For years, educational researchers and policymakers in Germany have strongly supported the idea of transforming schools into all-day schools. The leading argument for the reform is that all-day schools can foster heterogeneous students better than half-day schools. Research from large-scale assessment studies has shown – the latest study provided by Henschel et al. (2022) based on data from the IQB National Assessment Study in Year 4 – that students from families with a migrant background achieve lower proficiency scores than students from non-migrant families. The same results have been shown for students from families with a low socio-economic background (SES; e.g., Sachse et al., 2022). Both findings can be explained by the situation that parents provide different qualitative and quantitative support for their children. In addition, studies have demonstrated that parental homework involvement is significant for learning success (e.g., Dettmers et al., 2019). Thus, there is a higher probability that parents speaking German as their L1 and with a high SES are better suited to provide numerous learning opportunities outside school and help with homework and school preparation than parents with a migrant background and/or with a low SES.

In order to establish more equality, the reform for all-day schools is being pushed forward. The assumption is that all-day schools provide more learning opportunities for all students. Furthermore, instead of the traditional homework format, alternative concepts regularly exist at all-day schools, thus students are supposed to learn primarily in school. In this respect, the reform can contribute to greater educational equity. School development projects such as the transformation to an all-day school require that schools collaborate with multiple stakeholders. In Germany, in addition to principals, school supervisors play an important role in the management of schools. As representatives of the state, they legally have to supervise schools and, secondly, they have an advisory function. They advise principals, for example, on the implementation of reforms and give schools support in carrying out school development projects. Despite an extensive body of research on all-day schools (e.g., their effectiveness, see overview in Fischer & Kuhn, 2022), the role of school supervisors in the all-day school reform has not yet been considered. Since all-day schools are not compulsory in Germany yet (unlike Denmark, e.g., see Holm, 2015), the successful introduction highly depends on the various stakeholders and their beliefs on the innovation. Against this background, this study aims at exploring the beliefs of school supervisors on the implementation of all-day schools as one form of extended education. We focus on the concept of beliefs as they are considered to have a guiding function when it comes to the implementation of “new pedagogical approaches and reforms” (Fives & Buehl, 2012). Following Pajares (1992), we understand beliefs as an “individual’s judgment of the truth or falsity of a proposition” (p. 316). With regard to the reform under study, we ask whether school supervisors share the general positive assumption on the effects of all-day schools. In addition, we are interested in the factors that enable, facilitate or impede implementation of the reform from the perspective of school supervision.

In the context of schools, beliefs are usually assessed using self-report measures and interview techniques (Schraw & Olafson, 2015). Interviews are especially useful to assess individual and detailed perspectives on a topic allowing for “context sensitivity” and “conversational flexibility” (Brinkmann, 2018, p. 1000). To investigate the school supervisors’ perspectives, we conducted structured interviews with open questions. We asked for narrative accounts on the school supervisors’ job experiences regarding their task of advising schools in the reform processes to become all-day schools. The leading question was: “The all-day school reform is a challenge for all those involved in the process. Which role does the topic play in your job?”. We interviewed 12 school supervisors, half of them being female. We conducted the interviews from May to August 2022 via video conference system. They lasted from 45 to 100 minutes. The interviews were then recorded and transcribed. The methodology employed is based on a content analysis approach (Schreier, 2012), a method to analyse texts by categories. These categories allow a structured analysis of data and comparisons between different texts representing different cases. Using a consensual approach, a coding scheme was developed by the two authors that includes definitions, examples, and coding rules for all categories. Subsequently, we structured the transcripts by coding all transcripts using a combination of deductive and inductive categories that allow for a summary of the beliefs, opinions and topics across all interview cases.

In the data, two main categories emerged during the inductive coding process: (1) school supervisors’ beliefs on the all-day school reform and their (2) perspectives on impeding, enabling and facilitating factors regarding the implementation of all-day schools. These broader concepts are structured by various subconcepts. Five subcategories could be assigned to the broader category (1) school supervisors’ beliefs on all-day schools. The first subcategory beliefs on the “right” concept of all-day schools encompasses opinions and explanations on what school supervisors believe is the most effective all-day school concept. All interviewees shared the opinion that all-day schools should have compulsory morning and afternoon lessons, i.e., a concept that does not only offer child-care and free-time activities after lessons in the morning but includes, for instance, lunch times together, school lessons in the afternoon and times for other pedagogically planned activities throughout the entire school day. Another subcategory describes the belief that all-day schools are a tool to support heterogenous students individually and to foster the competencies they need to succeed in school. In short, all-day schools are considered to be a tool to achieve more educational equity. Three more subcategories will be presented. Regarding the second broader category (2) perspectives on impeding, enabling and facilitating factors regarding the implementation of all-day schools six subcategories emerged in the coding process. They encompass views on the role of human and monetary resources, organizational challenges and the thoughts on professional cooperation and external support. All subcategories will be illustrated by quotations we considered representative for the school supervisors’ accounts. We discuss implications of the school supervisors’ beliefs in the context of their role in the all-day school reform with a special focus on the potential all-day schools can have in supporting heterogeneous students.

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