Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

EDUCATION

Burglars rip open and void sealed Latin exam

The final Latin exam for Matura students is having to be rewritten after some erudite thieves broke into a secondary school in Salzburg on Thursday night and opened an envelope containing the exam papers.

Published: 7 May 2015 13:19 CEST
Burglars rip open and void sealed Latin exam
Photo: Shutterstock

The Education Ministry confirmed that the papers had been stolen and said that the Zentralmatura Latin exam, scheduled for May 13th, would still take place but that students will be given different test questions to the one on the stolen paper.

Police said they believe the burglars broke into the school looking for valuables but said that the safe containing the exam papers had been broken into and that the packet containing the Latin exam had been ripped open – and thus is now considered invalid. 

All other exam papers were “complete and untouched” a statement from the Education Ministry said.

The Federal Institute for Educational Research (Bifie) will now write up another exam paper and all secondary schools that teach the six-year Latin course will receive an encrypted memory stick with the new exam paper on Tuesday evening, which they will be able to download and print on Wednesday morning, before the exam. The exam will start a little later than planned, at 10am.

According to Bifie 700 students are affected, at 115 schools.

A spokeswoman for Salzburg police told the Kronen Zeitung newspaper that three schools had been broken into in the city of Salzburg on Thursday night. She said there were no clues as to the identity of the burglars.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

EDUCATION

Sweden’s Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

Sweden's opposition Social Democrats have called for a total ban on the establishment of new profit-making free schools, in a sign the party may be toughening its policies on profit-making in the welfare sector.

Published: 18 April 2024 16:09 CEST
Sweden's Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

“We want the state to slam on the emergency brakes and bring in a ban on establishing [new schools],” the party’s leader, Magdalena Andersson, said at a press conference.

“We think the Swedish people should be making the decisions on the Swedish school system, and not big school corporations whose main driver is making a profit.” 

Almost a fifth of pupils in Sweden attend one of the country’s 3,900 primary and secondary “free schools”, first introduced in the country in the early 1990s. 

Even though three quarters of the schools are run by private companies on a for-profit basis, they are 100 percent state funded, with schools given money for each pupil. 

This system has come in for criticism in recent years, with profit-making schools blamed for increasing segregation, contributing to declining educational standards and for grade inflation. 

In the run-up to the 2022 election, Andersson called for a ban on the companies being able to distribute profits to their owners in the form of dividends, calling for all profits to be reinvested in the school system.  

READ ALSO: Sweden’s pioneering for-profit ‘free schools’ under fire 

Andersson said that the new ban on establishing free schools could be achieved by extending a law banning the establishment of religious free schools, brought in while they were in power, to cover all free schools. 

“It’s possible to use that legislation as a base and so develop this new law quite rapidly,” Andersson said, adding that this law would be the first step along the way to a total ban on profit-making schools in Sweden. 

SHOW COMMENTS