First joint professional day for all daycares and primary schools in the city brings educators and teachers together
In the large conference room of St. Ingbert City Hall, 46 educational professionals from all daycares and primary schools in the city came together before the summer holidays to collaboratively work on shaping the transition from daycare to primary school. The professional day titled "Daycare and Primary School in One Boat – For the Children in St. Ingbert" was organized by the Institute for Teacher Training and Continuing Education (ILF) Saarbrücken in cooperation with the City of St. Ingbert.
Strong impulse for a shared educational responsibility
At the opening, Thomas Mann, director of ILF Saarbrücken, moderated a panel discussion on the topic "What would be different if it were ideal?" with Nadine Backes, mayor and first deputy, and Elaine Maas, pedagogical overall management of the daycares in the City of St. Ingbert. The keynote by Karolina Engel (ILF Saarbrücken), "Keeping the Child in Focus: Shaping the Transition Together," emphasized the educational partnership between educational professionals and parents: successful cooperation presupposes respect, communication, and shared responsibility. Educational inequality often arises long before daycare entry – making early, high-quality access to early childhood education and consistent support for families all the more important.
Engel introduced an image that hits the core of the challenge:
“Undeniably, good cooperation is not always easy due to the differing theoretical and educational-philosophical foundations of kindergarten and school. Professor Wassilios E. Fthenakis compares our education system to a high-rise building, where a different architect was employed on each floor, but the connecting staircases were forgotten. Today, with this professional day, we want to build those staircases into the high-rise.”
(Karolina Engel)
Ideas from practice: Rich yield in the World Café
The focus of the day was a multi-hour World Café, in which educators and teachers developed concrete ideas for joint projects and cooperation formats at six thematic tables. The theme tables were oriented to the Saarland education program and covered the entire spectrum of early childhood education: Body, movement and health; communication, languages and media; artistic design and music; basic mathematical experiences; basic scientific and technical experiences; as well as the path to becoming a schoolchild.
The results are diverse and practical: joint sports classes, reading mentors from grades 3/4 reading aloud to daycare children, forest days for group formation, theater projects, language specialists in both institutions, joint excursions for example to Dynamikum or to MINT-Campus Alte Schmelz – the ideas range from short-term implementable measures to structural cooperation formats for the entire cooperation year.
Idea pool: Structural directions for the cooperation year 2026/27
Special attention was given to the jointly developed idea pool: Participants proposed, among other things, to create an organizational chart of all cooperation partners with contact details at the beginning of each school year and to establish a joint exchange platform for all involved. In addition, the professionals advocated regular meetings of all cooperation officers from school and daycare – once at the beginning and once at the end of the year.
In the afternoon, the groups worked on concrete annual planning for the cooperation year 2026/27: work meetings, observations, parent evenings, and joint projects were discussed and translated into initial agreements.
Mayor Dr. Ulli Meyer and state parliament member Jutta Schmitt-Lang also addressed greetings to the participants, emphasizing the high political importance of successful cooperation between early childhood education institutions and primary schools for the future of the children in St. Ingbert.
Image: T. Bastuck
Title: 46 educational professionals developed joint ideas for the future in St. Ingbert City Hall
