Educational history register: Data-supported school development as a solution for PISA lows

Germany's students are sagging. This is what the new PISA study shows. And now education policy is once again puzzling over how performance can be permanently improved.

“We see in the highest performing school systems in the world that they all work with data,” says Anne Sliwka. The professor of school education at Heidelberg University observes international school systems.

The introduction to data-supported school development seems overdue. The prerequisite for this is a database with the unwieldy name Educational History Register.

The federal government promised in the coalition agreement to set up such a register. “This primarily means a technical infrastructure,” says Martin Pfafferott from the Bertelsmann Foundation, who is monitoring the development.

In step one, educational data that already exists in Germany would be compiled into statistics. This could make educational problems more visible. Student numbers are known, says Pfafferott, "but we don't know why there are breaks." With educational statistics, one could determine the causes - and develop targeted support programs based on the data.

There have been plans to build such a database in Germany for a long time. But implementation is difficult because education in Germany is a state matter. A spokeswoman for the Federal Ministry of Education said on request that the federal government was in talks with the states.

There is a lot of potential in such statistics. “For example, we currently have no statistical information about what further educational paths the approximately 62,000 young people who will leave school without a qualification will take in 2024.” This data is urgently needed for political control and prioritization in times of tight budgets.

Successful PISA countries show how it's done. These include Estonia, Canada and Singapore. Canada began data-driven school development in the mid-1990s, initially in the province of Ontario. Data-supported school development has now become established nationwide.

“Children’s learning levels are tested regularly,” says Professor Sliwka. The results are linked to other data, for example the parents' income. There are also surveys on the quality of schools. This is how school development can succeed based on evidence: “If 25 percent of the children in a third grade cannot read well, the school develops the strategic goal of changing that,” says Anne Sliwka. And she receives support from authorities and politicians in the form of training and materials.

In Germany, federal states are also working to improve children's performance on the basis of statistical data. These include Hamburg and Baden-Württemberg. However, there is still a long way to go before a nationwide solution is reached.

Important questions need to be clarified, for example data protection. Experts like Samuel Greiff from the Technical University of Munich would like to see more speed: "We invest billions of euros in educational programs. And for many of them we don't know whether they have actually achieved what they were supposed to achieve. And an educational history register can make a decisive contribution to ensuring that we better understand where we can best invest our resources and also what actually worked and what didn't work," says the head of the German part of the PISA study.

If Germany wants to catch up in student performance, an educational history register could be a good start.