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 labor 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.
While Olaf Scholz’s coalition government pushed through new legislation and extra funding for ‘kitas’, 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 daycare 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 organizations.
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 labor 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 labor 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.
Die Mittel helfen, zusätzliches Personal zu bezahlen, um das Personal-Kind-Verhältnis zu verbessern und die Einrichtungen zuverlässiger zu machen. Deutschland hat eine der höchsten Raten an weiblicher Erwerbstätigkeit in Europa, mit etwa 76% © Rupert Oberhäuser/IMAGO via Reuters. Bei dem in Berlin ansässigen Mahlzeit-Lieferdienst HelloFresh haben Führungskräfte sogar eine betriebseigene Kinderbetreuung eingerichtet, in der Eltern Slots buchen können, um von der Firmen-Nanny betreut zu werden – eine von mehreren Initiativen des Unternehmens, um Mitarbeiter anzuziehen und zu halten. „Jede größere Organisation in Berlin macht so etwas in irgendeiner Form“, sagte Johannes Willberg, Senior Vice President für Personal des Unternehmens. Aber die meisten Familien haben nicht das Privileg einer betrieblichen Unterstützung. Dreyer, die Expertin für die frühkindliche Entwicklung, sagte, sie mache sich Sorgen über die Auswirkungen der Krise auf Kinder aus benachteiligten Verhältnissen. Sie wies auf Studien hin, die zeigten, dass die Qualität der Bildung in den ersten Lebensjahren eines Kindes einen erheblichen Einfluss auf seine Zukunft haben könnte. Die Mängel im deutschen Kita-System hätten „Konsequenzen für Kinder, Eltern, Fachleute und letztendlich die Gesellschaft als Ganzes“, sagte sie. „Wenn wir nicht sicherstellen, dass jedes Kind seinen Platz in der Gesellschaft findet, dann werden Wohlstand und Zusammenhalt leiden.“