2023-09-17 21:26:40
This week Melanie Halbach, head of a daycare center in Frankfurt’s Ostend, once again had to struggle with an acute shortage of staff. She can currently only staff the five groups in her daycare with two teachers each. The plan is actually to have three per group.
“You are constantly afraid that another employee will leave you,” she says. But the consequences are already noticeable. If a teacher has to leave for a short time, you suddenly find yourself alone. It is obvious that children can quickly be lost sight of.
But many educators in Germany are like you. According to the Competence Center for Securing Skilled Workers, there is currently a shortage of 21,000 of them nationwide. And the need will continue to increase in the future. By 2025, the gap in skilled personnel could grow to up to 72,000, as the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs has calculated. This results in a total of 384,000 missing daycare places for 2023.
Everything is lacking
The daycare centers in Germany are already only making ends meet at the expense of the employees and parents. Some daycare centers have to close earlier without planning, others are closing entire groups immediately. And all of this because an employee suddenly fails in an already tense personnel situation. As a result, parents have to come home from work early to pick up their children. There is talk of a system on the verge of collapse. There is chaos, and the employees are already chronically overworked. For them, this means a lot of stress, while the parents have to reckon with increasingly unpredictable child care: What if my child inevitably leaves daycare early because there are not enough teachers? What does that mean for my job – and what will that look like in the future?
Many educators think they have the best job in the world, but the shortage of skilled workers is ruining everything. “As a manager, I’m just puzzling: How can I plug the holes that have arisen in order to keep the business running?” says Halbach.
The industry not only lacks teaching staff, but also other employees. In Melanie Halbach’s “Krabbelstube Klanghafen”, the teachers currently also have to take care of the kitchen. The actual kitchen staff was absent due to illness. The time for actual care is becoming less and less. Pedagogy and early childhood education thus degenerate into keeping children safe and occupied.
Over a million employees
And all of this is happening against the backdrop of a seemingly contradictory development: there has been unparalleled employment growth in the industry in recent years. Compared to 2019, almost 10 percent more employees were working in child care and education in 2022. In absolute numbers, this means an increase of almost 100,000 jobs to now over a million employees. But this growth is far from enough. Because it is clear that demand will continue to increase in the future. More mothers are entering the job market and their children need to be looked after. The demand for educators is increasing.
This is also due to the expansion of daycare centers and childcare places that is now being pushed forward nationwide, which is increasingly being slowed down by a lack of staff. Some new daycare centers cannot even open because there is simply a lack of staff. And when new staff are found, they often leave a gap somewhere else, in another daycare center. This just shifts the problem instead of solving it. In the long term, more staff will be needed to get the misery in German daycare centers under control.
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