Bavaria’s teachers are older than the national average and more often work part-time. This emerges from statistics published by the Federal Statistical Office on Thursday for the 2022/23 school year. Accordingly, 45.1 percent of all teachers in the Free State work on a part-time basis. This rate is significantly lower in Saxony-Anhalt (21.4 percent) and Thuringia (24.1 percent). In the city states of Hamburg (54.4) and Bremen (49.9), however, the proportion of part-time workers is higher than in Bavaria.
The part-time rate for teachers is significantly higher than for other professional groups. On average for all economic sectors it is 30.2 percent, but for the 724,800 teachers at general schools nationwide it is on average 42.3 percent, which is a ten-year high. One reason is the high proportion of women of 73.1 percent in this professional group. For comparison: On average across all professional groups, the proportion of women is 48 percent.
While 36.2 percent of teachers nationwide are 50 years and older, the proportion of older people at the desk in Bavaria is slightly higher at 37.5 percent. According to statistics, the states of Saarland (28.2) and Bremen (30.4) have the lowest proportion of older teachers, while Saxony-Anthia has the highest proportion with 57.1 percent and Thuringia with 53.5 percent. This part of the statistics is particularly meaningful for the future need for training young teachers.
The number of students fell in 2022 for the second year in a row. In the 2022 academic year, almost 45,400 people began studying to become a teacher – that was 3.2 percent fewer than in the previous year and 7.0 percent fewer than ten years earlier. In 2022, 28,700 young people will have completed teacher training courses. That was 0.7 percent fewer graduates than the year before, but 10.5 percent fewer than ten years earlier.