From 2026, primary school children throughout Germany will have the right to all-day care. The Association of Towns and Municipalities expresses massive doubts as to whether politicians will be able to keep their promises. To avoid frustration, the claim should be postponed indefinitely.
The German Association of Towns and Municipalities (DStGB) has spoken out in favor of postponing the legal entitlement to all-day care for primary school children, which will take effect from 2026. Due to a lack of space and staff, the promise made by politicians could "in fact not be fulfilled" across the board by then, DStGB President Uwe Brandl told journalists in Berlin at an annual outlook for the municipal association.
An implementation of the legal entitlement from 2026 is not possible for the municipalities "with the best will in the world", which will lead to disappointment among citizens, warned Brandl, who is also the first mayor of the Bavarian city of Abensberg and a CSU politician. He did not name a suggestion for a concrete alternative time window. That depends on how the expansion efforts in the care system would progress overall.
The biggest problem for municipalities is a lack of skilled workers, he added. There are currently already large gaps due to demographic change, and the right to all-day care means that more than 300,000 additional jobs are needed in the system. It is already clear that the municipalities could not find the necessary staff, at least across the board. Caregivers would be needed that "simply don't exist" at the moment.
In the western federal states in particular, there are also massive space problems because the necessary care infrastructure has so far been lacking and often has to be created first. In the east, the structures are generally better for historical reasons, said Brandl. He criticized the legal entitlement as an example of a policy that made "performance promises" to citizens that "on closer inspection" were unfulfillable.
DStGB General Manager Gerd Landsberg, like Brandl, emphasized that the association shares the goal of all-day care for primary school children and does not question the agreement. However, there will be areas in which the claim will initially “not be achievable”, emphasized Landsberg. He brought up the possibility of making the introduction more flexible regionally in order to have more time to prepare if necessary.
At the same time, Landsberg criticized the lack of long-term financing commitments with regard to the legal entitlement. The federal and state governments would have to assure the municipalities that they will assume the costs of setting up the appropriate structures for “at least ten years”, preferably permanently.
The legal entitlement to all-day care for primary school children was decided in 2021 by the Bundestag and Bundesrat. This will be introduced gradually from 2026 and will initially apply to first graders. An additional grade level will be added every year until 2029.
