From "a kindergarten is hard to find" to "a child is hard to find" Parents and kindergartens have their own joys and worries

Xinwang, May 13 (Reporter Zhao Yanyue) On the morning of May 10, various districts and cities in Qingdao successively released the 2024 kindergarten enrollment work plan. Xinwang (hotline [phone]) noticed that the planned enrollment of kindergartens this year has decreased significantly compared with previous years, and the planned number of kindergartens in some kindergartens does not exceed 25 people. There are fewer children and more places, which is a good thing for parents, and kindergarten places are no longer "hard to find"; But for kindergartens, it's a matter of survival. From a national point of view, from 2022 to 2023, 14,000 kindergartens across the country will be closed, and the sudden closure of some kindergartens in Qingdao without warning is no longer an exception, among which the situation of private kindergartens is more obvious. For many private kindergartens, the precipitous decline in students has led to a decrease in income, and the rent, staff salaries, and operating costs of the park continue to increase.

There are more places, and school-age children are no longer "hard to find"

Is it difficult to choose a kindergarten for your child this year? Ms. Zhao's answer is not difficult: "In the past, when I watched my colleague's children go to kindergarten, I had to find acquaintances and relationships to grab the places in the public parks, but this year, the two public parks near us have advertised enrollment in the community, and one of them has not been fully registered." ”

"I can clearly feel that going to kindergarten is easier now than before." Ms. Wang's child is in the fourth grade of primary school this year, and the whole family was heartbroken in order to let the child go to the kindergarten at the door of the house. Today, almost every child in the community can attend a public kindergarten in the neighborhood.

Kindergarten places are no longer "hard to find", which is not only the intuitive feeling of parents, but also reflected in the gradually optimized enrollment plan. In April 2020, Shandong Province issued the "Implementation Opinions on Promoting the Development of Infant and Child Care Services for Children Under the Age of 3", which mentions "supporting kindergartens that have met the needs of local children aged 3-6 to set up childcare institutions or open nursery classes." In March this year, Qingdao released the 2024 primary and secondary school kindergarten enrollment work plan, which mentioned that in order to solve the problem of inconvenience caused by the inconvenience of pick-up and drop-off caused by children studying in different kindergartens in multi-child families, the implementation of "learning with the elderly" for multiple children in the same family at the same time in the same kindergarten.

According to the annual enrollment work plan, school-age children enter the kindergarten twice, and kindergartens that are not satisfied with the first enrollment will participate in the second enrollment. Xinwang noticed that there are about 50 kindergartens with secondary enrollment places in Shinan District from 2021 to 2023, and there are thousands of vacant places every year; The number of secondary enrollment places in kindergartens in Shibei District has increased from 2,968 places in 2020 to 6,006 places in 2023.

There are fewer children, and kindergartens are "hard to find" and even have to be closed

In the past, kindergarten places were tight, and parents' requirements were that their children could go to school nearby. Now that there are enough places, parents have more choices, and the "competition for admissions" between kindergartens is more intense - in recent years, there has been a lot of news about kindergartens closing across the country. According to the public data of the Ministry of Education, in 2023, there will be 274,400 kindergartens in the country, and a total of 40,929,800 children in preschool education. Compared with the data of 2022, the number of kindergartens in the country decreased by 14,800, and the number of children in kindergartens decreased by 5,345,700. In other words, in the past year, an average of 40 kindergartens have closed every day.

Among the closed kindergartens, private kindergartens are the first to bear the brunt. According to media reports, due to rent disputes, the Yunbo Kindergarten in Laoshan District, Qingdao was suddenly closed, leaving more than 100 children who were ready to go to school "closed". Only two days from the end of the winter vacation, Shibei District Liaoyuan Road No. 281 Froebel kindergarten parents suddenly received a kindergarten closure notice, the organizer for personal reasons without warning to terminate the park, the kindergarten said closed, more than 200 children in the new semester facing no school to go, this news caught parents off guard.

There are few children in kindergartens of appropriate age, and "a garden is hard to find" has become "a child is hard to find", and private kindergartens are now facing a lot of survival pressure.

"I want to recruit six classes, but now I haven't even recruited three classes, and there are three more teachers." Ms. Li is a teacher in a Puhui private kindergarten in Qingdao and has been in the industry for ten years, but what she didn't expect was that one day she would be distressed about recruiting students.

"The most popular time is in 2020, the two-child policy is liberalized, the birth rate is high, there are many children, and there are not many supporting kindergartens in the community, and there is a great demand for kindergartens. In this context, the whole industry is developing rapidly, and at that time, many kindergartens did not have to work hard in terms of enrollment, and the school opened in March and September every year, and the places were filled almost a year ago. Mr. Liu runs a private kindergarten, in the past two years his most intuitive feeling is that the source of students has fallen off a cliff, this year plans to recruit 120 children into the kindergarten, and now 36 are enrolled, and the park rent, staff salaries, and operating costs have made him more stressed.

For many parents, private kindergartens have always played the role of "spare tire". In the past, because of the limited enrollment quota of public kindergartens, I couldn't get into it if I wanted to, so I could only go to private kindergartens. In the past two years, more and more private kindergartens have closed down, and there are fewer children, and the places in public parks are not tight, teachers are stable, and the cost of teaching is low, so naturally everyone is more willing to choose public parks.

There is a lot of pressure to run a kindergarten, and only by finding the characteristics can we go on

Some people believe that private kindergartens have experienced "savage growth" after ushered in the "shutdown tide", the reason, both the reasons for the fierce market competition and the impact of policy orientation, as well as the low birth rate of newborn babies caused by the objective situation of insufficient enrollment rate, the squeeze in many aspects makes private kindergartens face the pressure of survival.

There are fewer children and more places in high-standard public kindergartens, and private kindergartens will inevitably have a sense of crisis. Some of the higher fees of private kindergartens are also relatively high, rent, teachers' salaries, education fees, etc. are all mountains on them, especially some for-profit private kindergartens in this difficult situation can only be responsible for their own profits and losses.

"Kindergarten enrollment may be more difficult in September this year, and the number of students in kindergarten will be reduced by a large part after the graduation of kindergarten children and the enrollment of new students." Mr. Liu told the letter network that there may be kindergartens that continue to close down this year, in order to operate normally and not be eliminated by the market, he is also working hard to learn and improve, and find the characteristic advantages of running a school.

Some people in the industry believe that under the multiple squeeze, a large number of private kindergartens are closed, and the future kindergarten will be dominated by public kindergartens, which reflects the development trend of kindergarten education to a certain extent, but this does not mean that private kindergartens have no room for survival. On the contrary, private kindergartens have unique advantages in providing diversified and personalized education services, and as long as they continue to innovate and develop, they can still find their own market positioning.