Teaching materials lie on a table in the "Welcome School TXL".
© dpa
The so-called welcome school for children and young people from the arrival centre for Ukrainian war refugees in Tegel will soon have space for 300 pupils.
There are currently around 130 of them, supervised by 13 teachers, as the education administration announced on Wednesday. An expansion is planned for March, with more than 40 additional teachers to be hired in the future.
The TXL Welcome School provides lessons for children and young people from the nearby arrival centre on the site of the former Tegel Airport. The Ukraine arrival centre was originally founded in 2022 solely for the registration of Ukrainian refugees, but is now also used as large-scale accommodation.
It is her aim to guarantee every child in Berlin the right to protection and education, regardless of their status, said Education Senator Katharina Günther-Wünsch (CDU), who visited the welcome school on Wednesday morning. The establishment of classes in welcome schools is a temporary, necessary measure to ensure that refugee children and young people have access to school education in the first place. "This not only enables them to arrive better, but also to progress successfully in mainstream schools."
Formally, the TXL Welcome School is a branch of the Nelson Mandela School in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. According to the education administration, it offers standardised classrooms with WiFi access for children from the early school years as well as for learning groups with teenagers. For sports and exercise programmes, there is a cooperation with the sports school in the Olympiapark - Poelchau-Schule. There are also plans to create additional school places for young people from the Tegel arrival centre in the former Air Berlin headquarters on Saatwinkler Damm. As part of the Berlin school building campaign, the number of school places is also to be increased through the refurbishment, expansion and new construction of school buildings.