Waiting Slots in Nursery School

Shinzo Abe administration decides to delay the date of eliminating children who are waiting for entering nursery school to the end of FY 2020. While Abe has promised to do that by the end of FY 2017, enough room for those children has not found. Working mothers are suffering from scarcity of facility to leave their kids in daytime. Abe’s political agenda of mobilizing all the people including woman workforce still has a long way to go.

Abe administration made Waiting Children Elimination Acceleration Plan in 2013, which upheld a goal of eliminating children waiting for entering nursery school by increasing 400,000 slots for them. Asahi Shimbun found in its own survey that 14,481 children in 79 cities in Japan were waiting for entering nursery school at the beginning of this April. Setagaya District of Tokyo Metropolitan Prefecture marked the biggest number of such kids, 861, followed by 849 of Okayama City and 617 of Meguro District of Tokyo. Setagaya maintained the top for four consecutive years.

That number does not include “hidden waiters.” Waiting children are who cannot enter nursery school in spite of their request. But, they do not include children who have specific preference on the school to enter, have entered school without governmental license, whose mother or father is in childcare leave or has stopped job search. With those hidden waiters, the number of waiting children is swollen to 43,357.

Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare is redefining waiting children to include some whose mother or father is in childcare leave with a hope of returning to the job. Children with specific preference on the school are still excluded. But, there are a number of parents who prefer nursery school located along the way to their office or have another kids in different school. Redefinition is not the final answer.

Abe administration is making new plan for eliminating those waiters. With a hypothesis that the ratio of working woman in the age between 25 and 44 will increase from 72.7% in 2016 to 80% in mid-2020s, MHLW is going to find enough room to meet the greater demands. It considers introducing new system in which specialists of childcare can care those children in their own home.

The demand for nursery school is increasing faster than expected. With limited growth of salary, more families need double-income, leaving their children in daytime. Number of childcare experts is always in short. But, national government has been reluctant to redistribute the population from big cities to local cities where ample room for kids is. National policy is always focused on Tokyo or some urban area, leaving local community behind.