In Bavaria, more and more children are starting school whose native language is not German: in the 2023/2024 school year, the corresponding proportion was 30.7 percent. This emerges from the response of the Ministry of Culture to a request from the AfD parliamentary group. This means a slight increase compared to the previous school year (30.1 percent).
For comparison: In the 2019/2020 school year, the proportion across Bavaria was 27.4 percent. But that was long before the start of the Ukraine war, for example. Since the Russian attack on the neighboring country, many Ukrainians have also sought protection in Germany. This is proven by the ministry’s figures: in the last school year alone, 2,174 of the children enrolled in grade one in Bavaria had Ukrainian citizenship.
Naturally, the proportion of children whose native language is not German is even higher in Munich: in the 2023/2024 school year, the corresponding proportion was 55.1 percent. In the previous school year, 53.7 percent of the first graders here had a non-German native language.