People are not only in our business focus: Hays gives 120 schoolbags to socially disadvantaged first-year pupils

Together with the German Children's Fund, a total of 120 schoolbags were distributed to first-year pupils in Mannheim. The aim is to provide targeted educational help as more and more children are becoming educationally disadvantaged because of their social background. Our employees decided in favour of this project as part of a company voting. The schoolbags are filled with pencil cases, coloured pencils and a gym bag. The handover to children from all over Mannheim took place on Friday, 15 June 2018, in the Protestant day-care centre on Hafenstraße.

In one of the richest industrial nations of the world, social security and educational equality for children and young people should be normal. The reality, however, has been a different one for many years. In Germany, every fifth child is affected by poverty and, in many cases, it is the parents' financial situation that determines the educational opportunities of children.

"It is important to us that all those people who are disadvantaged in their educational path for various reasons receive equal, good education," emphasises Markus Auer, member of the management board of Hays AG. "With 120 filled schoolbags, we are not only equipping the children for a start into an equal future – we also partly relieve the parents from the costs related to the start of school.”

So far, around 18,000 schoolbags (worth almost EUR 3 million) have been distributed to children throughout Germany due to the annual school bag campaign of the German Children's Fund.