The full-time care of elementary school students is billions of euros more expensive than planned for the state. This emerges from an unpublished calculation of the German Youth Institute (DJI) in Munich.
In the coalition agreement for the "legal entitlement to all-day care at primary school age", the Federal Government had announced investments of two billion euros from 2025 onwards. According to the model calculations of the DJI, investments of at least 5.3 billion euros are necessary by 2025, in addition to running costs of 3.2 billion euros per year.
The institute had been assigned a prognosis by the federal government and the states after disagreements about the expected costs; the paper has now accepted the Bund-Länder-AG as a new basis for further negotiations. The reason for the forecasted cost explosion is that by 2025 higher birth rates and immigration, according to the DJI, are expected to increase the number of primary schoolchildren to about 187,000, as estimated by the Conference of Ministers of Education.
"On the education system, significantly stronger vintage cohorts are returning to work," explains DJI director Thomas Rauschenbach. In addition, according to DJI, new offers are attracting increasing demand, as has already been shown in the daycare center.
The Conference of Ministers of Education will deal with the financing of all-day operations in mid-October. The federal states want the federal government to participate in the future operating costs in addition to an investment aid.
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