When Minister for Children and Education Mattias Tesfaye (S) presented the latest primary school agreement this week, the enthusiasm was not equal among all parties to the agreement.
The governing parties, the Conservatives, the Danish People’s Party and the Liberal Alliance, cheered both their own imprint and the overall agreement. Radicale Venstre seemed, to put it mildly, more subdued in its support.
At first glance, there appear to be many positive elements in the agreement, which deal with parts of previous public school reforms.
The so-called “supportive education”, which met with criticism from the start and was never a success, is dropped.
The requirement for children to exercise 45 minutes a day is abolished. A legal requirement that the schools found incredibly difficult to meet.
And then you “slimen” curricula and drop compulsory curricula. It therefore looks like a marked de-bureaucratisation of the primary school, something that politicians often talk about, but which they rarely implement in practice.
In one area, however, there does not seem to be a change in direction.
The just-adopted elementary school agreement mentions that teachers must have “better opportunities to strengthen their skills, among other things in special pedagogy and classroom management, so that they are better equipped to help students who have special needs.”
But it can be dangerous to think that the challenges have been solved if you give a teacher with 28 (more or less) noisy and restless children an extra course in special education. Sometimes children just need more hands – or a shielded environment.
In North Jutland, Anna Bobach, mother of 11-year-old Karl, tells about the consequences for the family when yet another special school in North Jutland closes, Læringscenter Himmerland in Rebild Municipality.
Just ten years ago, there were 18 special schools in North Jutland, but in the name of inclusion and centralization, half of them have been closed.
There can be excellent reasons to centralize in cases where you can help both the public spending pressure and the citizens at the same time.
In other cases, where children have diagnoses, where security and shielding can mean the difference between a good life in spite on the one hand and extroverted children and stressed-out parents on the other, inclusion is only possible to a certain extent.
It is wise to give the municipalities more freedom to run primary schools, but one can hope that this freedom does not only lead to centralization and inclusion in a lot of areas, it does not make sense.
This is a leader. It was written by a member of our board of directors and expresses Nordjutske’s position.
2024-03-21 06:37:38
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