Over 5,200 private Chinese kindergartens went out of business in 2020
- Experts and business owners blame a mix of the Covid-19 pandemic and China’s plummeting birth rate
- The country has also tried to make preschools more public, to mixed results
Wang Ying, who operated a kindergarten in Shandong province in eastern China since 2009, had to close it in March 2021 after failing to enrol enough students.
“When there were reports of a local outbreak of the coronavirus and lockdowns were implemented, the young kids were always the last to return to school. So kindergartens became one of the most vulnerable sectors in the pandemic,” she said.
When she started the school, she enroled more than 100 kids per year, but by early 2021 the numbers dropped below 50, she said.
To make matters worse, the rent for her over 200-square metre property soared from less than 6,000 yuan (US$928) per year to 120,000 yuan (US$18,570) annually.
Wang said a lack of students forced at least four other private kindergartens in her county to shut down since the pandemic first broke out in Wuhan in December 2019.
Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the National Institute of Education, said the falling number of newborns in recent years might have contributed to the shrinking of the preschool education sector.
One statistic supports this notion: the percentage of families that can afford to send their children to kindergartens rose to 85 per cent last year, but the number of newly admitted kindergarteners per year has fallen from 20 million pupils in 2015 to 17.9 million in 2020.
The enrolment slowdown came amid a severe decrease in births in China in recent years. Chinese mothers gave birth to 12 million babies last year, the lowest number since the country was in the grips of its Great Famine, which ended 60 years ago.
One other factor in the drop in private education is a push from the central government for more affordable, inclusive, preschool education, which began in 2018.
The ratio of private kindergartens to all kindergartens dropped from nearly 70 per cent in 2011 to 57 per cent in 2020.
In 2019, the State Council, China’s top administrative body, announced that all kindergartens located inside residential communities must be publicly owned or charge fees according to government-guided prices.
Chu said that recent shifts in the industry meant parents are generally paying less for tuition but that the quality of education has also dipped.
“We’ve seen a drop in the quality of the industry in general, as traditionally private ones provide better services and have more activities for the kids,” he said.