Children are not in the room on Monday, which is quite common at press conferences. Nevertheless, you can’t get past them this time. “We want to do everything for the greatest treasure we have, our children,” says Prime Minister Markus Söder in Munich’s Prince Carl Palace. The state government therefore wants to create 180,000 new childcare places in the coming years, many of them for elementary school students – according to the result of a short-term “childcare summit” with representatives of the state government, daycare providers, municipalities and parents’ associations. Childcare, Söder will add later, is one of those “basics” that the state has to provide.
But it is precisely this “basic” that has recently caused frustration in Bavaria. In practice, parents sometimes have little left over from the nice theory of leaving their children in crèches and day-care centers in the morning. According to estimates, thousands of childcare places are missing in the Free State. And even where there are enough places on paper, staff shortages regularly throw a spanner in the works, as evidenced by fire letters and petitions from parents’ initiatives, among other things.
The state government has also recognized that things cannot go on like this. In any case, dissatisfied parents are a vote risk during election campaigns. If you want, you can see the joint appearance of Söder, Minister of Social Affairs Ulrike Scharf (both CSU) and Minister of Education Michael Piazolo (FW) on Monday as a kind of peace offer. “It was a good summit,” says Piazolo, for example, in terms of content and atmosphere. Similarly, Scharf expressed: It is good that all sides have now spoken to each other.
The result, however, is likely to bring relief in the medium term rather than immediately, at best. Most of the 130,000 childcare places to be created are intended for after-school childcare at primary schools. Because from 2026 onwards, a legal entitlement specified by the federal government will apply. The remaining 50,000 places are planned for children under the age of six. The state government wants to spend an additional billion euros on this. In order to cover the associated personnel requirements, she is increasingly relying on career changers – and wants to double the number of so-called team members to 12,000. In the future, they could provide support in administration, in the kitchen and with other tasks that are not genuinely educational. “We need them as helping hands,” says Scharf.
Will that be enough? Söder describes the challenge of meeting the legal entitlement for primary school families as “sporty”. The Free State has expanded its childcare offerings in recent years. “The status quo is better than you think,” says Söder. But the demand has grown even faster. Bavaria is an immigration country, for people from other federal states and abroad alike.
The result of a lack of space and staff: Young women in particular still reduce their working hours comparatively frequently or leave the job altogether in order to be able to devote themselves to childcare. Almost all sectors are already struggling with the lack of skilled workers. And from the point of view of those employed there, the work situation in day-care centers and crèches is at least considered to be capable of improvement. With warning strikes, trade unions recently tried not only to get better pay, but also to make the dissatisfaction of educators heard; a number of facilities throughout Bavaria remained closed on Women’s Day on March 8th. On the one hand, there was “an unbelievable workload and concentration of work,” said a Verdi spokesman to the SZ at the time. On the other hand, there are problems getting more people excited about the job. “A vicious circle.”
Breaking through it is, by definition, difficult. Scharf therefore uses the opportunity on Monday to appeal to daycare providers to be an “attractive employer”. The minister also wants to take a look at the existing funding instruments and develop them further. Piazolo points out that in view of the increasing need for care, work is already being done to create more training positions with the help of new technical schools, among other things. And the Prime Minister points out that pay in the industry has recently improved. Söder can also imagine a “Fast Lane” for people from other parts of the world who want to work as educators in Bavaria – like there is now for nursing staff. The complex bureaucracy has so far prevented their employment in a Bavarian home or hospital.