Schools: Almost 41 percent of teachers work part-time

In the 2021/2022 school year, around 709,000 teachers worked at general schools – 40.6 percent of them part-time. This put the part-time rate at its highest level in the past ten years, as reported by the Federal Statistical Office. Women in particular often reduce their working hours: the part-time rate for female teachers was 48.2 percent, more than twice as high as for teachers, of whom 20.1 percent worked part-time.

There were clear differences between the various federal states. While in Bremen and Hamburg (52.4 percent each) more than half of the teaching staff at general education schools worked part-time in the 2021/2022 school year, it was in Thuringia (21.9 percent) and Saxony-Anhalt (20.7 percent) only about a fifth.

36.6 percent were 50 years or older

According to the information, a good quarter (25.7 percent) of the teachers were between 50 and 59 years old, 10.9 percent were 60 years and older. The proportion of younger career starters is lower: under 35-year-olds make up 21.1 percent of teachers at general schools.

The proportion of older teachers was particularly high in the eastern German federal states. In Saxony-Anhalt they made up 60.8 percent of the teachers, in Thuringia 57 percent, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania 55.9 percent and in Saxony 52.2 percent. The proportion of younger teachers under the age of 35 was particularly high in Saarland at 25.6 percent, followed by North Rhine-Westphalia (23.1 percent) and Bremen (22.4 percent).

According to the information, the number of first-year students in teacher training courses fell again for the first time since the 2015/2016 academic year: In the 2021/2022 academic year, almost 32,300 young people began a teacher training course – that was 13.7 percent fewer than in the 2020/2021 academic year. The decline was significantly greater than the demographic and pandemic-related decline in first-year students of all courses, which fell by 3.7 percent.