Educational success in Germany continues to depend to a large extent on the social background of students. As a result, many young people leave school without the necessary skills—particularly in the German language and mathematics—to successfully start their careers.
With the Startchancen Programm, the federal and state governments intend to provide targeted support to schools with a high proportion of socially disadvantaged students. Germany will invest around 20 billion euros over a period of ten years. When more than 2,000 schools have started with the program by the 2024/25 school year, this number will almost double to around 4,000 by the 2026/27 school year.
The Startchancen Programm is scientifically supported by a network of about 20 university institutions under the lead of Prof. Dr. Kai Maaz from the DIPF Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education in Frankfurt/Main.
The program and its impact will also be scientifically evaluated over the entire duration. An interdisciplinary consortium led by the infas Institute for Applied Social Sciences has been commissioned to carry out the evaluation.
Further information on the Startchancen Programm can be found on the website of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Further members of the evaluation consortium alongside infas are Prof. Dr. Benjamin Nagengast from the Hector Institute at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen; Prof. Dr. Cordula Artelt, Prof. Dr. Corinna Kleinert, and Prof. Dr. Marcel Helbig from the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) in Bamberg; Prof. Dr. Marco Caliendo from the University of Potsdam/Evaluation Office; Dr. Mathias Huebener from the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) in Wiesbaden, and IEA (Hamburg). The Institute for Quality Development in Education (IQB) in Berlin (Prof. Dr. Petra Stanat, Dr. Stefan Schipolowski) is also involved in an advisory role.
As part of the evaluation consortium, IEA is primarily responsible for collecting data at Startchancen schools. In addition to annual monitoring at all 4,000 schools, cross-sectional data will be collected multiple times at a sample of schools at intervals of several years to examine changes over time in the program.