Where are all the places for so many children supposed to come from? Concerned parents have been asking this for years. A current Bertelsmann study on day-care centers shows that there is a huge 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.
Since 2013 there has been a legal entitlement to a daycare 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 that based on demand, around 384,000 places will be missing – most 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 for early childhood education, Kathrin Bock-Famulla, about the overall finding. Claims would be made without realistic planning, she says. This also applies to the plan of the federal government, for all children in the to create an entitlement to all-day care from 2026 onwards.
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. “Childcare itself was a matter of course,” says the expert. That was different in the West. “Twenty years ago, it wasn’t a matter of course for children under the age of three to go to daycare there.” So a cultural change only took hold there much later – which also brought a new awareness of the need for early childhood education.
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 day-care center children are still looked after in groups whose staff ratios do not correspond to the scientific recommendations,” it says. In East Germany, the quality problem is even greater. Around 90 percent of the daycare 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.
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 staffing levels 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.
