The "Krone" has the figures

What the influx into our classrooms looks like

Around 200,000 children and young people attend school in Upper Austria.

(Bild: Scharinger Daniel)

In Vienna in particular, teachers' representatives of various stripes have recently warned of an impending overload of the school system due to family reunifications from abroad. The "Krone" newspaper now has figures on how many children are currently entering Upper Austria's classrooms during the year.

"We have reached the capacity limit and in many schools we have even exceeded it," warned Upper Austria's top compulsory school teacher representative, Paul Kimberger, when recently asked in the "Krone" about the impact of family reunification of asylum seekers in the classroom.

However, this is a far cry from the scale of the situation in Vienna, where teacher representatives of various stripes recently raised the alarm about the threat of overload.

Reasons for enrolment not recorded
This is now also shown by figures from the Upper Austrian Education Directorate: 223 children from non-EU countries were newly enrolled in compulsory schools this year, an average of 56 per month (out of a total of around 110,000 compulsory school pupils). Not all of these new pupils were probably brought into the country by relatives through family reunification, as the reasons why the children came to Upper Austria are not recorded during school enrolment. They will therefore also include families who have moved within Austria.

For comparison: in Vienna, the media reported around 300 new schoolchildren per month due to family reunification.

So far, a suitable school place has been found for all of the new pupils.

Alfred Klampfer, Bildungsdirektor OÖ

More pupils with language difficulties
However, there are very precise figures for so-called exceptional pupils, who by definition still have a "lack of knowledge of the language of instruction".

Their number has risen in Upper Austria's compulsory schools in recent years, from 6216 in the 2020/21 school year (5.7 percent of all compulsory school pupils) to 8288 in the past school year (7.4 percent).