School is static? Hardly ever changes? Educational scientist Till-Sebastian Idel and his team take a different view. For example, they have been researching long-form schools without the transition between primary and secondary level for years. This would be a new type of school for Germany.
Red, blue, orange, green, pink. Coloured corn starch, as used in the Indian spring festival "Holi", envelops the schoolyard, pupils, parents and staff of the Primus School in Minden, East Westphalia, in a cloud of bright colours. "Cheers to us" can be heard from the loudspeakers at the start of the holidays. A school is celebrating its tenth birthday, celebrating itself. Above all, however, it is celebrating the young people who were the very first to complete an ambitious school trial from their enrolment in 2013 to the end of year ten and who now have their intermediate school-leaving certificate in their pockets. PRIMUS - the acronym stands for the integration of primary and secondary education, i.e. "a school from a single mould", as described by Oldenburg educational scientist Prof. Dr Till-Sebastian Idel, who has provided academic support for the North Rhine-Westphalian school trial at a total of five locations since the beginning.
"Nothing less than a new type of school" has been tested here since 2013, as Idel and his research assistant Dr Sven Pauling from the university's Institute of Educational Sciences put it in a specialist article. According to Idel, there is a social debate that perceives schools as rather immobile and static. This contrasts with his perspective: "We are focussing on schools that see themselves as extremely capable of change. And that's the exciting thing - to see it: Schools may be changing after all."
One of the aims of the PRIMUS project is to enable educational biographies without external breaks - i.e. without having to change schools after the fourth grade - in educationally innovative, efficient 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 transition-free school has enormous potential for the future," emphasises Idel, who heads the Department of School Pedagogy and General Didactics in Oldenburg and leads the Primus accompanying research together with his Münster colleague Prof. Dr Christina Huf.
Idel and his team conduct research into schools and school culture, teaching, pedagogical professionalism and their respective changes - this automatically results in a "wide-angle perspective". This is certainly helpful when analysing and accompanying the school experiment, whose elements touch on several points of a current school pedagogical reform agenda: teaching for all, keyword inclusion; the opportunities that cross-grade and even cross-level learning offers pupils; and the interaction of different teaching qualifications and other professions in an all-day school, a school that offers more than "just" teaching. The accompanying research is still ongoing, but group discussions and interviews with children, teachers, parents and school administrators as well as an observation of everyday school life have provided initial insights.
Idel's research is primarily qualitative. Qualitative, that is, it is not about the broadest possible data basis as for PISA, IGLU or other standardised studies. Rather, it is about concrete insights: "We are interested in how, for example, members of a teaching staff think together about the development of their school, in appropriate committees and working groups, wherever they may be. What problems do they identify and how do they talk about them? What solutions do they find and how do they develop them further?" says Idel. These solutions are quite different at the five Primus locations. "We watch, are there and conduct targeted interviews with all school stakeholders at certain intervals." This is supplemented in part by quantitative data, figures that can be analysed statistically.
These figures show, for example, that not changing schools - one of the central profile features of Primus schools - has measurable effects. In any case, says Idel, it is known from research "that this transition is a neuralgic point at which disadvantages and inequality arise in the education system". This has to do with a kind of "self-selection" by parents, for example, who tend to shy away from aiming for a higher qualification than their own for their child. Teachers' recommendations are often cautious due to similar considerations. "And despite all the talk about the permeability of the general education school system, it is rare for children to 'progress' to the next higher type of school afterwards," says Idel.
As a look at the Primus schools suggests, it is easier to emancipate oneself from school recommendations outside of the usual multi-tier school system. As three of the five Primus schools enrolled children in both first and fifth grade in the early years, the researchers were later able to compare the school choice recommendations and qualifications of these lateral entrants. The results: Of the total of 193 pupils in the 2020 graduating class, only 9 per cent had left their respective primary school in 2014 with a grammar school recommendation. A further
49 per cent came to a primary school with a Realschule recommendation and 31 per cent with a Hauptschule recommendation. However, as the researchers' report to the Ministry of Education states, they "tended to achieve the next higher educational qualification".
