Ministry of Education can no longer locate list of 492 funded schools

Reasoning: Protection from Stigmatization

According to ORF Vorarlberg, which requested the release of the information and, after a two-year legal dispute, received only part of it, there are now no files on the matter. According to this, the Ministry of Education did not document the locations; apparently, no file was created or it was kept incompletely. "A corresponding storage of the data in the system was not found," the ministry said. Which 492 schools nationwide were supported under "Schools with Special Challenges" can therefore no longer be determined.

The background to the efforts to maintain secrecy is likely to be a feared stigmatization of individual school locations. The original refusal to disclose the data was explicitly justified by the protection of the schools. At the same time, the case shows that precisely those data that would have enabled a later scientific or political evaluation of the program were apparently never fully secured.

Successor Program "Chancenbonus" Is More Transparent

The successor program to "Schools with Special Challenges" is now called "Chancenbonus." Unlike its predecessor, the list of the roughly 400 participating schools in this program is publicly accessible. This means that – six years after the start of the first initiative – there is now at least partial insight into the funded locations.

The responsible staff members who were once supposed to maintain the files no longer work at the ministry. As a result, not only is the document itself missing, but so is the institutional memory that could provide information about possible predecessors, file plans, or databases.

Open Questions About File Management

The ORF Vorarlberg request for information ended after a two-year legal dispute with only partial information. The Constitutional Court decision on the transparency of school data had increased the pressure on the education directorate, without the missing documents being able to be restored as a result. The data loss that has now come to light thus falls in a phase in which the authority was obligated to disclose.

Which 492 schools nationwide specifically received funds can no longer be determined according to the current state of reporting. Neither a subsequent survey of the schools themselves nor a search in the federal finances appears possible according to ORF, because the selection criteria and the award process at the time can no longer be traced without the documentation.

The case raises fundamental questions about file management in federal ministries. Even if no misconduct by individual persons has been proven, the example shows how a long-term funding program loses its verifiability without adequate documentation – with the result that neither parliament nor the public can subsequently evaluate the effects of the program.