Education begins at home, long before your child attends school formally. However, formal schooling certainly has its place in your young child’s development, and many parents like the idea of starting that step in their child’s educational journey as early as possible.
However, different countries and areas have different laws and regulations regarding preschool, daycare, nursery school, and more. For an expatriate family, understanding these regulations can save you a lot of time and hassle when deciding whether and where to enroll your child in pre-primary schooling.
If you are curious about Indian nursery admission, here’s what you need to know:
How Early is Too Early?
In most parts of the world, formal schooling begins around age five or six. At this time, children attend their first year of primary school. In many countries, one year of kindergarten is added to this, bringing the minimum age for formal schooling down to just four or five years.
There are regulations set up in these areas to ensure that children who are too young or not mentally and emotionally prepared for school do not attend and potentially fall behind. For example, some areas may require students to have a birthday that falls within three months of the start of the school year and brings them to the minimum age within that time. Otherwise, that student will have to wait until the following year to begin their schooling.
However, many areas do not have these rules and regulations in place. As such, children have long been free to attend preschool, nursery school, and even kindergarten programs with no minimum age requirement. While this has some obvious advantages for both students and parents – such as providing safe, reliable supervision and care for children and giving them an early academic advantage – it can also have some drawbacks.
These drawbacks include thrusting very young children into situations that they are not prepared to navigate. A child who is only two years old is not very likely to be able to attend a full day of class, let alone retain any of what is taught during that time. These children may not even be able to perform basic self-care tasks or communicate effectively, making attending school with older, more independent, and emotionally mature peers frustrating.
The Indian Nursery School Minimum Age Mandate
The potential developmental drawbacks mentioned previously are just some of the reasons why the Indian government decided to issue a mandate regarding the minimum age for preschool and nursery school admissions. That mandate went into effect in 2015 and states that children younger than three years of age at the beginning of the academic period or year are not eligible for formal education such as preschool or nursery school. They are still permitted to attend daycare programs, which they may receive whatever instruction or education that staff members see as appropriate. However, very young children are no longer permitted to attend public or private schools – including international schools – until at least three years of age.
This came as a shock to many Indian and expatriate families who had already signed their young children up for preschool or nursery school programs to begin in 2015. The mandate did not permit children younger than three years of age to attend any kind of formal schooling, regardless of existing enrollment or the fact that parents may have already paid enrollment fees. What’s more, the mandate went into effect very quickly, giving parents little time to make new plans if they have already begun preparing for their child’s first formal school year.
Thankfully, parents have since had time to adjust. Local and expatriate families alike no know that when it comes to starting school in India, a classroom education will simply have to wait until after the third birthday.
