Is the school system static? Does it hardly ever change? Educational scientist Till-Sebastian Idel and his team see things differently. For years, for example, they have been researching ‘long-form’ schools that do not have a transition between primary and secondary levels. For Germany, this would be a new type of school.
Red, blue, orange, green, pink. Coloured cornflour, similar to that used in the Indian spring festival ‘Holi’, envelops the school playground, pupils, parents and staff at the Primus School in Minden, East Westphalia, in a cloud of brightly coloured dust. “Three cheers for us,” echoes from the loudspeakers as the holidays begin. A school is celebrating its tenth anniversary, celebrating itself. Above all, however, it is celebrating the young people who were the very first to complete an ambitious school pilot scheme, from their first day at school in 2013 through to the end of Year 10, and who now have their lower secondary school leaving certificate in their pockets. PRIMUS – the acronym stands for the integration of primary and secondary education, in other words, “a school from a single mould”, as described by the Oldenburg-based educational scientist Prof. Dr Till-Sebastian Idel, who has been providing scientific support for the North Rhine-Westphalian school pilot project at a total of five locations since its inception.
Since 2013, “nothing less than a new type of school” has been being trialled here, as Idel and his research assistant Dr Sven Pauling from the University’s Institute of Educational Sciences put it in a scholarly article. According to Idel, there is a wider societal debate in which schools are perceived as rather inflexible and static. This contrasts with his perspective: “We are focusing on schools that see themselves as extremely capable of change. And that’s what’s so exciting – seeing that schools might actually be changing after all.”
As in the PRIMUS project. One of the aims of the school pilot is to enable educational journeys without external disruptions – that is, without a change of school after Year 4 – in pedagogically innovative, high-performing and, at the same time, inclusive and educationally appropriate reform schools. What might the school of the future look like? “From our perspective, the idea of a school without transitions has enormous potential for the future,” emphasises Idel, who heads the School Pedagogy and General Didactics department in Oldenburg and leads the PRIMUS accompanying research together with his colleague from Münster, Prof. Dr Christina Huf.
Together with his team, Idel conducts research into schools and school culture, teaching, pedagogical professionalism and the changes taking place in these areas – which, he says, almost automatically results in a “wide-angle perspective”. This perspective is certainly helpful when analysing and supporting the school pilot project, elements of which touch on several points on the current school pedagogy reform agenda: education for all, under the banner of inclusion; the opportunities that cross-class and even cross-stage learning offers pupils; and the interaction between different teaching disciplines and other professions within an all-day school – a school that offers more than ‘just’ lessons. The accompanying research is still ongoing, but group discussions and interviews to date with children, teachers, parents and school management, as well as observations of everyday school life, are providing initial insights.
The research Idel is conducting is primarily qualitative. Qualitative means that the focus is not on gathering the broadest possible data set, as is the case with PISA, IGLU or other standardised studies. Rather, the focus is on specific insights: “We’re interested in how, for example, members of a teaching staff collectively reflect on the development of their school, in relevant committees and working groups, wherever that may be. What problems do they identify, and how do they discuss them? What solutions do they find, and how do they develop these further?” says Idel. These solutions vary considerably across the five Primus sites. “We observe, we’re involved, and at regular intervals we conduct targeted interviews with all those involved in the school.” This is supplemented in some cases by quantitative data – figures that can be statistically analysed.
These figures show, for example, that not changing schools – one of the key defining features of the Primus schools – has a measurable impact. In any case, says Idel, research has shown “that this transition is a critical point at which disadvantages and inequality in the education system arise”. This has to do, for example, with a kind of ‘self-selection’ on the part of parents, who tended to shy away from aiming for their child to achieve a higher qualification than their own. For similar reasons, teachers’ recommendations were often cautious. “And despite all the talk of social mobility within the general education system, ‘advancement’ to the next level of schooling rarely succeeds,” says Idel.
As a look at the Primus schools suggests, it is easier to break free from school recommendations outside the usual multi-tiered school system. As three of the five Primus schools enrolled children in both Year 1 and Year 5 during their early years, the researchers were later able to compare the school choice recommendations and final school-leaving qualifications of these lateral entrants. The results: of the total of 193 pupils in the 2020 graduating cohort, only 9 per cent had left their respective primary schools in 2014 with a recommendation for a Gymnasium.
, 49 per cent entered a Primus school with a recommendation for a Realschule, and 31 per cent with a recommendation for a Hauptschule. However, as stated in the researchers’ report to the Ministry of Education, they “tended to achieve the next higher educational qualification”.
