According to statistics released by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) on Wednesday, over a third of teachers in Germany are aged 50 or older, reflecting shifts in the country’s teaching workforce. Specifically, in the 2024/2025 academic year, one in four (25.4 percent) of educators was between 50 and 59 years old, and an additional 10.0 percent were 60 or older, resulting in a total of 35.4 percent being 50 or above. Conversely, the proportion of younger staff is notably lower, with those under 35 making up just over one-fifth (20.3 percent) of the personnel in general education schools.
Significant regional variations exist regarding this age profile. In Saxony-Anhalt, just over half (50.7 percent) of teachers were 50 or older, followed closely by 46.8 percent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Conversely, the lowest percentages for this age group were recorded in Bremen (30.0 percent) and Saarland (28.6 percent).
Operationally, 752,100 teachers were employed in general education schools across Germany for the 2024/2025 academic year, with 43.9 percent working part-time. This marks a new high for the part-time quota, reflecting a slight increase from the previous year’s 43.1 percent. The need for reduced hours is particularly pronounced among female teachers, whose part-time rate (51.4 percent) was more than double that of male teachers (23.3 percent). Furthermore, the part-time rate in general education schools is higher than the average across all other employed sectors, where 31.3 percent of dependents worked part-time.
Regarding gender representation, women also constitute a disproportionately large share of the teaching profession. In the 2024/2025 school year, women accounted for nearly three-quarters (73.2 percent) of the general education teaching staff. This stands in contrast to the broader labor market, where women only represented 48.2 percent of all employed sectors in 2024.
The distribution of part-time status also highlights regional differences. While more than half of the general education staff are part-time in cities like Hamburg (55.4 percent) and Bremen (51.9 percent), these figures are significantly lower in Thuringia (23.2 percent) and Saxony-Anhalt (23.8 percent), where only about one in four teachers works part-time.
Given the shortage of teaching personnel, the number of ‘lateral entrants’-teachers without recognized teaching qualifications-is continually rising. For the 2024/2025 school year, this represented 11.2 percent of teachers in general education schools, with 84,100 out of the 752,100 teachers lacking official qualifications. This figure is substantially higher than the 4.3 percent recorded in the 2014/2015 academic year, when 28,500 out of 664,200 teachers were lateral entrants.
This trend of lateral entry is even more pronounced in vocational schools. In the 2024/2025 school year, 20,800 teachers (16.7 percent) in the total pool of 124,100 vocational school staff did not hold recognized teaching qualifications. This percentage remained relatively steady since 2014/2015, when 20,200 out of 122,100 teachers lacked recognized qualifications (16.6 percent).
