CDU on families

The CDU wants to fund daycare centers through fees paid via vouchers rather than grants, as Hamburg does. Expansion of places should be faster, including with private investors. The platform argues this removes long planning processes and complex reviews.

The CDU wants to pay for daycare in a new way. There should be daycare vouchers, like in Hamburg. New daycare places should be built faster. Private investors should help too.

The platform plans to switch daycare funding from grants to fees so that expansion follows demand. Providers that voluntarily share places or take in extra children would get more staff and material resources, and an online exchange for swapping places is planned. Company daycare centers would be supported and included in planning, and concepts would be developed with businesses for looking after single parents' children during shift work. Rooms for external family daycare would be created together with municipal housing companies. The CDU also wants to finish the state law on daycare quality and funding, implement the Bildungsplan 0-10 (education plan for ages 0 to 10), and press the federal government for permanent funds from the Gute-Kita-Gesetz (Good Daycare Act).

The CDU wants to cut the qualification period for family daycare providers from nine months to two to three months and pay trainees from the start. A central service office would take over their paperwork so they have more time for working with children.

Family daycare providers should be trained faster. Training should take only 2 to 3 months. They should be paid during training. One office should do their paperwork for them.

The training would be offered full-time and part-time and would be paid. Providers who sign a contract committing to offer places would be relieved of bureaucracy. A central service and contact point at "Pflegekinder in Bremen" (PIB) is planned to handle administrative, documentation, and billing tasks. Through modular, part-time further training, family daycare providers would be able to earn qualifications as social-pedagogical assistants or early childhood educators, including while self-employed.

The CDU wants to fix the staff shortage in daycare, which the platform says leaves more than 600 finished places unusable. To do so, it wants to make the educator profession more attractive and easier to enter.

Bremen does not have enough daycare teachers. So finished daycare places stay empty. The CDU wants to win more people for the job. Getting into the job should be easier.

The plan includes more places in the practice-integrated educator training program (PiA). Foreign teaching qualifications would be more easily recognized in full and treated as equal to German ones so those people can start working in centers sooner. Educators would be relieved of administrative tasks to spend more time with children. The platform justifies this with more than 600 built but unusable places and thousands of missing places overall, mainly in the city of Bremen.

The CDU wants the city of Bremen to send a welcome package to families with newborns on its own initiative. People who move to Bremen or Bremerhaven are also to receive a package. The party speaks of a different culture of welcome.

The CDU wants a package for every new baby in Bremen. The city sends the package to the family itself. New residents should also get a package. It contains key information and vouchers.

The newborn package is to include information on support and contact persons, a cuddly toy of the Bremen Town Musicians, and basic baby supplies. According to the platform, there is currently a package called "Willkommen in der Familie" that pediatricians hand out at the U3 checkup. Newcomers could receive an overview of key government contacts and a voucher for cultural and sports facilities.

The CDU wants to bundle benefits and advice for families and make them available digitally. In the platform's view, red tape and waiting times cost families time together.

The CDU wants families to get benefits more easily. There should be one single place for this. Applications and advice should be available online. This saves families time.

The plan is a "one-stop shop," a central point of contact for benefits and advice. The platform names Kindergeld (child benefit), birth certificates, and Elterngeld (parental allowance) as examples that should be handled fully online, from advice to application. Advisory services for families are to be expanded, improved, and all digitized.

The CDU wants to help single parents into work through education, childcare, and help with child support. The goal is for them to become independent of state income support; the platform points to low labor force participation and high child poverty in this group.

The CDU wants to help single parents. They should be able to do job training, also part-time. They should get daycare places first. Public offices should help them get child support.

The platform counts about 19,000 single parents in the state of Bremen. Vocational training and continuing education are to be possible part-time, backed by reliable and flexible childcare and priority for daycare places. Household help is to be subsidized where needed so that qualifications can be completed. Single parents are to become eligible for social housing to avoid disadvantage in the housing search. Public offices are to enforce child support claims more firmly, because according to the platform Bremen has the lowest recovery rate nationwide for advance child support payments.

The CDU wants to improve child protection and put the youth welfare office on a more stable footing in staffing and organization. This includes more case managers and official guardians, constant reachability and a shared understanding of when a child's welfare is at risk. Unaccompanied foreign minors are again to be distributed among the states under the Königsteiner Schlüssel (the national allocation formula).

The CDU wants to protect children better. The youth welfare office should get more staff. People should always be able to reach it. All offices should agree on when a child is in danger. Young refugees without parents should be spread across all German states.

The "Frühe Kindheit" (early childhood) coordination office is secured for two more years; during that time the CDU expects a report with rules for cooperation among departments. New official guardians are to be recruited before the legal cap of 50 cases is exceeded. The third and fourth batches of approved case managers are to be advertised and an onboarding system set up. Student assistants in administration are to stay until the end of 2023 instead of June 30. Emergency care capacity is to grow as needed because of extra cases following the COVID period. A concept is to settle the workload at the youth welfare office for the long term.