The president of the German Teachers’ Association, Stefan Düll, has criticised proposals to ban messenger services such as WhatsApp for children and young people. He argues that a blanket prohibition or sweeping usage restrictions would be hardly realistic in practice. These services currently play a central role in everyday communication and scheduling within families, clubs, youth groups, and religious communities.
Teachers generally have no access to the class chats of their students. For privacy reasons, WhatsApp is not used for official school communication. According to Düll, teachers and school leaders usually only see such chats when something problematic occurs-such as insults, threats, or other conflict‑laden content. In those cases, they coordinate educational or disciplinary measures with the students and the parents.
It is difficult to reliably assess how widely problematic content actually circulates in class chats. “There is no systematic monitoring” Düll explained. While such incidents do happen and are burdensome for schools, single cases do not provide an overall picture.
Instead of a prohibition, he called for more media‑literacy programmes, greater support for schools in dealing with digital conflicts, and reliable protection mechanisms from service providers. Prevention approaches, he said, are far more effective in everyday life than blanket bans.