A new study by the German Economic Institute (IW) has found that children who don’t grow up in a German-speaking household have fewer opportunities in the German school system.

Children who don’t speak German at home are disadvantaged

A micro census involving 880.000 under-18-year-olds living in Germany has found that those growing up in a non-German-speaking household are half as likely as monolingual German children to attend an academic high school (Gymnasium). Gymnasium is the kind of school that children in Germany generally must attend if they would like to study at university.

Just 20,1 percent children from non-German-speaking households attend Gymnasium compared with 40,9 percent of German-speaking children in monolingual households. This is the case for many children who grow up in a household where both parents are non-native German speakers or don’t speak German.

“A lack of German and bilingualism at home are often associated with other factors [...] such as a family background with little experience of either educational institutions or the labour market,” the IW report read.

Children from bilingual German households are also disadvantaged

The study found that children who grow up in bilingual German households, for example where one parent is a native German speaker and the other parent speaks another language, are also less likely to attend Gymnasium compared to children in monolingual German households.

Class also plays an important role. The study found that 35,8 percent of the group it called “foreign-language children” (fremdsprachigen Kinder) and 23,8 percent of bilingual children were part of families where the parents were considered “arbeitsmarktfern” (distant from the labour market) or were dependent on social security benefits.

Children who entered the German education system at a later age were found to be at a disadvantage because of gaps in their knowledge, while the study said that integration at Kita was particularly important. “A smaller proportion of children from non-German-speaking and bilingual homes attended a daycare facility than their exclusively German-speaking counterparts,” the authors explained.

To reckon with these inequalities, the study’s authors said that “measures aimed at socially integrating young people from immigrant families should not focus solely on language acquisition, but rather address all the special challenges they face holistically”. 

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