What if your child is refused to enter a licensed kindergarten?

When you are notified of acceptance of rejection

Generally, refusal notice or acceptance notice is sent to your pace in April right before all kindergartens and nursery schools start accepting children. At the earliest, you’re noticed in the beginning of February or March.

There is a few difference on notification season depending on the municipality. If you receive a refusal notice from your applied kindergarten, you are automatically added on child waiting list so you have to consider counter-measure for this as soon as possible because you don’t have any spare time to hesitate what you should decide and do. Otherwise, you end up postponing returning back to your work for you child to look for another kindergarten.

Keep it in mind that if you receive refusal notice, you only have about 1 month left to look for the next nursery facility to leave your child if you want to meet the simultaneity entrance of a kindergarten on April.

It is quite better to put your effort to also find non-licensed kindergarten simultaneously before refusal notice is sent to you place.

What if you receive a refusal notice without preparation for finding the next kindergarten?

What you should do is…

• Start looking for the next nursery facility to have your child accepted
• Offer postponement of your reinstatement to a company you work for (you can extend maternity leave by the law until your child becomes 1 and half years old)
• Pay attention if there is secondary look-for-children ads notified by a licensed kindergarten or nursery school which is located within the range of your possible commute

In case you are added on child waiting lists, if requesting kindergarten or nursery school and its class become vacant and screening meeting is held after May
, your child become subject for it .

You could have a chance for admission even in the middle of year

A licensed kindergarten originally accepts children from the first day of the next month if you apply until the middle of the previous month. However, a municipality that has many children hardly accept additional children on a month other than April that has promotion and graduation of children.

There seem to be misunderstanding that a chance for admission is once a year but actually, some of admitted applicants have cases to cancel admission and transfer to another kindergarten with reasons of transference of father, and house-moving etc… so if you wait patiently, your turn comes.

While you wait for vacant notice from a kindergarten, you can look after your child all day long in your house after applying for postponement of your reinstatement to your company but you should leave your child to non-licensed kindergarten or day care center to use waiting time effectively because leaving child to those places connects to raising your priority to admission among children on waiting lists and shortening the distance to admission as a result.

You can refer to this page, that explains nursery admission points system.

While you leave your child to non-licensed kindergarten, when you receive a notice that your child passes screening for additional admission from a municipal offie, you may be asked if you will withdraw your decision to enter a licensed kindergarten. In this case, if you want to transfer to a licensed kindergarten, you must not turn it down. Don’t miss the opportunity.

What is it right timing to apply for a non-licensed kindergarten?

According to the survey by the association of parents considering nursery schools, households that can leave children in nursery facilities are 60 to 70 percent of all the households that apply for licensed kindergartens in Metropolitan area, Tokyo.

In the region where admission to licensed kindergartens is highly selective, it is too late to look for non-licensed kindergarten after you receive refusal notice. Ideally, you have to apply for admission of non-licensed kindergarten such as authentication nursery school supported by a municipality before applying for admission of a licensed kindergarten.

Even if you get a late start to look for a non-licensed kindergarten, don’t give up and keep on trying until you find one. If you find one that meets your condition, you apply for admission without a moment’s delay.

Non-licensed nursery school or kindergarten’s screening process and application fee

Authentication nursery schools basically adopt first-come-first-admit policy but some of them have unique screening standard for admission.

There is a case some authentication nursery schools may bargain with you by taking advantage of your weak point as a negotiating tool, which is like “if you show us a favor without applying for admission of a licensed kindergarten, we can give full facilitate to you as your child can enter our nursery school very soon” or “please pay reservation fee for admission. If you receive acceptance notice from a licensed kindergarten, we will not refund this money. ”

Such a nursery facilities supported by government that confront applicants with these conditions needs to be questioned the propriety of its policy.

However, from the position that you are looking for a place to leave a child in, you need to decide swiftly what to do by considering the possibility of admission to a licensed kindergarten. If you only have little hope of admission to a licensed kindergarten, you’d better to decide to make your child enter a non-licensed kindergarten temporarily and focus on earning admission points there and challenge application for admission to a licensed kindergarten again. This is one of you choices.

However, you just inspect the quality of nursery service for yourself beforehand. Even licensed kindergartens present an infinite variety. Only your clairvoyance against nursery qualities guarantees to find a good nursery school or a kindergarten.

Don’t give up

Many of applicants who hope to make a child enter a licensed kindergarten reserve vacancy at the same time considering when they receive refusal notice in a region where there are a lot of children listed on child waiting list.

Those people intend to withdraw the admission of non-licensed kindergarten if accepted by a licensed one. Some of them do duplicate application to non-licensed kindergartens also considering when receive refusal notice from even first applied non-licensed kindergarten as a safety measure. Applying 3 to 4 non-licensed kindergartens is quite normal to insure admission against refusal especially in Tokyo.

Then you happen to receive acceptance notice from one of your applied nursery schools or kindergartens. If you are a foreigner, things are not straightforward and not dealt with by ordinary means but don’t give up and keep on trying.