Swiss Review 4/2020

Swiss Review / July 2020 / No.4 14 MIREILLE GUIGGENBÜHLER In the days immediately after 16 March, many parents’ mailboxes sud- denly filled upwith emails from their children’s teachers. All schools had closed on 16 March, and hurried preparations for homeschoolingwere under way. However, the academic material and work schedules sent to parents and their children not only differed from canton to canton, but from school to school and class to class. Some teachers wanted to link up via video with their students every day. Others expected their classes to work through extensivemultisubject material on their own. Some schools focused heavily on the traditional main subjects. Others preferred crea- tive and artistic areas during this challenging time. Every teachermore or less did their own thing. It was al- most a caricature of Swiss federalism. Unclear from the start Parents going throughCOVID-related upheaval in their own jobs found it hard to follow what their children were doing. Homeschooling objec- tives, priorities and rules appeared anything but consistent. Even the question of whether and how stu- dents would be assessed and marked during the lockdown generated dif- ferent answers depending on whom you asked. For example, it was ini- tially uncertain as to whether school-leaving examinations would take place at all. Basically, things were unclear from the start. Federalist and chaotic: homeschooling during the Swiss lockdown Equality of opportunity compromised Around a million Swiss elementary school pupils had to do lessons from home during the lockdown. The same applied to 400,000 secondary and vocational school students. Distance learning was a challenge for all concerned. Many benefited from it. But not everyone. In normal circumstances, there are of- ten advantages to the decentralised, highly federalist nature of Switzer- land’s school system. But now, some of its weaknesses were coming to the fore. The gap between schools has widened – and the effects of this have become more severe. This is the con- clusion reached by the authors of the ‘School Barometer’ study at the Uni- versity of Teacher Education Zug (PH Zug). Based on a series of question- naires, the School Barometer assesses and evaluates the current school situ- ation in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Its findings over recent months suggest that homeschooling during the lockdown could have been detrimental for equality of opportu- nity among students. Specifically, the authors of the study fear that students Focus