Science and Education

German youth welfare services comprise public sponsors (towns, municipalities, local authorities) and private sponsors (charitable associations, churches, parental initiatives). Thanks to the entitlement to a kindergarten place for every child over the age of three that was introduced in 1996, the German youth welfare offices now have enough places to cover a national average of 95 per cent of demand. Although attendance at a kindergarten is not mandatory in Germany, the vast majority of all children spend at least some of the day in a childcare centre. Parental contributions are graduated accorded to income so that low-income families can also afford a kindergarten place.

There are no binding care guidelines for the country as a whole. This means that there are considerable differences from Federal Land to Federal Land with regard to the form of day-care centres for children. On the one hand, this concerns the opening times, on the other the carer-child ratio or the size of the group. Moreover, the educational approaches applied to work in German kindergartens are especially diverse. As well as Rudolf Steiner kindergartens, Montessori facilities and those that work according to the principles of Reggio educational science, the concept of integrated education has established itself at many centres, i.e. joint care for disabled and able-bodied children. However, most German kindergartens work according to the so-called situation approach that teaches the principle of “learning in experience contexts”. This means that the teachers make suggestions that the children then develop on their own. Due to the many ways in which it can be implemented, this concept has come under ever stronger criticism in recent years. But this is a phenomenon that is true for the pre-school education system as a whole in Germany.

Since the introduction of the statutory entitlement to a kindergarten place, however, parents have increasingly criticised that many public kindergartens are dwindling away into “care centres with little stimulation” because in many cases the groups have just been made bigger without any additional specialist staff being taken on. Since then a high-quality education has no longer been guaranteed.

Experts in early education even believe that German pre-school education is fundamentally lacking in generally binding and measurable quality standards and that it is now at a very low level on an international scale. The aspect of pre-school policy that they criticise is that although it aims to remedy quantitative deficits such as a lack of kindergarten places or opening times that are too short, it does little for the quality of the educational work. And this is in spite of the fact Germany was the birthplace of kindergartens, where Friedrich Fröbel founded the first “General German Kindergarten” in 1821 and from where his the revolutionary primary education convictions spread throughout the world.

Unlike its European neighbours, such as France or Holland, where care for children under three is guaranteed with appropriate care facilities, Germany has hardly any so-called crèches. It is true that the Child and Youth Services Act has been calling for adequate provision of crèches for many years. But the expansion of the number of places has failed in most local authorities to date due to a lack of funds. In order to compensate for the lack of professional crèche places, many private parental initiatives have now been founded in Germany in order to organise so-called “parent and toddler groups” for their children between the ages of four and 23 months, and “play groups” for two-year olds. Experts estimate that there is nevertheless still a need for an additional 350,000 crèche places for children under three here in Germany.