The Austrian Parliament has adopted a law introducing a mandatory two-week summer school for children who do not speak German sufficiently well.
The obligation applies to so-called “extraordinary pupils” – the official term for children who cannot fully follow school lessons because they do not speak German well enough. Currently, these children received supplementary German lessons during the school year.
Starting in 2027, they will be required to attend a two-week summer school during the school holidays. Failure to attend will be considered a violation of compulsory schooling and will be punished with fines of up to €1,000.
According to government estimates, more than 20,000 children in Vienna alone will be attending the summer school in the first year.
With the same law, parliament has decided to relax the requirements for children to move up from primary school to middle school, which typically happens at age 10.
According to the new rules, extraordinary pupils will no longer have to complete the fourth and final grade of primary school. Instead, they may still move on to middle school if their primary school decides that switching to middle school “offers the pupil a better chance of development than remaining in primary school”.
The bill received support from both the three-party government coalition and the Greens Party.
The right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) voted against the law, citing the lowering of middle school standards as the main reason.
FPÖ education speaker Hermann Brückl said: “We are in favour of the summer school … But we decidedly reject the rest of this bill. This is nothing but another declaration of surrender in the face of an out-of-control immigration policy.
“The fact that children will be able to participate in regular classes in the future despite their lack of language skills is an attack on our teachers and our children in terms of education policy.”
The language skills of primary school pupils in Austria have deteriorated in recent years, according to experts, especially in Vienna where most immigrants are from countries such as Syria and Afghanistan live.
In October 2025, almost 51 per cent of the children starting primary school were “extraordinary pupils”, according to Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s largest newspaper.
This was an increase of 10 percentage points since 2020 when “only” 41 per cent lacked a command of German deemed sufficient.
