German education report shows inequality gap opens before school, minister demands mandatory language tests

Inequality starts before first grade

Germany's 2026 National Education Report, presented in Berlin, confirms that social background determines educational outcomes long before a child enters a classroom. Already at age two, significant differences in vocabulary appear depending on the mother's level of education, and those early advantages or disadvantages remain stable throughout the entire school career.

The education gap opens at birth. It opens further until school entry, and after that it is barely closed.

Unequal access to early education

Children who would benefit most from daycare are exactly those who attend least often. Among families with a high level of education, around 40 percent of under-threes are in Kita; among families with a low level of education, that figure is only 20 percent. The report also records that the states have launched 347 programmes and the federal government 13 more to reduce social inequality in education for 2024–2026, but the vast majority of these measures target schools rather than the early years where the divide takes root.

Declining school performance

Basic competencies in reading, mathematics and the natural sciences are weakening. In 2024, almost a quarter of pupils aiming for a middle-school qualification missed the minimum standard for that diploma, nine percentage points more than in 2018. The proportion of young people who leave school without any qualification has risen to eight percent of the relevant age cohort.

Too many young people do not achieve basic competence goals. This points to long-term structural problems in securing these competencies, and thus a central weakness of the education system.

Policy push: mandatory language tests

Federal Education Minister Karin Prien (CDU) wants to bring a quality-development law for childcare to the cabinet before the parliamentary summer break, focusing especially on the last preschool year. The coalition agreement already provides for compulsory language diagnostics for all four-year-olds; according to the report, eight of the sixteen Länder already implement it. In Bavaria, where four-year-olds with German deficits have been tested for over a year, around 43,000 children attended preparatory language courses in the 2025/26 school year. At the same time, demographic shifts are reshaping the system: for the first time in 2024 the total number of children in daycare declined, partly due to falling birth rates, and a further drop in primary-school numbers is expected from the 2027/28 school year. The share of the population with a migrant background has risen to 26 percent, up from 17 percent in 2013.