"To have a good future, I also have to study well"
As a result, 26 per cent obtained a lower secondary school leaving certificate - including young people with special educational needs, some of whom had been transferred to the fifth grade without any recommendation at all. 21 per cent obtained an intermediate school-leaving certificate, and a full 48 per cent were granted admission to the upper secondary school. This means that more than five times as many graduates as expected based on the recommendations left the Primus schools with a qualified intermediate school-leaving certificate. Idel emphasises that these are centralised examinations. And just as in nationwide surveys of learning levels in years 3 and 8, Primus schools "did very well" in comparison with other schools with a similar composition of pupils.
Meanwhile, parents certified that Primus schools make it possible to experience "the joy of learning without the pressure of time and grades" and - thanks to the long form - enable long-term relationships - whether with other children or with teachers. At the same time, qualitative interviews with more than a hundred pupils from different Primus schools revealed that their main aim when learning is to optimise their own performance - beyond grades or working towards a specific school recommendation. Accordingly, many children and young people give meaning to their own learning and learning process with explicit reference to their future prospects: "The future is still ahead of me, I still have everything to experience, and in order for me to have a good future, I have to learn well," said one pupil in the interview. The researchers are looking at the further educational path of Primus graduates in another study that is still ongoing.
Change of scene: "Money, money, money..." - Songs by Swedish pop band ABBA ring out at the start of an English lesson in the classroom. Young people from eighth or ninth grade are sitting at the tables. The teacher calls for a brainstorming session to determine the existing vocabulary on the subject of money. In staccato fashion, the pupils name English-language terms in response to his hand signals - until educationalist Idel clicks "pause" on his office computer. It is a video of a classroom situation, just as he and his team record for their research - always waiting "for the situation that pulls us in, where we press 'record'" - and as he also uses it as illustrative material in teaching. "This is a classic introduction to a teacher-led lesson," says Idel, "a class discussion that the teacher structures and in which he distributes tasks and speaking rights."
Idel likes to contrast this example of frontal teaching with recordings from a mixed-grade learning group in Berlin. Room-dividing elements instead of precise rows of desks. Pupils spread around the room, working on tasks individually or in groups, moving around to exchange ideas, ask others for advice or join the queue forming at the teacher's flipchart to ask their questions. "Typical open lessons," says Idel, in the so-called learning office there is naturally much "more hustle and bustle".
It is a form of teaching that also exists at the Primus schools. Individualised learning at the students' own pace, at their own level and, as Idel emphasises, "with different content and objectives for the same subject matter". So-called spiral curricula structure the learning material and enable learners to start at different points in an imaginary ascending "spiral" of content: this allows a topic to be covered simultaneously with pupils from different learning levels and year groups, without it simply being a repetition of the previous year's material for the older pupils in a learning group. Everyone can differentiate their knowledge according to their wishes and abilities. In these lessons, teachers act primarily as learning guides who work with the pupils to determine their learning plan and provide regular individualised feedback.
"Successful concepts can be transferred. Every school is different"
This type of teaching challenges schools to constantly develop further - such as the Primus schools in Minden and Münster, where the learning groups comprise three year groups until the end of year 9. There, the researchers observe how the teachers try to organise the school experiment in the best possible way. For example, in Level II, which combines Years 4 to 6, teachers with different professional backgrounds - namely primary and secondary school teachers - come together and work hand in hand. How they also develop their own teaching materials - away from the textbooks that are traditionally separated by level.
Or how, for example, teachers in Level III with Years 7 to 9 discussed the optimal organisation of learning time quite controversially: opinions differed as to whether the class teacher or rather alternating subject teachers should continue to be available in the daily individual learning time in the last level before the final year. Priority for the closer pedagogical relationship or the respective subject expertise? In the end, the teaching staff decided in favour of a mixed model with a focus on the subject teachers.
A decision has yet to be made as to whether the long-form schools will be retained beyond the end of the trial in 2027 and whether the state school law will allow them elsewhere in the future. But they could already provide impetus and inspire other schools, says Idel. "Successful concepts can be transferred - whether it's performance assessment without grades or a certain organisation of subject lessons in 'learning offices'. Every specific school is different - the problems are slightly different, the players are different, the social space is different," he emphasises. "There is no one-size-fits-all solution that you can copy and paste." So the future of the school is probably a bit like the different colours at the celebration in the Minden schoolyard: it lies in the diversity.
The article was taken from the current issue of the research magazine EINBLICKE; author: Deike Stolz.
