18 Preschools Closed This Term. The Ones Closing Aren't the Bad Ones.

Eighteen preschools have closed this term. Thirty more are expected to close or cut staff in 2025. When you read that in the news, your instinct is probably to assume that what closed was the deadwood — the poorly run schools, the ones with the under-qualified teachers, the ones that parents never really rated.

Your instinct is wrong.

I spent twelve years on the admissions side of a Band 1 kindergarten. I know this sector well enough to tell you what is actually happening, and it is considerably more uncomfortable than "bad schools closing."

The Economics Have Nothing to Do With Quality

Kindergartens in Hong Kong operate under a voucher system. Government subsidy comes in the form of per-student vouchers. When enrolment falls — which it is falling, everywhere, because Hong Kong's birth rate hit a record low in 2022 and those cohorts are now arriving at kindergarten age — the money that kept a school viable disappears proportionally.

A kindergarten that ran three K1 classes can sustain its fixed costs: rent, principal's salary, maintenance, insurance. A kindergarten running two K1 classes cannot always sustain those same fixed costs, particularly in older districts where the building is leased rather than owned and the landlord is not inclined toward sympathy.

The schools closing are disproportionately in older, lower-income districts: parts of Kowloon City, Sham Shui Po, parts of Yau Ma Tei. These are not the districts where the middle-class families who read parenting articles live. The schools that are closing are, in many cases, the schools that have served those communities for twenty, thirty, forty years. Some of them were excellent. They are closing because their neighbourhood is losing young families, not because they failed their children.

I have seen school closures from the inside. The day a school announces it is not continuing is not a day when the staff are relieved that the mediocrity is ending. It is a day of genuine grief. The principals and teachers in these institutions often knew their families across generations. That is not the profile of a failed institution.

The Ones Not Closing Are Not Necessarily Better

This is the uncomfortable corollary that I am going to state plainly: the schools surviving this wave are not surviving because they are better schools. They are surviving because they are in the right postcode.

Schools in Taikoo Shing, Happy Valley, Kowloon Tong, Discovery Bay — schools in areas with younger, wealthier, more stable residential populations — are not facing the same pressure. Their enrolment is holding because their surrounding community is holding. Their voucher income is stable. Their landlords are manageable. They will still be operating in five years.

The reputation economy of Hong Kong kindergartens has always been distorted by postcode. The "top" kindergartens — the ones families spend months preparing their children for, the ones where the interview coaching industry thrives — are overwhelmingly in wealthy districts. This was always partially a function of location signalling, not purely programme quality. The current wave makes this clearer than it has ever been. Schools are surviving or closing based on demographic geography, not educational merit.

I am not saying the Band 1 schools in Kowloon Tong are bad. Some of them are genuinely excellent. I am saying that the metric you are using when you evaluate a school by its survival is neighbourhood economics, not educational quality.

What This Means If You Are Currently Applying

There is one piece of genuinely good news buried in this demographic picture, and it is the one I never expected to be writing: K1 admissions is becoming slightly less frenzied in some areas.

Slightly. I want to be precise.

The total pool of K1-age children is shrinking. This means that in some districts, the competition for a limited number of places has softened. Not dramatically — the top Band 1 schools in high-demand areas still receive far more applications than they have places. The market at the very top remains as intense as ever, because wealthy families with educational ambitions have not disappeared; they have simply become a larger proportion of a smaller total population.

But below that top tier, in the middle segment of the market, there is genuine easing. Schools that were turning away fifty percent of applicants three years ago are, in some cases, offering places more readily. This is useful information if you are a family who is applying to a reasonable school in a non-premium district and has been bracing for rejection.

It is also worth understanding that a school with lower than expected enrolment this year is not necessarily in trouble. A single smaller cohort does not create a crisis. A pattern across three consecutive years does. Schools are well aware of their own enrolment trajectories, and most of them are managing this carefully rather than in freefall.

The Question You Should Actually Be Asking

When a kindergarten closes and parents ask me what went wrong, the question is usually framed as "was it always bad?" I want to redirect that question entirely.

The question you should be asking about any kindergarten — open or at risk — is not "will it still exist in three years?" The question is "what is actually happening inside this classroom?"

I have visited many kindergartens over twelve years that were financially secure and educationally mediocre. I have visited kindergartens in financially pressured situations that were doing genuinely remarkable work with children. The two variables are related only by coincidence.

When you visit a school that is smaller, in a less fashionable district, with slightly lower fees than the places your friends are applying to, do not rule it out because the building is older. Watch what the teacher does when a child is frustrated. Notice whether the children look absorbed or performative. Ask what the daily outdoor time looks like, because the research on early childhood development is unambiguous: unstructured outdoor play in the three-to-five age range matters more for long-term development than almost any curriculum choice.

The closure wave will continue for at least another three years. The schools that survive it will include excellent ones and mediocre ones. The schools that close will include mediocre ones and excellent ones. The filter is demographic, not educational.

Your child's K1 experience is determined by what happens in their specific classroom, with their specific teacher, in the hours they spend there. That assessment requires a visit, not a survival statistic.

One More Thing I Will Say Directly

Some families are using the closure anxiety as a reason to double down on elite school applications — applying only to the schools with the longest waitlists and the most famous names, on the theory that these are the "safe" choices.

I watched this logic operate for years from the admissions side, and I want to name it clearly: the safest choice for your three-year-old is the school where they are genuinely happy, genuinely engaged, and genuinely known by their teachers. That school may or may not be the one with the longest waitlist.

The demographic wave will sort out the institutions. Your job is to find the right room for your specific child.