“To have a good future, I need to study hard”
Thus, 26 per cent obtained a Hauptschule leaving certificate – including young people with special educational needs, some of whom had been promoted to Year 5 without any recommendation for a leaving certificate at all. 21 per cent obtained an intermediate school leaving certificate, and as many as 48 per cent gained entry to the upper secondary level of the Gymnasium. More than five times as many graduates as would have been expected based on the recommendations therefore left the Primus schools with a recognised intermediate school leaving certificate. Idel emphasises that these are centralised examinations. And just as in state-wide assessments of learning outcomes in classes 3 and 8, Primus schools ‘performed very well’ in comparison with other schools with a similar pupil mix.
Meanwhile, parents issued certificates stating that the Primus schools enabled pupils to experience “the joy of learning without the pressure of time or grades” and – thanks to the extended programme – fostered long-term relationships, whether with other children or with teachers. At the same time, qualitative interviews with more than a hundred pupils from various Primus schools revealed that, when it comes to learning, they primarily strive to optimise their own performance – regardless of grades or working towards a specific school recommendation. Many children and young people therefore explicitly attribute meaning to their own learning and learning process with a view to their future prospects: “The future lies ahead of me; I still have everything to experience, and to ensure I have a good future, I need to study hard,” said one pupil in an interview. The researchers are examining the further educational paths of Primus graduates in another, ongoing study.
A change of scene: “Money, Money, Money…” – the song by the Swedish pop band ABBA rings out at the start of an English lesson in the classroom. Seated at their desks are pupils in Years 8 or 9. The teacher calls for a brainstorming session to identify the pupils’ existing vocabulary relating to the topic of money. At his signal, the pupils rattle off English terms in quick succession – until educational scientist Idel clicks ‘Pause’ on his office computer. This is a video of a classroom situation, just as he and his team record them for their research – always waiting “for the moment that draws us in, when we press ‘Record’”, – and just as he uses them as illustrative material in his teaching. “This is a classic introduction to teacher-led lessons,” says Idel, “a class discussion structured by the teacher, in which they assign tasks and determine who gets to speak.”
Idel likes to contrast this example of frontal teaching with footage from a mixed-age learning group in Berlin. Space-dividing elements instead of neat rows of desks. Pupils are spread around the room, working on tasks individually or in groups, moving about to exchange ideas, ask others for advice or join the queue forming at the teacher’s flipchart to ask their questions there. “Typical open-plan teaching,” says Idel; in the so-called ‘learning office’, there is naturally considerably “more hustle and bustle”.
It is a form of teaching also found at the Primus schools. Individualised learning at one’s own pace, at one’s own level and, as Idel emphasises, also “with different content and objectives for the same subject”. So-called spiral curricula structure the learning material and enable learners to join in at different points along an imaginary ascending ‘spiral’ of content: This allows a topic to be covered simultaneously with pupils at different levels of learning and in different classes, without it simply being a repetition of last year’s material for the older pupils in a learning group. Everyone can tailor their knowledge as they wish, according to their ability. In this type of teaching, teachers act primarily as learning facilitators who work with pupils to draw up their learning plans and provide regular individual feedback.
“Successful approaches can be replicated. But every school is different”
This type of teaching challenges schools to continually develop – for example, the Primus schools in Minden or Münster, where the learning groups comprise three classes of students each until the end of Year 9. There, researchers are observing how teachers are striving to organise the pilot scheme in the best possible way. For example, in Stage II, which combines classes 4 to 6, teachers with fundamentally different professional backgrounds – namely from primary and secondary education – are, so to speak, joining forces and working hand in hand. How, in the process – moving away from the traditional textbooks organised by year group – they also develop their own teaching materials.
Or how, for instance, teachers in Stage III – covering Classes 7 to 9 – engaged in quite heated discussions about the optimal organisation of study time: opinions differed as to whether, in the final stage before the leaving class, the form tutor or rather rotating subject teachers should remain available during the daily individual study time. Should priority be given to a closer pedagogical relationship or to subject-specific expertise? In the end, the teaching staff opted for a hybrid model with the emphasis on subject teachers.
A decision is still pending on whether the ‘long-form’ schools will be retained beyond the end of the pilot scheme in 2027 and whether the State Schools Act will allow them to be established elsewhere in future. But even now, they could provide impetus and inspire other schools, according to Idel. “Successful concepts can be replicated – whether it’s assessment without grades or a specific way of organising subject teaching in ‘learning offices’. Yet every individual school is different – the problems are slightly different, the people involved are different, and the social context is different,” he emphasises. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution that can simply be copied anyway.” So the future of the school is probably a bit like the different colours at the celebration in the Minden school playground: it lies in diversity.
The article is taken from the current issue of the research magazine EINBLICKE; author: Deike Stolz.
