Childcare in Upper Austria: Where is the improvement offensive?

Childcare in Upper Austria: Where is the improvement offensive?

Volksgartenstraße 40, 4020 Linz, Österreich - Childcare in Upper Austria faces major challenges. Analyzes of the Chamber of Labor show an inadequate offer for working parents. According to the IFES survey from the order of the Chamber of Labor, the situation in crawling rooms, kindergartens and hoarding has hardly improved compared to the previous year, especially in rural areas. There is only moderate progress in the availability of full-time care offers for the little ones, whereby only 6.4 % of the 438 municipalities offer high quality care for under-three-year-olds. This number remained almost unchanged, which is alarming for many parents.

growing gaps in childcare offers

The current situation shows that just 22.2 % of the Upper Austrian communities provide an excellent range of care for elementary school children. The decline in the 1A communities for three to six year olds, which has dropped from 106 to 97, is particularly worrying. In the Linz-Land district there are at least 52.2 % of the municipalities with first-class care in this age group. But in the districts of Ried and Rohrbach, the numbers are alarming low; There were no 1A communities at all with the Under-Drei-year-olds.

At a press conference on December 11, 2024 in the Linz Chamber of Labor, AK President Andreas Stangl and Erika Rippatha will present the results of the new childcare atlas and explain that there is a massive catch-up requirement in the care. The state of Upper Austria has set itself the goal of becoming "the children's country number 1", but as ooe. The need to create suitable childcare offers that enable parents to do full -time work is more urgent than ever. The results of the childcare atlas are intended to serve as the basis for measures that make quality and comprehensive childcare possible.