and Upper Austria with more than 1,000 cancellations. The number of cancellations in Upper Austria has increased more than fivefold compared to autumn 2019, i.e. before the outbreak of the corona pandemic. In Salzburg, too, the number has more than quadrupled since then and is now over 380 cancellations. In Vienna, around 500 cancellations are expected to be the same as in previous years. The child and youth advocates are very critical of the development, said the Salzburg child and youth advocate Andrea Holz-Dahrenstaedt. The children had already suffered enough from the school closings.
In Austria only compulsory instruction
In Austria there is no school requirement, only instruction. Children can therefore also attend home lessons or a private school without public rights (these do not have the right to issue school reports). This must be reported to the respective education directorate by the beginning of the respective school year. This can only forbid deregistration “if it can be assumed with a high degree of probability that the …. equivalency of the lessons is not given”.
In the future, the Ministry of Education would like to ensure that parents are also aware of what this de-registration means in practice. For example, learning groups made up of several children are not allowed in home lessons, meaning that school as a social place is no longer available for the children. In contrast to distance learning in the previous school year, there is no support for teachers in teaching at home.
External exam at the end of the school year
If a child is registered for home lessons, they must also take an external exam on the subject matter at a “normal” school at the end of the school year. If you fail to do this, you are no longer allowed to de-register in the following school year, but have to repeat the grade at a school with public rights. In future, the education directorates in all federal states are to determine at which school the external exam takes place. With this, the Ministry of Education wants to put an end to “examination tourism”.
As early as the beginning of 2022, in addition to the external exam, it will also be checked after the winter semester which learning progress the de-registered students are making. So you should be able to counteract problems early on, as the Ministry of Education says. However, this does not result in any legal consequences such as returning to regular lessons earlier, after all, there are no consequences associated with the school message at the end of the first semester.
According to the Ministry of Education, some legal questions still need to be clarified for the implementation of these plans.
