Teacher (Private Education) — Job Description & Salary in Germany

Why hiring teachers in the private education sector so often goes wrong

The most common bad hire starts before the first application even comes in: assuming that a teaching role is automatically a public-school civil-service role. It isn’t — at least not for a business recruiting with Join. Public schools hire through the regional school authority (Landesschulamt) or the state ministries of education, usually as civil servants or under the TV-L collective agreement; that process runs entirely outside SMB recruiting software. This guide covers the private education sector: independently run private schools, language schools, tutoring institutes, private nurseries, and corporate training providers hiring as employers in their own right.

The second mistake happens within the private sector itself: hiring managers treat every teaching role as the same role, when it’s actually the institution type — not the job title — that sets the qualification bar. At a state-recognised Ersatzschule, every teacher needs a teaching permit from the relevant school authority; the standard is broad equivalence to the Second State Examination, assessed case by case by that authority. At a language school or tutoring institute, legally usually an Ergänzungsschule, there’s no statutory qualification bar at all: “tutor” isn’t a protected title. Requiring a completed teaching degree for a tutoring institute filters out perfectly capable candidates for no legal reason; hiring for an Ersatzschule without checking whether the teaching permit will be approved risks a rejected application only after the contract is already signed.

What matters in both cases is practical teaching ability: a trial lesson in front of real or simulated learners shows more about classroom management and clarity in 30 to 45 minutes than any CV. Require an enhanced certificate of good conduct regardless of institution type as soon as the role involves regular contact with minors; at nurseries it’s tied to the operating licence under § 72a in conjunction with § 45 SGB VIII anyway, and at Ersatzschulen and Ergänzungsschulen the statutory requirement depends on the federal state, but it’s the right level of care either way. And because lessons sit fixed in learners’ and parents’ calendars, reliability is a harder screening criterion here than for most other roles in this collection: for most roles, Join’s organic distribution across more than 10 job boards automatically covers a broad candidate base; for teachers that does less, because qualified candidates specifically head for subject-specific channels like academics.de or the job board of the relevant private-school association.

The template on the Job description tab covers both cases: placeholders for the qualification requirement, the pay type (fixed salary or fee per unit), and the institution type can all be filled in depending on whether you’re hiring for an Ersatzschule, a language school, or a tutoring institute.