Germany’s lengthy pandemic school closures hit migrant pupils hardest

When a teacher told Syrian mother Um Wajih that her 9-year-old son’s German had deteriorated during his Berlin school’s six-week shutdown, she was saddened but not surprised, writes Joseph Nasr. “Wajih had picked up German fast, and we were very proud of him,” said the 25-year-old mother of two. “I knew that without practice he would forget what he had learned but I couldn’t help him.” Her son now faces another year in a ‘welcome class’ for migrant children until his German is good enough to join native peers at a school in Berlin’s poor neighbourhood of Neukoelln. School closures – which in Germany have amounted to around 30 weeks since March last year compared to just 11 in France – have further widened the educational gap between migrant and native pupils in Germany, amongst the highest in the industrialised world. Even before the pandemic the drop-out rate among migrants stood at 18.2%, almost three times the national average. Closing that gap is crucial, otherwise it risks derailing Germany’s efforts to integrate more than two million people who applied for asylum in the past seven years, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, experts say. German language skills and maintaining them – [...]

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