Russian is losing importance in Saxony's schools

Interest in the Russian language is waning at schools in Saxony. In the current school year, 14,035 pupils are learning Russian, compared to 19,354 five years ago, according to statistics from the Ministry of Culture in Dresden. The number of Russian teachers also fell during this period - from 2,215 in the 2020/2021 school year to 1,462 in the current school year.

Russian teachers are retiring

"The decline in Russian teachers initially has nothing to do with the attractiveness of Russian lessons. Rather, most Russian teachers received their training during the GDR era and will now be retiring in the next few years," explained the ministry. After reunification, very few young people wanted to study Russian as a teacher. Instead, interest has shifted towards languages such as Spanish, Italian and French. A trend that could also be observed among pupils.

English is already offered in elementary school in Saxony from Year 3 and is consequently the dominant foreign language. In the current school year, this applies to 423,587 girls and boys. They are followed by French (58,079), Spanish (31,193) and Latin (16,974). The Czech language was studied by 3,819 pupils, Italian by 2,119 and Polish by 1,783. 93 opted for Greek - fewer than five years ago (157).

Greek as a niche subject

In addition to Russian and Greek, the number of Polish pupils has also declined in a five-year comparison. Interest in French and Latin remained almost constant. There was a particularly strong increase in Spanish. In English, the increase is solely due to the rise in the total number of pupils.

English therefore has the most teachers: 3,800. This is followed by Russian teachers and teachers for French (736), Latin (284) and Spanish (162).

According to the ministry, English is continued for all pupils from elementary school from year 5 onwards. Two foreign languages are compulsory up to upper secondary school. French, Italian, Latin, Polish, Russian, Spanish or Czech can be studied from year 6 onwards. At selected grammar schools, lessons in the second foreign language begin as early as year 5.

An additional foreign language can be studied from year 8. Possible languages are French, Greek, Italian, Latin, Polish, Russian, Spanish or Czech. There are bilingual classes for English, French, Polish and Czech at grammar schools with in-depth language training.