Overview
- The Schulbehörde has changed how it will allocate school accompaniment for the next school year by centralising decisions, expanding pooled support models, and increasing use of Freiwilligendienstleistende while raising the overall budget to about €44 million.
- Schools, welfare groups, unions and parents say the new practice has already led to large cuts in approved hours for many children, with some reporting reductions of 50 to 70 percent, and organiser groups held a protest at Jungfernstieg on Wednesday.
- Planned measures include using FSJ participants in combined roles for several pupils, reserving formally trained one‑to‑one aides only for complex cases, and delaying extra accompaniment during a child’s first school year while schools try in‑house supports.
- The authority argues the change answers a steep rise in demand—accompanied pupils rose from roughly 1,600 to about 4,000 over recent years and costs jumped from €6.8m to about €42m—saying prior approvals had become unsustainably broad.
- The dispute has moved into the Hamburgische Bürgerschaft and is being watched nationally because it mirrors a federal draft to replace individual entitlements with infrastructural, pooled assistance and could influence other states’ policies.