If you can get a good daycare place for your child in Bavaria, you can consider yourself lucky. Because next year there will be far too few of them. Where is the problem?
Gütersloh (dpa / lby) – In Bavaria, many parents will have difficulties finding a daycare place for their children next year. Based on the need for care, there will probably be a shortage of almost 62,000 daycare places in Bavaria in the coming year, according to the calculations published on Thursday by the Bertelsmann Foundation in Gütersloh on the early childhood education systems. The biggest problem continues to be the shortage of skilled workers. In order to meet the demand for daycare places, 14,500 additional workers would have to be hired. As a result, the additional personnel costs alone add up to more than 603 million euros annually.
According to the Bertelsmann Foundation, the figures show that Bavaria will not be able to fulfill the legally anchored right to a daycare place for every child in 2023 either. “This is doubly unacceptable: Parents are not supported in looking after their children, while children are denied their right to professional support in their early education,” said Kathrin Bock-Famulla, an expert on early childhood education at the Bertelsmann Foundation .
Only a high-quality day-care center promotes the children’s development. A prerequisite for this is qualified personnel, explained the expert. In Bavaria, however, 61 percent of daycare children are still cared for in groups whose staff ratios do not correspond to scientific recommendations – even if they are above the national value. Around 35,300 additional specialists would have to be employed so that there would not only be sufficient daycare places in Bavaria in the coming year, but also child-friendly staffing ratios everywhere.
