Berlin/Erfurt (dpa/th) – Thuringia’s education system has worked its way back to third place in the ranking of the business-related Initiative Soziale Marktwirtschaft (INSM). According to this year’s education monitor published on Wednesday, the Free State has strengths compared to other federal states, as has been observed for a long time, especially in vocational training, school and university education in mathematics and natural sciences (MINT subjects) and in all-day offers in schools and kindergartens. According to the study, however, Thuringia is lagging behind most federal states when it comes to the digitization of schools. In this area, Thuringia ranks 13th out of the 16 federal states.
The study sees a need for improvement not only in equipping schools with high-performance WiFi and in the daily use of digital media in the classroom. “The corona pandemic has shown how urgently it is necessary for education to go digital,” said an INSM spokesman. Thuringia also performs worse than other federal states when it comes to IT training. Statistically, there are 23 company training contracts for every 100,000 inhabitants in the Free State, about half as many as the national average. A similar ratio can be seen among IT university graduates with statistically 38.6 graduates per 100,000 inhabitants (national average: 69.5 per 100,000).
Saxony again took the top spot in the ranking, followed by Bavaria. According to the INSM, it is financed by the employers’ associations in the metal and electrical industry.
