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Hanover (dpa / lni) - In Lower Saxony there are no longer enough applicants who want to do a voluntary social year.
Church volunteer service providers have had problems filling their positions in the past year.
Caritas was only able to find applicants for around two thirds of its approximately 1200 jobs in the federal voluntary service or in the social year; it did not look much better at the Diakonie.
A spokeswoman for Caritas said that there were fewer applicants to choose from because of the smaller high school graduation class in 2020.
Due to the return to the Abitur after 13 years, according to the Lower Saxony Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, only just under 10,000 pupils nationwide passed the Abi exams in 2020.
A year earlier it was more than three times as many, around 32,000 graduates.
According to Caritas, high school graduates make up a high proportion of applicants for voluntary services.
Due to the corona pandemic, many volunteers had to be deployed in other areas at short notice.
Applicants for positions where you work together in a confined space, such as youth care or assisted living, were placed in other jobs.
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The corona pandemic and the smaller Abitur class were also the biggest challenges for the Diakonie when filling volunteer positions.
Compared to the previous year, around ten percent fewer positions were filled in 2020, said a diakonia spokesman.
The number of applicants fell sharply in April, but had recovered over the summer and leveled off at the previous year's level.
The average age of applicants for a voluntary service position has not changed since the Corona crisis.
Both at Diakonie and Caritas, the majority of applicants are, as in previous years, younger than 27 years.
Ministry of Culture on the number of high school graduates in 2020