Foreign sounding names are more frequently rejected when looking for a daycare spot than German names. This was the result of a joint study by the Ifo-Institut, TU München, IWH, and DZHW. According to the study, inquiries from parents with Turkish sounding names were answered in 66 percent of cases during the study period, compared to 71 percent for parents with German names. Overall, children with foreign names received a placement confirmation for a daycare spot approximately 20 percent less often.
According to the Statistisches Bundesamt, in 2023 only 22 percent of children with a migration background under three years old attended a daycare, compared to 45 percent of children without a migration background. The legal right alone does not guarantee equal access to daycare, according to co-author Simon Wiederhold from IWH.
In a complementary survey of daycare managers, about 85 percent stated that they make the admission decisions themselves. Fixed guidelines from managing bodies or municipalities are rare. Nearly four out of five managers process parent inquiries alone. On average, they receive 14 such inquiries per week, in addition to their pedagogical duties.
According to the study, parents’ educational attainment plays no role in the decisions of kindergarten managers. Even if parents mentioned a higher education degree in their email signature, they were less likely to receive a response if their name sounded Turkish.
For the study, the researchers sent emails from fictitious parents to over 22,000 daycares with spots for children under three in March 2021. Trained assistants evaluated the over 12,000 responses without knowing the names of the parents.
