Germany’s kindergartens are in crisis, with staff shortages wreaking havoc in the lives of working parents, damaging the nation’s productivity and risking the future prospects of a generation of children.
The lack of trained childcare workers in the EU’s largest economy is causing overcrowding in day-care centres, emergency closures and a shortage of available places — with wide-ranging consequences for families, for businesses and the labour market.
“The situation has never been so alarming,” said Rahel Dreyer, one of Germany’s leading authorities on early years education. “I experience it on a daily basis in my interactions with [childcare] professionals, with parents who are completely at their limit and with children who are exhausted by groups that are too large.”
Parents in Germany have some of the lowest childcare costs of any developed nation, albeit with stark regional differences that mean fees can range from zero to about €1,200 a month.
But that fact masks deep problems within reliability and quality of care.
While Olaf Scholz’s coalition government this year pushed through new legislation and extra funding for kitas, as day-care facilities for the under-sixes are known in Germany, the bill fell short of the hopes of many experts. Childcare is already playing a role in the campaign for parliamentary elections in February, with the major parties promising steps to tackle the crisis.
Government spending on day care has increased significantly over the past 15 years, with the German public sector spending a net sum of about €46bn in 2023 as it expanded the number of places. That figure represents about 1.2 per cent of GDP, up from about 0.7 per cent in 2009, according to Stefan Sell, a professor of economics and social policy at the Koblenz University of Applied Sciences.
Despite Germany’s falling fertility rate, demand for extra places is growing as more mothers are returning to work after having children. “The increase in the number of childcare places and the associated expenditure is not nearly enough to meet the demand,” Sell said. “We need even more [kita] workers, but they are becoming increasingly rare, if not impossible to find.”
The country has close to 900,000 trained childcare professionals employed in the sector, but there are about 125,000 unfilled jobs, according to a report published in June by Paritätische Gesamtverband, an umbrella association for health and social work organisations.
In an illustration of the measures being taken in parts of Germany in response to the crisis, the government in North Rhine-Westphalia recently proposed allowing a single trained day-care worker to be responsible for up to 60 children — as long as they had support from other professionals such as musicians, gardeners or craftspeople.
The staff shortage, which is mirrored in elderly care and healthcare, has contributed to a nationwide lack of about 300,000 kita places, the majority in west Germany.
The problem has piled pressure on existing personnel, who unions say are overloaded and stressed. The primary issue is not one of pay — the median pre-tax wage for Germany’s highly trained kita workers is €3,750 a month, lower than the average salary but far above the minimum wage.
Many trained childcare workers were being put off by the profession’s “catastrophic conditions”, Katja Ross, a day-care teacher from the northern city of Rostock told parliament in October.
Those working in childcare suffer one of Germany’s highest rates of sickness absence, with an average of 30 days off per year owing to illness, compared with the national average of 20.
As a result, kitas regularly announce curtailed opening hours or even closure at short notice, leaving children and parents — and their employers — in the lurch.
“The first thing I do every morning is check my phone and see if there’s a message from the kita app,” said Mirjam Hock, a working mother of an 18-month-old who lives in the Bavarian city of Augsburg.
“We get messages about twice a month where they ask us to pick her up early, or say: could your kid stay at home?”
Hock, who works as an IT project manager and sits on the board of Germany’s Association of Working Mothers, said that the situation put stress on her job and on her relationship with her partner. “You wake up in the morning and fear that you will let someone down today,” she said.
The phenomenon disproportionately affects women.
Germany has one of the highest rates of female labour force participation in Europe, at about 76 per cent. But that figure conceals a high rate of part-time work for mothers, particularly those with young children: only 27 per cent of mothers with children under the age of six worked full time in 2023, compared with 91 per cent of fathers.
Jonas Fluchtmann, a labour market expert at the OECD group of advanced economies, said that the level of part-time work among mothers was “very high” compared with other nations, adding that it had knock-on effects for women’s current and future earnings and for their pensions.
For some mothers, part-time work is a choice. But surveys suggest that many want to work more than they actually do — leading economists to argue for better childcare as a way of boosting national productivity.
The situation has left some private businesses coming up with their own solutions to fill in the gaps in state provision. The energy company Eon sponsors 65 kita places in its home city of Essen, at an annual cost of roughly €4,000 per place. The funds help to pay for extra staff to improve staff-child ratios, making the facilities more reliable.
At the Berlin-based meal delivery service HelloFresh, executives have gone as far as setting up in-house childcare, where parents can book slots to be cared for by the company nanny — one of several initiatives by the business to attract and retain staff. “Every large organisation in Berlin is doing some version of this,” said Johannes Willberg, the company’s senior vice-president of people.
But most families do not have the luxury of corporate back-up.
Dreyer, the early years expert, said she was worried about the impact of the crisis on children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
She pointed to studies showing that the quality of education in a child’s first years could have a substantial impact on their future.
The failings of the country’s kita system had “consequences for children, parents, professionals, and ultimately society as a whole”, she said. “If we don’t make sure that every child finds his or her place in society, then prosperity and cohesion will suffer.”
Read the full article here
