The aim of the project is the indicator-based recording of the school systems of the 16 federal states of Germany since 1949 and the appropriate publication of the associated database for research and the public. The database of school regulations of the 16 federal states should make it possible to measure their school system design, as it were.

Germany's schools have a federal structure. Germany thus has not one school system, but 16. However, relatively little is known about the legal structure and development of these systems or about the impact of individual features of school law on (social) educational inequalities. Legal requirements in the form of school laws, ordinances, and decrees determine the scope of action and procedures for accessing learning opportunities and educational certificates. A fundamental assumption of the project was that differences in the design of school systems under school law lead to different educational opportunities depending on the federal state.

A website is to be set up to show, on the basis of comparable criteria, how the school systems in the 16 states are structured. The project is based on several thousand legal documents, ordinances, legal decrees, circulars, etc. These were collected by the Science Center for Berlin (WZB) and coded into a comparable category system. These were collected by the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and coded into a comparable system of categories (up to the 2009/10 school year). Marcel Helbig and Rita Nikolai used this coding to describe and analyze school policies in the German states since 1949 in the study "die Unvergleichbaren (the incomparables)". The collection of school policies was continued at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi).

The result of the data collection will be presented on the website, which is being developed within the framework of the project and is intended to address different user groups. On the one hand, it will offer researchers the possibility to compile and retrieve the results of the research via a database. On the other hand, it will give researchers and the interested public the possibility to trace the school systems of the 16 states in their structures over time. In addition, the website will also serve to make research on institutional state differences and their effects visible.

The launch of the website is currently planned for mid-2024.

• Project lead:  Prof. Dr. Marcel Helbig
• Project start: Jan 2022
• Funding: Internal research funding
• Link to this page: www.lifbi.de/Schulsystemdatenbank