Kindergartens sign up for online application system built by parents

Fed up with the scramble for kindergarten places, two parents are setting up their own online application system in an effort to streamline the process.

The idea came to Dr Zheng Yanfeng and May Law Wai-ying in January last year after they spent hours queuing for application forms for their children.

"First I had to line up to get the forms, then I had to do it again to submit them for my three-year-old daughter," said Law, a mother of two girls. "But on top of that, for each application I had to fill out several forms that were pretty much identical. It's very time-consuming."

Huge queues formed at kindergartens in the New Territories last year as an influx of Hong Kong-born children living on the mainland saw parents rush to apply for places. The Education Bureau has imposed several measures to prevent a similar crush in future, including ordering kindergartens to make application forms available online.

But the friends have their own ideas for overcoming the squeeze on places. They plan to launch the website, the Kindergarten Admission Service, in May. Parents will be able to create an account for their children and need only fill in one application form, which will be used for all kindergartens that sign up to take applications via the service.

Every preschool in five districts - Kowloon City, Sha Tin, Central and Western, North and Yuen Long - was approached about signing up, and some 40 agreed to use the online system for the academic year starting next year, for which the intake process starts this year.