Bielefeld Stimulus Paper

With its 325,600 inhabitants, the City of Bielefeld is facing a multitude of future-oriented challenges in order to preserve the City as a place worth living in and to further its development...

Founded in 1214 as a trading town at the Teutoburger Wald hill range, Bielefeld has developed into an important industrial location for the mechanical engineering, textile and food industries since the beginning of industrialization. Bielefeld ranks among the twenty biggest towns in the Federal Republic of Germany and within the State of North Rhine-Westphalia it is the regional center for the region of East Westphalia-Lippe with its 2 million inhabitants. Today Bielefeld is also a town of science and innovation and provides an academic environment with international orientation.

The population of Bielefeld has become increasingly international during the past decades as well: 11.47% of its residents in 2010 hold a diversity of foreign citizenships, the majority being Turkish citizens, followed by Greeks, Iraqis, Serbs and Montenegrins, Poles, Italians and Russians. On top of this, 12.09% of Bielefeld citizens in 2010 have dual citizenships; in addition to their German nationality they hold one further foreign nationality, predominantly Turkish, Polish, Russian and Kazakh. A further considerable part of the population is made up of German citizens with migration background, i.e. the persons themselves or at least one of their parents were born abroad. Statistical surveys carried out especially in primary schools, found that approximately every second child ( 51 %) in general education comes from this kind of background.

The reason why the City of Bielefeld appealed to people with migration background or foreign citizenship and convinced them to make Bielefeld their new home was based on two factors: On the one hand, Bielefeld’s industries have offered attractive employment opportunities to foreign workers since the 1960s, on the other hand, ethnic Germans and their immediate family, especially those emigrating from the former Soviet Union (today Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and others) and Poles of German descent found their way to Bielefeld due to bilateral constitutional agreements within the framework of German politics towards Eastern Europe pursued by the then German Federal Government.

This heterogeneous ethnic makeup of the population enriches the development of the town, but at the same time also confronts it with additional challenges, including the core issue of developing strategies for an educational policy. In particular, it has become imperative to create a better learning environment for people with low educational qualifications and few educational aspirations and for people with migration background. In this process it will become evident that there are disparities between social environments and that some social environments accumulate a mixture of educational and social disadvantage. Creating better learning conditions in these particularly disadvantaged social environments would be an important contribution towards improving the future prospects of the individual and a chance to cope with demographic change and the decreasing numbers of residents predicted for the future in a constructive manner.

For this reason the City of Bielefeld has passed the so-called Bielefeld>>Pakt on the basis of a broad political consensus. This pact is to provide a basis on which reliable political majorities can be achieved to shape and bear responsibility for the development of action strategies with defined objectives, priorities and key issues, initially in the fields of education, climate protection and the economy, which will be sustainable beyond a single legislative period. This process-oriented Bielefeld-Pakt has already garnered a lot of support from the Bielefeld public.

By passing this pact, the City of Bielefeld has set out to encourage a broad definition of education, including non-formal learning environments within the context of life-long learning, in order to prevent the development of whole social strata within the population who see little or no sense in education, and to increase the success rate in formal education.

In accordance with the German constitution, responsibility for the school system is split between the federal states and the municipalities in Germany, which means that the State of North Rhine-Westphalia determines the school structure and decides all internal school issues (educational content and teacher supply), whereas the City of Bielefeld is responsible for external school issues (all framework conditions for ensuring the well-ordered running of a school, like maintaining the buildings, organizing transport, providing material). In order to meet this joint responsibility in a future-oriented way and to improve the conditions for educational success in Bielefeld, the City of Bielefeld signed a Co-operation Contract with the State of North Rhine-Westphalia on 14 April 2010, in which both parties agreed to set up a sustainable, structured co-operation in committees specifically constituted for this purpose. The guidance panel and management team for the educational region of Bielefeld regularly bring together the decision makers responsible in the Ministry for Schools and Further Education in the region (Bezirksregierung Detmold) and the City of Bielefeld. They co­operate to define and operationalize targets, action fields and schemes and ensure their implementation in practical terms. On signing the contract it was already agreed that first priority was to be given to the following targets: Increasing the percentage of students leaving school with university entrance qualifications and reducing the number of students having to repeat a year or change to a lower tier school or another type of school altogether. As of 1 July 2010 the Bildungsbüro der Stadt Bielefeld was set up as the regional branch office for the educational region of Bielefeld; it is staffed by a multi-professional team working on the tasks to be accomplished.

