Has Germany's state education system failed?

"I choose the school [not for religious reasons] but because it has a strong community," said Luisa* of her decision to send her two children to a private Catholic school in Berlin. "It's a really kind environment, very personal, love it."

Luisa said that her children simply couldn't get the support they needed at the state schools in the German capital where teachers often called in sick and hardly any of the children could speak German. "It was a race to the bottom so to say. There were so many kids that needed special focus that the teacher focused on that ... and there was no individual care for kids who have more talents," she explained.

Luisa pays monthly fees of between €180 and €360 ($197-$394) (the fees are staggered by parental income) to send her children to the Catholic school.

In Germany, private schools can be run by churches, social welfare organizations, associations or private individuals.

While state-run schools and even universities are free in Germany, a growing number of parents are opting to pay an average annual fee of €2,030 to send their child to private school. The latest figures released by the German Statistical Office show that the proportion of pupils attending private schools has increased to almost 10% in the 2022/23 school year. Two decades ago, it was 6%.

The rising number of children enrolled at private schools has led to concerns that wealthy, well-educated parents are turning their backs on the state school system and, in turn, fueling social inequality.

Germany's broken education system

Comparative social policy expert Stephan Köppe from University College Dublin says there is no evidence that in Germany, children at private schools perform any better than at state schools.

"What is concerning is that it really points towards either discontent with the state school system or so far unexplained cultural changes," Köppe told DW.

Indeed, a recent survey by the Munich Info Institute for Economic Research indicates that Germans are increasingly unhappy about the quality of education in their country. 

In world's fourth largest economy, schools lie in a state of disrepair, with buildings quite literally crumbling and often closed for repair work. Schools have been slow to digitalize, with many unable to afford computers and lacking reliable or fast Wi-Fi.

Germany's schools also face a desperate shortage of teachers, with high sick rates and an increasing number leaving the profession due to exhaustion and poor working conditions. The baby-boomer generation of teachers is also heading into retirement. 

The latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report commissioned by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was bad news too: ninth graders in Germany performed worse than ever in maths, science and reading, leading to much handwringing about what has gone wrong with the education system in the land of poets and thinkers.

Some blame the sorry state of the German education system on immigration. Roughly 217,000 Ukrainian child refugees now attend school in Germany.

And the overall the number of students is growing: the German Statistical Office reported that 830,000 children started school in 2023, the highest number in 20 years.

But immigration isn't the problem, says education and social inequality expert Marcel Helbig from Germany's Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories.

"The performance at [Gymnasien, or university preparation secondary schools] where there are hardly any migrant kids has also fallen very sharply. It is more than just a migrant-specific problem that we are dealing with here," he told DW. 

The socio-economic divide

According to Helbig, all the evidence suggests academic achievement in Germany remains steadfastly tied to socio-economic background and not the school a child goes to.

So why are more parents opting to send their kids to private schools?

"Many parents, mostly those from the middle and upper classes, above all academics, are attracted to the [educational] model at private schools, but it's really hard to tell whether it's really the pedagogy at a particular school that they find so great … or that they don't want their kids going to a state school because, for example, there are large numbers of migrant kids, poor kids," said Helbig.

In Germany, the vast majority of children go to schools within their local catchment area. The socio-economic divide is most apparent in urban centers where parents have a choice of different schools and can effectively buy or maneuver their way out of the state school system, said Stephan Köppe.

He gave the example of university educated parents living in Neukölln, one of Berlin's most rapidly gentrifying and poorest districts, who would probably not choose for their child to go to a local school. "Research also revealed that some parents in Berlin had given fake home addresses in order to get their kids into a better school in another catchment area," he said.

But what is good for one child is not good for society as a whole, as children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds become effectively segregated in state schools in poorer urban districts. "All PISA studies have shown that the longer you keep the kids together, it has little effect on the top performers, but it all lifts the lower performers," said Köppe.

The road to greater inequality? 

Private school fees in Germany are relatively low in comparison to countries such as the US ($16,050) and the UK ($17,700). That's because the majority of private schools in Germany receive the bulk of their funding from the local state government. 

The German constitution or "Basic Law" ("Grundgesetz") also states that private schools are not allowed to discriminate between which children can attend based on parents' income. To get around this, many private schools offer scholarships. Still, the number of scholarships is limited, and going private just isn’t an option for many parents in a country where the average before-tax salary is below €4,000 a month.

The right to establish a private school is guaranteed under the German constitution where the intention was to protect religious plurality on account of German history.

"From a democratic point of view, I wouldn't say that private schools should be banned or abolished, but the question is: should they be encouraged?" said Köppe.

The real problem, Köppe said, is not private schools but the structure of the school system itself. Under Germany's so-called "track system", in some states the decision is made as early as in Year 4, when pupils are aged around 10, about whether they can attend a Gymnasium — an academic high school equivalent to a grammar school in the UK or a lycée in France. Germany's gymnasiums are the standard path to a university education.

Germany is still a long way off the type of inequality of outcomes seen between private and public schools in the US and the UK, Köppe said. "There's a slight upward trajectory, so over time private schools might cause more inequalities in outcomes. So far, the major problem in Germany remains the track system," said Köppe.

(*Name changed to protect anonymity.) 

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

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