The situation at day care centers in Munich is coming to a head. The Caritas Association of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising is now warning of a collapse in childcare. In many daycare centers, shortage management is the order of the day, the staff are working at the limit of their resilience. “The consequences are fatal,” said Caritas director Hermann Sollfrank on Wednesday. “There are more cases of illness and burnout and a higher turnover.” Sollfrank called on politicians to act, saying that a specialist offensive was urgently needed. More training places are needed, the appreciation for the profession in society must increase. Foreign qualifications should finally be checked and recognized more quickly, more money is needed for the staff and more money in the institutions.
The shortage of skilled workers is also evident in the city of Munich
Caritas is responsible for 178 day-care centers, midday care and remedial day-care centers (HPT) in Munich and Upper Bavaria, where almost 14,000 children are cared for. Caritas has more than 100 vacancies, and on average there is a shortage of one or two workers in each facility.
The shortage of skilled workers is also evident in the city of Munich, with the 450 city daycare centers currently lacking 377 teachers and eleven percent of the positions are vacant. In addition, there is a shortage of 141 daycare nurses, which corresponds to almost eight percent of the jobs. “Lack of staff is a problem for all providers in Munich and in the surrounding area,” said a spokesman for the Department for Education and Sport. “The legal entitlement for all-day care will also mean that even more staff will be needed.”
“We struggle with the labor shortage every day,” said Gabriele Stark-Angermeier, head of the Diocesan Caritas Association. “Maintaining operations is currently the most important task of daycare management.” In the current situation, it is particularly important that daycare management is there for the employees and also protects them from overload. If the challenges become too great, it could even end up being dangerous for the children, says Stark-Angermeier.
Again and again, booking times have to be shortened and groups closed for weeks because there are no employees. The daycare management would have to help out with the care instead of performing their actual tasks, according to the director. If a kitchen help fails, the daycare manager also washes the dishes, said Stark-Angermeier. Their demand: an assistant for each day-care group so that educators can work pedagogically.
The entire educational sector in Bavaria, from the crèche to the school leaving certificate, is threatened by a real collapse due to the increasingly acute shortage of skilled workers – this is what several Bavarian daycare operators, private and independent providers, said in mid-December in a letter to the Prime Minister on the initiative of the Pfennigparade Foundation Markus Söder (CSU) and Minister of Social Affairs Ulrike Scharf (CSU) wrote. Many care groups and facilities could not even open carriers “because there is simply a lack of staff,” says the letter.
Alfred Ranner heads the HPT Josefine Kramer, a large Caritas facility in Munich with 118 places.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
Caritas service manager Alfred Ranner only needs a few words to describe the problems in the remedial day-care centers (HPT): “Too few people, too many children.” Ranner runs the HPT Josefine Kramer, a large Caritas facility in Munich with 118 places – theoretically at least, because at the moment Ranner is missing two teachers, he can only fill 104 places. The waiting lists for a place in an HPT are long: 50 to 100 families, per facility. “We have waiting times of two years,” says the Caritas expert.
The protagonist at the Caritas press conference was 22-year-old Sara Birzer, an educator in her third year of training. She chose this job because she wants to work with “the people who are our future. That was my greatest motivation.” She tells how proud she was when a schoolchild stood in front of her, whom she had accompanied during his daycare and in whose development she played a big part. A nice job, says Birzer – but she lacked two aspects, such as enough recognition: “Many still think that educators just sit around and play.” What she also lacks: A fair payment. Even during her training, she was thinking about how she could make ends meet as a teacher in Munich.
The lack of staff in the daycare centers had been foreseeable for years, said Caritas director Sollfrank. More inventiveness is needed when building up the workforce. A suggestion from Caritas: a better employment key. Instead of one teacher for eleven children, one teacher is needed for nine children. But in the end it’s all arithmetic, says Gabriele Stark-Angermeier, and suggests a flexible system with groups as large as the children’s needs would require.
Sollfrank and Stark-Angermeier demand that many things in the day-care center area have to be put to the test. Day care centers would have to be fully financed via the Bavarian Child Education and Care Act (Baykibig). At the moment, the obligatory share of the free state and municipalities does not cover the costs of the day-care centers by far.