Schools providing general education will face a severe shortage of teachers by 2035. Teacher shortage! And no end in sight.

The shortage of teaching staff at general-education schools in 2035 will be between 115,000 and 177,000.

The shortage will be particularly severe at the lower secondary level, at almost 190,000, while there is likely to be a surplus of over 60,000 teachers at the upper secondary level. In the primary sector, a shortage of around 16,000 teachers is to be expected, although under certain circumstances there may also be a slight surplus. These are the key findings of a teacher forecast by FiBS.

‘Our forecast is in clear contradiction to other forecasts, which is also due to a more up-to-date database,’ says Dr Dieter Dohmen, owner and director of the FiBS Research Institute for the Economics of Education and Social Affairs and author of the study. The calculations are based on current population and school data that take into account the effects of the war in Ukraine and the resulting immigration, as well as the low birth rate of the last two years.

The above figures are based on rather moderate assumptions regarding the need to replace teachers and the future supply of new teachers. ‘In other words,’ says Dohmen, ‘it could be much more dramatic, with figures well over 200,000 missing teachers.’

The increase in the demand for teachers is also due to the growing number of pupils, but more important is the need to replace teachers who retire from teaching. At present, for every teacher who retires for age reasons, two to two and a half more teachers retire from teaching for other reasons. ‘So if 160,000 teachers leave schools by 2030 for age reasons, the total replacement requirement could be 480,000, or even over 520,000,’ explains the education economist. ’That's two-thirds of the teachers currently working!’

The number of pupils is expected to rise from just under 8.7 million in the 2022/23 school year to up to 9.6 million in the 2029/30 school year. It is then expected to fall to 9.46 million by 2035. The drop in the birth rate has been particularly noticeable in the primary sector in the last two years: after an increase from 3.1 million pupils to almost 3.4 million in the 2027/28 school year, a decline to as few as 3.0 million is expected. ‘Should the decline be greater, as the Bertelsmann Foundation expects, the student-teacher ratio will rise and the need for replacement can be significantly reduced, then there could be a slight surplus of teachers in the primary sector. However, this also presupposes that there is no decline in the number of students in teacher training,’ says the FiBS director. “The conditions for there being a surplus of teachers in the primary sector are therefore very high. Even if this possibility is unlikely, it cannot be completely ruled out.’

‘The consequences of our study for education and school policy are dramatic,” concludes Dohmen. ‘There is no way around fundamental reforms in the school system to reduce the workload of teachers, increase the attractiveness of the profession, increase the student-teacher ratio and still be able to improve the quality of the learning process in schools. A central building block for this is a fundamental, practice-oriented reform of teacher training and professional development.’

The study is available here: Lehrkräftemangel! Und kein Ende in Sicht.