Austria 'ghetto' language classes leave children to repeat school

For two years after he first arrived in Austria, Iraqi pupil Abdlrahman Aljanabi didn't follow maths, science and other subjects like the rest of his peers.

Instead, he was pulled out of his class every day for several hours to learn German under a flagship programme meant to bring newcomers like him up to par with the national language.

But an assessment has shown the programme -- long decried by critics as "ghetto" classes -- leaves a number of pupils to repeat at least one school year, contributing to a relatively high number of over-age pupils in the Alpine EU member.

"I was a bit lost, a bit upset... because I didn't understand why I was the only one who had to leave to go to another class," the 19-year-old refugee, who has yet to take his end-of-school exam, told AFP.

The language classes differ from many other European countries where newly arrived pupils are fully immersed in the regular school system right away.

Introduced eight years ago under a conservative-far-right government, it was mandatory for schools to provide the programme.

But given the assessment that a quarter of students who took the classes lose at least one year, the government has relaxed the rule from this school year onwards.

Schools can now decide for themselves how they want to support non-native German speakers, leading to half of them to abolish the separate classes.

But their legacy is bound to stay for some years to come.

Austria has a comparatively large number of over-age pupils -- those who are at least two years older than the intended age for their grade level -- according to OECD figures.

Between 2015 and 2023, the proportion of such pupils rose from 4.1 percent to 5.8 percent in primary schools and from 6.5 percent to 9.1 percent in secondary school, the OECD says.

In the last school year, there were almost 60,000 so-called "non-regular students" who had to take the special classes. In Vienna, this was every fifth child in primary school.

Among them, 35 percent are from Syria and 27 percent from Ukraine, according to figures from the Austrian Integration Fund (OeIF).

"When you arrive at a school, you just want to blend in," said a 16-year-old Ukrainian student, who only gave his first name Makarii and who fled Kyiv in 2022 at the start of Russia's invasion.

"You spend time in a group that is then dissolved, you lose your friends and you don't know the teachers in the regular class," he told AFP.

A recent assessment by the education ministry found that 22 percent of 22,800 students deemed "non-regular" in the school year 2022-23 had to repeat the year once and three percent twice.

Education Minister Christoph Wiederkehr told Austrian news agency APA this was a "far too high" number.

The ministry did not respond to AFP's questions seeking comment on the programme.

The programme leads to an "automatic repetition" of pupils who stay in it for a long time because they are not graded in core subjects, like maths, and so cannot move up to the next level, according to Susanne Schwab, an education expert of the University of Vienna.

"As a consequence, it becomes apparent that students who attend German support classes are highly likely to suffer a significant learning delay, and repeating a grade is a real part of their educational trajectory," Schwab, who has studied the programme's effects, told AFP.

The programme, adopted against the "scientific consensus", doesn't "create solutions, but generates additional problems", she added.

A 2022 report by experts evoked "racist mechanisms" and "institutional discrimination... under the guise of language support".

The country of nine million inhabitants has long drawn people from poorer nearby nations, as well as asylum seekers, though numbers have slumped due to anti-migration policies.

The anti-immigration far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) has already slammed the change of relaxing the rules for schools.

The FPOe won the last parliamentary elections, in 2024, for the first-time ever, though it failed to find partners to govern.