The president of the German Teachers' Association, Heinz-Peter Meidinger, says English lessons in primary schools should be scrapped.
"We believe that English lessons are indeed dispensable and that they can be shifted to, for example, reading lessons," he told German public broadcaster ARD on Friday. "We have to pay more attention to the basics at primary schools - reading skills, writing skills, arithmetic," he continued.
The background to his remarks is Germany's poor performance in the International Primary School Reading Survey (IGLU) presented in May.
The survey found that a quarter of children in year four in Germany cannot read properly. Internationally, primary school pupils in Germany perform worse in reading skills than their peers in many other countries.
The IQB education trend, another regular series of tests among fourth graders, also showed last year that Germany has fallen behind significantly in basic maths and German skills in recent years.
English lessons might make sense at some schools, Meidinger said, "but we also have classes where we have 70, 80, 90% of children with a migrant background who hardly have sufficient knowledge of German."
English lessons, he said, are setting the wrong priorities. The knowledge that primary school pupils are taught varies so much that in secondary schools "almost all of them have to start from scratch again anyway."
Meidinger also called for more pre-school support. "And of course," he said, "we have to take measures against the teacher shortage, otherwise we will never get a grip on the problem."
