Germany's New Right to Full-Day Care: A Place to Live, Not Just to Learn

From August 2026, Germany’s GanztagsförderungsGesetz comes into force: every pupil starting school in autumn 2026 gains a statutory right to a full-day care place — a right that will extend to all primary school pupils by 2029/30. But what this means for schools, holders, and local authorities goes far beyond a question of capacity. Prof. Dr. Jessica Süßenbach (Leuphana University Lüneburg) and Annekathrin Schmidt (German Children and Youth Foundation, DKJS) addressed the decisive quality questions in the Expert Talk about daycare. Their findings are clear: great all-day schools rarely fail because of a lack of places. They fail because of missing structures, too little movement, and administrative workload that eats up time in all the wrong places.

Daycare Schools as Places to Live – More Than Extended Lesson Time

Thinking of the all-day school as simply more lesson time misses both the real potential and the real challenge. Good full-day care doesn’t just change the timetable — it changes the entire school culture. Children spend the majority of their day at school. That makes school their social centre: a place where friendships form, curiosity flourishes, and trust is built.

“We need the all-day school to be active — we need it to be a place where children truly live, not just a learning environment that takes place on chairs.”

Prof. Dr. Jessica Süßenbach, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Expert Talk

That sounds obvious. It isn’t. According to Germany’s National Youth Sport Reports, most primary school pupils don’t even reach the WHO’s recommended daily activity levels. Seated lessons in the morning, seated homework supervision in the afternoon: many all-day schools are reproducing the problem rather than solving it. Full-day care offers a genuine opportunity to change this — if school organisation and pedagogy are designed together.

Quality Over Quantity: The Legal Right as an Educational Promise

Germany’s new statutory entitlement to full-day care creates places — but good places don’t follow automatically. Qualified staff are in short supply: the Bertelsmann Foundation estimates that up to 100,000 additional pedagogical professionals are needed nationwide. Spaces are lacking. Coordination structures are lacking. Above all, a shared understanding of what full-day care should actually achieve is lacking. Annekathrin Schmidt names the dilemma directly:

“I see the greatest opportunities for children growing up in disadvantaged circumstances to receive meaningful support — and school is where that can happen. At the same time, that’s an enormous expectation. We have a quality challenge here — yet when we talk about all-day care, we mostly talk about numbers.”

Annekathrin Schmidt, DKJS, Expert Talk

The DKJS Theme Journal ‘All-Day Care: Time for Courageous Implementation!’ (2025) confirms: only high-quality full-day care sustainably reduces social inequalities. Children from less-advantaged families benefit most — but only when relationship quality, a clear pedagogical concept, and a reliable daily structure come together. Quantity alone, the research shows, can actually widen the gap.

Movement Throughout the Day — The ‘Activity Ribbon’ in Practice

One concrete model shows what a full-day school as a living space can look like: the activity ribbon. It distributes movement, play, and sport rhythmically across the entire school day — from an open, active start in the morning through dynamic breaks to structured afternoon offerings. Not PE as an island in the timetable, but movement as the thread running through the whole day.

The SPORT VERNETZT (Sport Connected) all-day primary school research project (Robert Bosch Foundation / Leuphana University Lüneburg) tested this approach at eleven primary schools in socially challenging environments. The results are compelling: movement-oriented school development works. It improves not only physical health but also concentration, social skills, and wellbeing. The key factor is that movement is woven into the overall concept — not added as an afterthought (Schröder, Süßenbach & Kraus, 2025). That requires schools to coordinate times, spaces, and staff reliably. A detailed explanation of Jessica Süssenbach's approach to integrating sports into a daycare concept is available in our Infopackage.

Multi-Professional Teams: Bringing Schools, Governing Bodies and Partners Together

In an all-day school, teachers, educators, social pedagogues, and external partners work together every day — often with very different training, responsibilities, and communication cultures. What reads as an enrichment in theory is regularly a challenge in practice. Annekathrin Schmidt puts it plainly:

“It really takes everyone working together for it to succeed. Working in multi-professional teams is not as straightforward as it might sound — these institutions are simply not used to collaborating with external partners. When it does work, that’s a real achievement.”

Annekathrin Schmidt, DKJS, Expert Talk

The research confirms it: multi-professional collaboration rarely happens spontaneously. It needs clearly agreed roles, shared planning time, and above all transparent communication channels. When information travels across three different platforms, when room bookings still happen on paper, and when parent messages disappear into email inboxes — collaboration doesn’t fail because of a lack of goodwill. It fails because the right structure isn’t there. This is exactly where digital daycare management tools can make a real difference.

The Golden Rule: Design the All-Day School From the Children’s Perspective

All organisational thinking comes back to one question: what do the children actually experience? Do they feel comfortable? Do they feel seen? Do they have adults they trust? Annekathrin Schmidt offers a guiding principle that sounds simpler than it is:

“The golden rule is to design the all-day school from the children’s perspective and to nurture strong relationships — because without relationships, no learning takes place. That’s why it’s so important for everyone involved to create a space where children can spend their day with joy and a sense of agency.”

Annekathrin Schmidt, DKJS, Expert Talk

Relationship quality isn’t built through policy — it’s built through time and continuity. When care staff keep changing, when teachers are too busy with administration to be truly present — the foundation for meaningful learning is missing. Great daycare starts with giving teachers and educators time for children. And that, in turn, requires reducing administrative workload to the essential minimum.

Digital Daycare Management: Structure That Enables Great Teaching

Great full-day care needs an organisational foundation. The reality in many schools today looks like this: care registrations managed in Excel spreadsheets, room bookings done on paper notices, parent communication spread across multiple apps and email simultaneously. Every day, this costs precious time and leads to errors, double bookings, and misunderstandings — time that should be flowing into work with children. Seven Education offers an integrated platform for digital school communication and daycare management — one solution that brings all key processes together:

• Daycare Management: Manage care offerings, registrations, and capacity centrally — including billing interfaces

• Room and Resource Planner: Book rooms, materials, and equipment in real time — double bookings prevented automatically

• Parent Communication: Messages, forms, and responses through one secure platform — no media breaks, no lost information

• Multi-Professional Team Communication: Clear responsibilities, traceable workflows, and less coordination overhead for school leaders

  
  

Schools already working with the platform consistently report one key benefit above all: time gained. Time that flows into what truly matters — the educational work with children.

Conclusion: Full-Day Care as an Opportunity — When the Conditions Are Right

Germany’s statutory right to full-day care is a historic opportunity for educational equity. Children who receive less support at home can catch up at school — when the quality of their all-day experience is strong. That takes more than places. It takes movement, genuine relationships, real multi-professional collaboration — and structures that enable great education rather than getting in its way. Digital school management isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a prerequisite.