Where are all the places for so many children supposed to come from? Parents have been asking this for years. A Bertelsmann study shows that there is a gap between supply and demand, especially in western Germany.
Around 384,000 missing daycare places in 2023 – that is a forecast that not only concerns the experts and parents involved. It affects millions of people in Germany – regardless of whether they have or have children themselves, work as educators, run institutions or make political decisions about childcare ratios.
The country monitor for early childhood education, which the Bertelsmann Foundation published this Thursday, not only reveals a large gap in daycare provision between East and West, but also nationwide staff and investment gaps. Here is an overview of the findings.
Hundreds of thousands of children without a daycare place
Since 2013 there has been a legal entitlement to a childcare place for children after their first birthday in Germany, and for children over the age of three it has existed since 1996. However, according to the Bertelsmann analysis, this entitlement has little to do with actual needs. The authors write that this will not be fulfilled in the coming year either. Expressed in numbers, this means: Based on the demand, around 384,000 places are missing – the vast majority of them in western Germany, where, according to the study, 362,400 children would go away empty-handed, in the east, on the other hand, there are significantly fewer with 21,200 missing places.
“This is an absolute failure of politics,” says study author and expert on early childhood education, Kathrin Bock-Famulla, on the overall finding. Claims would be created without realistic planning, she says. This also applies to the federal government’s plan to create an entitlement to all-day care for all children of primary school age from 2026.
Gap between East and West
The study shows differences in daycare provision between East and West Germany on several levels, especially in the age groups: According to this, most daycare places are missing for children under three years of age. In the West there are around 250,300, in East Germany – including Berlin – almost 20,700 children from this group would be waiting in vain for a place. For children from the age of three, where the entitlement has been in place for decades, there are still 112,100 places too few in western Germany, compared to 500 places in the east. The shortage is particularly pronounced in the most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia. There are 101,600 places missing next year.
According to study author Bock-Famulla, the gap between East and West has a historical background. In the former GDR, mothers went back to work very soon after the birth of a child. “Child care itself was a matter of course,” says the expert. It was different in the West. “Twenty years ago it was not a matter of course that children under the age of three were looked after.” It was only much later that a cultural change took hold there – which also brought with it a new awareness of the need for early childhood education.
quality in day care centers
The authors of the study not only complain about a pure “space problem”, but also draw attention to the quality of care. “Nationwide, 68 percent of all daycare children are still looked after in groups whose staff ratios do not correspond to scientific recommendations,” it says. In East Germany, the quality problem is even greater. Around 90 percent of the day-care center children would be cared for there without the necessary personnel key. With a new law – the Kita Quality Act – the federal government wants to focus on exactly this aspect. Then a large part of the federal funds provided for in the law for the federal states – four billion euros in the next two years – will flow into improving quality.
Skills shortage and necessary investments
According to study results, the shortage of staff is alarming. In order to cover the pure need for care without recommended quality requirements, 93,700 additional staff would have to be hired in the daycare centers in the west, and 4,900 new employees would be needed in the east. This would result in extra personnel costs of 4.3 billion euros. Operating and possible construction costs for day-care centers are not yet taken into account. According to the study, almost 309,000 additional specialists would have to be employed if there were to be child-friendly personnel keys in the day-care centers. Personnel costs would then amount to around 13.8 billion euros annually.
Associations and trade unions are demanding both a specialist and an investment offensive from the federal, state and local governments. The German Federation of Trade Unions, for example, suggests paying for the training of educators across the board in Germany and paving the way for more career changers to enter day-care centers.
Specialist radar country monitor_Bertelsmann Infoblatt_Kitas_Bertelsmann PM_Bund_Bertelsmann information_Federal Ministry for Family Affairs
Source: Stern
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