At present the above-motioned educational committees and the branch office are working flat out on implementing the prioritized targets and to this end they are developing concrete schemes in the areas educational transition, parent education, individual support, documentation of educational careers, scientific competences and media competences, which are geared towards the transition from primary education to secondary education after class four, because of the special relevance of these topics for setting the future educational course.

As a pilot municipality the City of Bielefeld is also co-operating with the Bertelsmann Foundation in Gütersloh and the Sociological Research Institute at the University of Göttingen on a further important component: the implementation of an indicator-assisted municipal education report on lifelong and occupational learning on the basis of the UNESCO heuristics: Learn to Know, Learn to Do, Learn to Live Together and Learn to Be. The so-called ELLI (European Lifelong Learning Indicators) Education Report is to optimize and document strategic municipal operations in so far as it will provide indicator-supported status reports to support political decisions.

Within the framework of the 1. Bielefelder Bildungstag/1st Bielefeld Day on Education on 24 March 2011, which was initiated by the Senior Mayor, participants worked on and discussed the following range of topics: education and integration, education and belief, education and sport, education and culture, education and the media, under broad participation of the general public. At the 1. Bielefelder Bildungskonferenz/1st Bielefeld Conference on Education on 24 Mai 2011 participants actively involved in education and representing all kinds of formal and non-formal education, including the University of Bielefeld and the Universities of Applied Science will discuss the situation in the educational region of Bielefeld and the concepts decided by the guidance panel, starting with a scientific input address on the importance of transition in educational systems and followed by a panel discussion.

Bielefeld’s orientation towards becoming a city of education also manifests itself in the following exemplary events, which where initiated by the Science section of Bielefeld Marketing GmbH:

On 9 April 2011 Bielefeld was the venue for the finals in the Germany-wide Famelab contest, a science event giving junior scientific staff the opportunity to present their area of research to the general public in a three-minute presentation and thus to qualify for the international finals in Great Britain.

The one-week Science-Festival Geniale is already taking place for the second time from 26 August to 3 September 2011. For this event, scientific topics and activities are prepared in a child and family-friendly fashion and presented at various locations throughout town for first-hand experience and hands-on involvement. Bielefeld expects that these systematically developed activities will further and support the networking efforts of all players in the field of education and also emphasize the importance of education for the City of Bielefeld.

After the economic crisis of 2009, Germany has seen the onset of a markedly positive economic development, but nevertheless the situation of municipal and rural district budgets continues to remain strained, as the legally binding municipal responsibilities, among others in particular the costs for providing social security, are leaving hardly any room for financial maneuver. Thus the City of Bielefeld has also been subject to budgetary restrictions since 2010 and as a consequence the State administration is now monitoring compliance with its strict targets. This reduces the chances for implementing cost-intensive educational schemes and requires extraordinary creativity in reaching ambitious educational goals locally.

Fields of activity for the advancement of life-long learning:

1. Inclusion In 2009, Germany ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD), which is aimed at establishing suitable measures to prevent legal and social discrimination against persons with disabilities. Article 24 UN CRPD requires that no signatory state may exclude persons with disabilities from the general educational system on the grounds of their disability, that persons with disabilities are to have access to inclusive, high-quality and free education at primary and secondary schools together with their peers in the community they live in, and that suitable arrangements have to be made in individual cases. As statutory rules for the implementation of this requirement are still pending; which the State of North Rhine-Westphalia would have to make binding in terms of cost responsibility (Principle of Connexity) as well, the City of Bielefeld has no concrete framework for action as yet.
   
