Dr. Katharina Werner

Almost 62% of people in North Rhine-Westphalia see unequal opportunities in the German education system as a serious problem. This has been shown by an analysis of the 2023 ifo Education Survey, in which over 5,500 adults participated.  The average across Germany is 57%.

Germans and members of parliament systematically misjudge student performance in their states. This is the finding of a representative survey conducted by the ifo Institute together with the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) and the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Assessments tend to be too pessimistic in states with good student performance and too optimistic in states with weak student performance. 

A majority of Germans (58 percent) are in favor of taking immediate educational measures to integrate Ukrainian refugees. There is broad support for different measures for adults, such as the right and duty to attend government-funded German courses (74 percent) and issuing work permits to refugee teachers (66 percent). These are the findings of a representative survey of the German adult population conducted by the ifo Center for the Economics of Education between May and June 2022.

A full 77 percent of Germans are in favor of a right to lifelong learning from a catalog of options offered by companies; 63 percent support mandatory annual training courses for employees in occupations that are particularly affected by structural change; 72 percent of those surveyed consider professional lifelong learning to be a good way of keeping pace with structural change.

Unsere Umfrage zeigt, dass deutsche Schulkinder während der Corona-bedingten Schulschließungen ihre tägliche Lernzeit auf die Hälfte reduzierten. Besonders leistungsschwächere Kinder ersetzen Lernzeit durch wenig förderliche Aktivitäten wie Computerspielen. Die Ergebnisse betonen die Bedeutung verbindlicher Konzepte für Distanzunterricht bei Schulschließungen, die sich besonders an leistungsschwächere Schüler*innen richten.

A key feature of school closures is that there is no trained educator in the room to help. In their column Elisabeth Grewenig, Philipp Lergetporer, Katharina Werner, Ludger Woessmann, and Larissa Zierow argue that low-achieving students are particularly affected by the lack of teacher support. Based on a German time-use survey, it finds that students on average reduced daily learning time by about half during the school closures. This reduction was significantly larger for low-achieving students, who disproportionately replaced learning time with activities deemed detrimental to child development such as computer gaming rather than with more conducive activities such as reading.