All-day care | Tinkering and bogus solutions

If school time is not coordinated with parents' working hours, families have a problem. All-day care is intended to solve the problem. Photo: dpa/Hatim Kaghat Wednesday, eleven o'clock. The teacher wishes the first graders a “nice weekend.” Family vans are waiting in front of the gate, ready to go, because tomorrow is a holiday, then there will be a bridge day on which classes will also be cancelled. So the extended short vacation is worth it. The catch: Only a few children go to a holiday home by the sea. Rather, by half past twelve at the latest, they are wondering what they should do. Mother and father have to work, but the school doesn't care much about that: If the children's timetable doesn't fit in with the parents' work schedules, it's considered a private problem.

Admittedly, the story is told one-sidedly. The school weekend usually does not start on Wednesday morning. However, constantly changing start and end times of lessons are still common, especially in western Germany. Compared to the relatively reliable daycare, this is a significant step backwards for parents. A warm meal is now offered at almost all schools. Afterwards, the so-called open full day starts at many schools, a half-hearted offer without a fixed commitment. This is unlikely to change any time soon.

After all, there has been a legal right to all-day care at primary schools since the current school year. This is what it says in a law that the then black-red coalition passed more than five years ago. The regulation will be introduced gradually: Since summer 2026, it will initially apply to first graders, and then to all grades from 2029. Schools must offer at least eight hours of care on five working days. During the holidays they may close completely for a maximum of four weeks per year.

Almost two thirds of elementary school students already take part in all-day programs. That is significantly more than a decade ago. The regional rates vary between almost 90 percent in East Germany and the city states and just under 50 percent in Baden-Württemberg or 60 percent in Bavaria.

Critics suspect that the legal claim is a form of coercion. “Until the sun goes down” was once the headline of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” and created a horror scenario: “Some children are brought in at seven in the morning, the students come in the dark and leave at dusk. Care for up to ten and a half hours a day, 50 hours a week. For some professionals, this may be a dream. And for the children?”

The report describes how a boy is “homesick at two o’clock” on the first day of school. And in general: "More and more children are exhibiting behavioral problems." Because in the all-day system, the "base station" is no longer the "parental home, but the institution."

The report refers to warnings from psychologists and doctors: "Romping around without a trainer, resting without a time window, retreating without a corner to retreat to - many children can no longer do that: disengage."

And as a nod to those with legal guardians: “Some people forget that this well-paced life is not a collection of circumstances that cannot be changed. But the sum of decisions that they have made themselves.«

Decisions you made yourself? Anyone who complains about too much “program” and the over-planning of childhood ignores the economic constraints behind it. Instead of advocating for family-conscious personnel policies, CDU politicians mock alleged “lifestyle part-time work.” Not all employees have enough negotiating power to force their superiors to work from home - not to mention the fact that parents can hardly look after their children adequately at home while working.

But children trudging through snow and rain before the sun comes up - that's not a pretty sight indeed. But why does German school start at eight o'clock, sometimes even earlier? Why not at nine, as in Great Britain, or even later for young people, as chronobiology recommends?

However, starting early is a necessary prerequisite for the half-day system; otherwise the learning load cannot be achieved. Starting school early seems like a relic from the era of early industrialization: It is intended to provide discipline for upcoming requirements such as punctuality and adaptation. By equalizing teaching, however, new opportunities arise, in keeping with developmental psychology.

Half-day school has always been a special (West) German approach; afternoon classes are a given in almost all European countries. Almost nowhere is there such a time-limited educational offer. And nowhere are the problems that arise from this passed on to the parents, and especially to the mothers, in a similarly drastic way: whether illnesses, consultation days, further training, company outings, black ice or lack of heat - there are many reasons why the already tight lessons are canceled. If you can't rely on helpful relatives, neighbors or friends, you'll hardly be able to take on a full-time job outside the home.

A deep-seated cause of this misery is an antiquated image of the family that sees education as a primarily private matter and not a public task. There was once talk of “depository institutions,” of “raven mothers” for working mothers and of “latchkey children” when the children came home alone - specifically German terms that do not exist in other languages. In France, the role of the state as a pedagogical authority has been viewed positively since the Enlightenment - while in this country there was a sense of totalitarian indoctrination. According to this understanding, the state should limit its “interference” to a few hours of educational provision in the morning.

However, because half-day school is becoming less and less suitable for both parents' work and companies are also putting pressure on politicians due to the shortage of skilled workers, the legal right is now at least at primary schools. But that's not the big deal: people continue to mess around and improvise with fake solutions. The open full day that prevails in most federal states usually means morning lessons according to the old model with subsequent supervision by temporary staff from youth welfare services and clubs, some of whom are not adequately trained.

“Around a third of the full-time staff do not have sufficient pedagogical qualifications,” says Gunther Graßhoff from the Institute for Social and Organizational Education at the University of Hildesheim, criticizing this practice in the membership magazine of the Education and Science Union. Educational scientist Wilfried Bos calls this “cheap options,” while his colleague Dirk Zorn from the Bertelsmann Foundation speaks of a “conceptual vacuum.”

What would be necessary would be compulsory all-day school attendance for everyone, in which learning and leisure alternate. This is the only way mothers and fathers can stop the strenuous juggling between timetables and shift schedules.

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