   Bielefeld has a long tradition of living together with disabled people – the von Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel (today von Bodelschwinghsche Stiftungen Bethel/von Bodelschwingh Foundations Bethel), which offer a living environment for people with and without disabilities in the inner-city suburb of Bielefeld-Gadderbaum, were founded as early as 1867. But even with the far-reaching efforts described below, Bielefeld still does not meet the current requirements of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Four schools on primary education level offer joint classes for children with and without special educational needs, four additional primary schools have been setting up joint classes since 2009 and from summer 2011 a total of ten primary schools are going to offer joint classes. On secondary education level two comprehensive schools, the Bielefeld Laboratory School, which was set up by the State of North Rhine-Westphalia as an experimental school with special educational concepts, and one grammar school/academic high school offer integrative schooling. A total number of 171 children in primary education and 165 children in secondary education benefit from these schemes. In addition, there is the Centre of Excellence for Empowerment through Special Education established by the Association of Local Authorities in Westphalia-Lippe, which has approached the issue through generating a transfer of competencies by supporting co-operation between a special educational needs school and schools providing general education in order to integrate a greater number of children with a special needs focus on physical and motor skills development into regular schooling. These first steps cannot hide the fact, though, that compared to other European countries, Germany has a particularly high percentage of special needs students in segregated settings (EU average 2.1%, Germany 4.8%). Thus Bielefeld also has 2375 children attending special needs schools; the ratio of children with special needs requirements in regular schools is as low as 15.1% in the primary education sector and only 11.7% in secondary education.
   
   The residents of Bielefeld are already taking a proactive interest in the measures designed to implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities of 13 December 2006 and are submitting the respective applications to the expert committees. In order to implement the targets formulated in Article 24 locally, and to take one more qualitative step from integration to inclusion in Bielefeld, the North Rhine-Westphalian state government is now duty bound to develop the existing laws further. Information material has been issued and conferences on the topic of inclusion in school development planning have repeatedly taken place, a further conference in June 2011 is being prepared at the moment.
2. Cultural education The City of Bielefeld is convinced that cultural education is an essential instrument for improving education success among the Bielefeld population, in particular among children and adolescents.
   
   Therefore the necessity to promote cultural education and its integration into the formal education system have also been included in the Bielefeld>>Pakt and the co-operation contract concluded between the City of Bielefeld and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Cultural education in its many learning dimensions will also be represented within the framework of the ELLI Education Report.
   
   The City of Bielefeld itself operates various cultural institutions: among others, two museums, a school of music and the arts, and adult education center, a public library with various branches, a town archive as well as a theater and a philharmonic orchestra playing in various locations around town. In addition, the City holds an interest in several cultural facilities or provides funding for them. The institutions operated by the City of Bielefeld in particular are increasingly developing activities for the advancement of children and adolescents and are thus honoring their role as players in the educational field. The activities are partly integrated into the school lessons or into the after-school care programs within the framework of co-operation agreements between the schools and the City institutions, and partly taken up by the children in their leisure time. In addition, there are also special activities offered during the holidays. The activities on offer cover a broad range of interests and a diversity of learning environments. They comprise music and arts lessons as well as dance and theater projects and activities with a focus on historical or natural history topics.
   
   Cultural education as the City of Bielefeld understands it is more than a mere leisure-time activity. It stimulates an interest in the arts and thus not only in contemporary and past societies, but also in foreign cultures and teaches children to keep an open mind about the world. This is precisely why – in particular if intercultural competence is taken into account as well, which constitutes a further challenge – cultural education has such great significance for urban societies. It enriches life by imparting knowledge and by creating opportunities for experiencing pleasure as well as for expressing one’s own feelings. In addition it trains further important abilities which help to lead a successful life, like the ability to concentrate, curiosity to make new experiences and learn from them, stamina, respect and tolerance. In order to document these abilities, the Bielefeld Theater has started a research project in co-operation with Bielefeld University to evaluate the enduring effects of cultural education on adolescents who took part in a dance project.
   
   In the course of the year 2011 the City of Bielefeld will in addition initiate the process of cultural development planning in order to be able to plan and to shape the development potentials of the cultural institutions and the culturally relevant social developments. In this context cultural education will be assigned an important role as well.

Questions:

1. How can social involvement in the education sector be further activated and employed in a targeted way?
2. Which conditions and measures are conducive to improving social acceptance of and support for inclusion?
3. Which concrete measures can be applied to achieve that children with disabilities are accepted in the classroom and feel themselves being accepted?
4. How can we increase acceptance of cultural education in those social classes where education is regarded as unimportant?
5. How can we convey the idea that cultural education enriches life, improves key competencies and thus creates the basis for general success in learning and in life?