At the start of the new school year, many German schools face an acute staffing crisis, with teachers missing in several subjects and lengthy sick leave further tightening an already tense situation.
Germany’s schools are facing a structural staffing crisis. More teachers have been hired and the federal states are trying to counter this by creating additional posts, recruiting lateral entrants and offering financial incentives.
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Yet in many places there are still not enough staff to cover all lessons in full.
There is a particularly chronic shortage of teachers in the STEM subjects – mathematics, computer science, physics and chemistry. There is also a continuing nationwide or regional need in special needs education as well as in art and music.
According to the latest projection by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education (KMK), there is a calculated shortfall of around 27,000 fully qualified teachers in Germany.
How dramatic the situation can become in individual regions is currently illustrated by Brandenburg. Education Minister Gordon Hoffmann (CDU) warned in June that the state would probably no longer be able to guarantee the standard timetable everywhere in the coming school year. The situation is particularly difficult in rural areas and in subjects such as biology and chemistry.
The situation also remains tense in North Rhine-Westphalia. Although the state now has more than 166,000 teaching posts, more than 7,770 positions were still unfilled most recently.
Berlin: Off sick for ten years
Berlin is an example of how sickness-related absences exacerbate the already strained staffing situation. According to the city’s education administration, 380 teachers have been on sick leave for at least a year. This emerges from a reply by the Senate to a parliamentary question from the MP Alexander King (BSW), first reported by the Berliner Morgenpost.
They include 225 civil servants and 155 salaried teachers. In total, Berlin employs around 35,000 teachers.
More specifically, 143 civil servant teachers have been absent for at least a year, and a further 50 for at least two years. According to the education administration, 18 teachers have even been on sick leave for at least ten years.
Primary schools are particularly hard hit, with 98 teachers out on long-term sick leave. Secondary schools are missing 54 teachers, grammar schools 34 and vocational schools 27.
There are also long-term absences among salaried teachers: five of them have been on sick leave for at least ten years, and 16 for at least five years.
The BSW MP Alexander King attributes this development, among other things, to the tight staffing situation: inadequate staffing levels increase the workload on those still in post and can in turn encourage further sickness-related absences.
North Rhine-Westphalia: sickness rate around 10 per cent
In Hesse, according to the Ministry of Education, around 225 of the approximately 67,000 teachers have been ill for at least a year, 16 of them for more than five years. Common causes cited include psychological strain and physical complaints.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, teachers in 2025 were on sick leave on average for 8.43 per cent of working days – more than in the state administration as a whole. Secondary modern schools (Hauptschulen) were particularly affected, with a sickness rate of 9.83 per cent.
In Saxony-Anhalt, around 8.6 per cent of lessons in the 2024/25 school year were cancelled because no cover could be provided.
It is impossible to say how many teachers nationwide have been off sick for at least a year. Why? The federal states collect and publish different sets of data. North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, distinguishes according to the duration of illness, while other states use other categories. The term "long-term illness" is also defined differently and in some states can apply to sick leave lasting more than 30 days.
Surveys in individual states nevertheless show that there are at least several hundred such cases.
The future: fewer teachers, more pupils
Many teachers are over 50. According to the Federal Statistical Office, in the 2024/25 school year exactly 35.4 per cent of teachers at general education schools were at least 50 years old. Some 25.4 per cent were between 50 and 59, and a further 10 per cent were 60 or older.
The German education system is therefore facing a major wave of retirements in the coming years. At the same time, it takes several years to train additional teachers.
Demand for teachers is likely to continue rising for the time being. According to the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education, there were just under 11.2 million pupils in Germany in 2024. By 2032 the number is set to rise to almost 11.8 million, an increase of around 5.3 per cent. After that it is expected to fall slightly again because of smaller birth cohorts. By 2040, however, around 11.3 million pupils are still expected.
