An amendment to the school law is currently being discussed in the state parliament. The CDU parliamentary group is urging parents, rather than school administrators, to make the final decision as to whether their child will start school a year later than planned. The Ministry of Education is against it.
Erfurt (dpa/th) – According to Thuringia’s Education Minister Helmut Holter (left), the responsible school management and not the parents should finally decide whether a child will start school later. “The decision can be made on the basis of professional assessments,” said Holter of the German Press Agency. Good and understandable reasons are needed to postpone a child’s school enrollment by a year.
Based on the Thuringian school law, parents can apply for their child to start school a year later than planned. However, other people make the decision. Paragraph 18 of the law states: “The decision is made by the head teacher in particular on the basis of the examination by the school doctor.” In such cases, directors and public health officers have a greater influence than parents. As a rule, children in Thuringia start school at the age of six.
An amendment to the school law is currently being discussed in the state parliament. The CDU parliamentary group is calling for parents to be given the final right to decide whether their children should start school at the age of seven or not. After all, the parents would know their children much better than anyone else, said CDU education politician Christian Tischner. Holter accused the CDU parliamentary group of wanting to make “a pedagogical role backwards into the 20th century” with their proposals.
According to the Ministry of Education, the number of Thuringian children who are not enrolled in school as planned, but have been deferred, has been fairly constant for years. Between the 2012/2013 school year and the 2021/22 school year, it commuted between 6.0 and 6.8 percent of all children who were six years old on August 1 of the respective year.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Education said that since 2003 the school management in Thuringia has been deciding on the deferral of children. It is true that parents can assess their children. However, the parents’ assessments of their children were primarily based on their observations in the private sphere. “How a child gets involved in a school context and orients itself in this is generally difficult to assess before going to school,” said the spokesman. School administrations and teachers would have many years of experience that would enable them to decide whether to start school or defer it.
In addition, there was a paradigm shift in the enrollment of children a long time ago, according to the Ministry of Education. At the beginning of the 1990s, it was still assumed throughout Germany that a child had to be able to attend school in order to be able to attend school. Today it is assumed that children are prepared in a so-called school entry phase for further joint learning from the third grade – despite very different prerequisites. These different learning requirements of the individual students are taken into account with an individual approach to the individual. However, the FDP education politician Franziska Baum, among others, had rejected such representations as unrealistic. According to feedback from the schools, the theory of the school entrance phase is often not implemented in practice.
