Throughout 2020, the corona pandemic led to a shift from physical classroom teaching to digital learning and homeschooling in virtually all Western education systems. In Germany, the country investigated in this study, how to deal with the corona situation is a matter of continuous between a variety of actors from three different domains: schools (headteachers, teaching staff, teachers unions), families (pupils, parents, parents’ associations) and politics (local, regional, and Länder-based levels) (Eickelmann and Gerick, 2020; König, Jäger-Biela and Glutsch, 2020). The three types of actors stand in relation to each other in an actors' constellation, with multifaceted implications. They affect each other in that they have similar interests, share resources, fight for the same things, or simply stand in each other’s way.

Using Schimank’s (2010) actor-structure dynamics approach, which offers an explanation of changes on the macro-level caused at the micro-level of individual actors, we investigate the question of how pandemic-related challenges have affected the power balance between the three types of actors over time. How do schools, families and politics perceive, first, themselves, and, second, the other two actors in light of the challenges which the corona pandemic has created for the domestic education system? To answer this question, we investigated German press coverage during two critical three-month periods: first, from 12 March 2020, when the 369th Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs specified uniform rules on how to deal with the corona situation, up to 12 June 2020, and, second, from 3 August 2020, when school education recommenced after the summer holidays (marked by the school start in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania) up to 3 November 2020.

Based on a systematic search for documents in the news database LexisNexis, an initial data corpus made up of 3,140 press articles was created. In a second step, we used a combination of LexisNexis algorithmic relevance criteria and judgement sampling (Maul, 2018) to create two data sets – one for each period – which contained 86 and 92 news articles respectively. The news articles were sampled from a wide variety of nationwide and regional sources. Both data sets were analyzed by means of Braun and Clarke’s (2006; 2013) thematic analysis method. Thematic analysis allows a broad overview of the data while capturing nuances and details in great depth (Xu and Zammit, 2020). During the research process we treated our data with due diligence and adhered to a set of rigorous trustworthiness criteria (Nowell et al., 2017). Having become familiar with the data, inductive coding was performed across data set 1 and initial codes were generated. Individual sentences were designated as data items for coding (Braun and Clarke, 2012: 62). In the following steps the codes were reworked and refined, assessed in relation to the whole data set, and sorted into themes and sub-themes by collating all data relevant to each. Next, given our research interest in developments over time, data set 2 was coded in a deductive manner. Themes – each theme captures data from both periods – were systematically reviewed, and given a name and definition. In order to offer a mode for visually exploring the relationships and interconnectivity between themes and sub-themes, a thematic map was finalized (Attride-Stirling 2001: 389; Braun and Clarke, 2013: 232).

We crafted six themes from the data which offer in-depth insights into the self-perceptions of each type of actor while showing how each actor type is perceived by the other two. With each theme, we elaborate on how actor-structure dynamics have developed from period 1 to period 2. We find that there is an increasing understanding of actors from schools and families for the situation and actions of the other. Families are in a continuous process of coming to terms with the ‘new reality’ and they experience less stress in light of potentially upcoming school closures. According to an affected mother: ‘If there’s a school closure – as in the rural district Berchtesgadener Land – that’s daft, but, when it happens, that’s the way it is’ (original source in German). At the same time, schools and families are increasingly critical of actors from the politics nexus and perceive them as lacking a future-oriented coherent strategy, which is particularly critical for socially deprived and economically disadvantaged households. Eventually, we discuss these findings in light of Schimank's (2010) analytical framework. As a model is only valid to the extent that the conditions accounting for its construction are comparatively similar in those other contexts where it is to be applied (Magrath, Aslam and Johnson, 2019), we are cautious in suggesting that our findings apply in other European education systems. Still, we are convinced that the German case study is relevant in that it adds to our understanding of actors' constellations and power balances during the corona pandemic.

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