Digital education is a central aspect of schooling in the dynamic process of deep mediatization (Hepp 2020). With the Digital Education Action Plan (European Commission 2020) and the DigComp (Vuorikari et al. 2022) and DigCompEdu (Redecker 2015) frameworks, the European Commission provides a differentiated approach to the implementation of digital education and its conditions in the European Union. Against this backdrop, the Covid-19 pandemic has massively disrupted schooling conditions worldwide (Al Mazrooei et al. 2022; Bond 2021). Under the influence of the pandemic, face-to-face teaching was limited to varying degrees in all countries, and as a result, teaching and learning was largely conducted at distance (Vincent-Lancrin et al. 2022). Digital technologies have been widely used to implement such time and space flexible learning, making students` use of technologies a basic requirement for teaching and learning. This was accompanied by a further development of the technical infrastructure in schools, which was supported by financial measures from the respective countries (Lindblad et al. 2021). Thus, the Covid-19 pandemic may have had a lasting impact on the conditions for digital education in schools. For example, by raising awareness among teachers and school decision-makers about the pedagogical and didactic potential of digital technologies, the requirements of media literacy, and by further developing the technical infrastructure in schools. It is important to examine these considerations with a particular focus on primary schools, where the basics of digital education should be acquired so that secondary school curricula can build on them (European Commission 2020).

Overall, there is a lack of representative data on how digital education is organised in primary schools in order to comprehensively promote media and IT literacy with the goal of achieving a self-determined, socially responsible, and creative technology use. For Germany, however, quantitative data shows the conditions for digital education in primary schools have hardly changed since the pandemic. Their technical infrastructure has improved slightly, but hardly noticeable (forsa 2021). Furthermore, there is indication that subject-related media use remains low. For example, the “Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS)” for 2021 shows that only 16.7% of German primary school students use digital media to research and read information for at least 30 minutes per school day in German classes (Lorenz et al. 2023, 210). This is significantly below the international average. These results indicate that the conditions for the implementation and realisation of digital education in German primary schools have not improved significantly since the pandemic. Against this background, the project presented in the paper examined the experiences and perceptions of various stakeholders regarding the current state of the implementation of digital education in German primary schools and the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic. As stakeholders in digital education school principals, representatives of teachers' associations, and school administrators were interviewed in focus-groups in the project.

The paper analyses the results of the study based on the research question of how stakeholders assess the development of digital education in German primary schools since the Covid-19 pandemic and what challenges and opportunities they perceive for its implementation. The results confirm the assumption of a slightly positive - but now partly declining - development of conditions for digital education in German primary schools since the pandemic. On an individual school level, the challenges that inhibit this development lie in media-related skills and attitudes of the teaching staff, in teacher cooperation in the context of media-related school development as well as the technical infrastructure of the school. At the structural level, there are challenges in clarifying responsibilities and setting guidelines, along with bureaucratic and data protection requirements.

Ten focus group interviews were conducted between July 2022 and February 2023 with various stakeholders in primary education in Germany for data collection. The interviews were carried out with school principals, representatives of teachers' associations, and school administrators. Three focus group interviews each were conducted with principals and school administrators, while four interviews were conducted with teachers' association representatives. Between three and six people participated in each interview. In total, the sample consisted of 31 people from 13 of the 16 German federal states. Data protection policy was developed for the project and approved by the University's Data Protection Supervisor. Informed consent was obtained from the participants. The interviews were conducted online. Audio was recorded and transcribed. The data was analysed using qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz 2019) with MAXQDA 2022. Furthermore, a combination of deductive and inductive methods to develop categories was used. Three main categories were deductively generated to describe the conditions of digital education (Bärnreuther et al. 2023): “media-related school development”, “educational practice”, and “individual and family circumstances of the children”. The code “media-related school development” includes all statements about the existing conditions for digital education in the schools and how they have changed over time, including aspects of the technical infrastructure (internet connection, Wi-Fi, available digital devices), school concepts for organizing digital education as well as corporations with education policy stakeholders on the topic of digital education. The code “educational practice” includes all statements about the organisation of lessons and the interaction between teachers and pupils in the context of digital technologies. It also includes teachers' media-related skills and attitudes. The code “individual and familial circumstances of the children” contains all statements about the individual preconditions of the pupils as a starting point for digital education. Information about the social and family background of the children is also taken into account. Within these main categories, between three and seven subcategories were developed inductively. The data was coded by four people. To verify the coding guidelines, the intercoder reliability was calculated at the subcode level (O`Connor & Joffe 2020). This shows good agreement with values between ϰ = .86 and 1.00. Nevertheless, the coding guide was revised again after the review, and the researchers were in close contact with each other throughout the coding process, so that ambiguities and open questions were always discussed together.

The findings highlight challenges in two complementary areas of digital education at primary school level: (1.) teachers' skills and practices, and (2.) cooperation in school-administrative contexts. In the first area, in line with existing research (e.g. Bozgun et al. 2023; Juszcyk, S. et al. 2021; Schmidt et al. 2017), it becomes clear that primary school teachers have very different starting points in context of digital education. In addition to adapted training measures, the interviewees emphasised the importance of communication and cooperation as an important basis for digital school development and the associated organizational, personnel, and curricular development. In the second area the stakeholders see a variety of challenges, particularly with regard to the acquisition of technical equipment, complex bureaucratic processes and existing data protection regulations. High demands are placed on digital school development in coordination with various external stakeholders. The European Commission has developed models to describe related development dimensions in both areas: the DigComEdu framework for digital literacy of teachers (Redecker 2015) and the DigCompOrg framework for digital organisational development (Kampylis et al. 2015). The DigCompEdu describes media-related skills for teaching and also takes into account the requirements for teachers to work cooperatively with the goal of digital school development. The DigCompOrg focuses on the organisational development and takes aspects of management and school leadership into account. In this way, the coordination between school leadership and school administration can be emphasised within the existing structural conditions. The paper presents the results of the study in both areas and classifies them in the DigCompEdu and DigCompOrg frameworks. Against this background, the requirements for the further development of digital education in European primary schools are discussed. In the age of deep mediatization, digital education is a necessary condition for the next generations to deal with the growing uncertainty of the future.

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