What is a Play School?
A preschool or a play school primarily caters to children aged between 2-4 years.
Play schools offer a combination of learning and playing to extremely young children and help them develop social skills and learning abilities.
There has been a supreme build-up about early childhood education.
In terms of education, dividing this phase of a child’s life into different segments, we have,
1) Preschool – Age 2 year + – 3.5 years (Pre-Pre Primary)
2) Post School – 3 years – 5 years (Nursery, Pre Primary 1, Pre Primary 2)
As soon as the student or the child reaches 5 years of age, he/she shall be taking admission to Class 1(Higher Education).
There are currently approximately 15-20 players (nationwide) in this business. Shemrock and Bachpan are two of them.
Other than this there are several homegrown brands.
Reason Why Playschool Business Has Bloomed
Education sector is an extremely budding sector for investments in the present day. Our generation comprises parents who take the education and development of their children very seriously.
Therefore, efficient playschools are extremely rising in demand.
In fact, almost every locality in a metropolitan city houses a play school.
- Low Investment – A Play School franchise is obtainable for a budget between 5 – 10 Lacs. Therefore, with a small investment, this business can take off.
- Low expertise (Manpower requirement) – No degrees like a Bachelor’s in Education or a Master’s in any subject are required to teach in a Play School.
- The minimum requirements are easily obtainable degrees without the need to clear any competitive exam. Therefore, many people consider joining the staff of a play school in India.
- Revenue– In India, a huge percentage of parents spend without hesitation on the education of their children. Therefore, an efficient playschool will attract a lot of admissions.
How to get started
A person can either start his/her own play school or take a franchise of a prevalent playschool brand, like Grow Inn Steps, Kidzee, EuroKids or Bachpan.
The parent company will set the required guidelines for setting up and running the school.
If the person wants to start his/her own playschool, they will need to manage everything themselves.
The person needs to take care of the marketing, branding and designing of the curriculum.
Hurdles in this Playschool Business
As a play school business, these are the problems one faces in this field –
1. Low Shelf-life of the customer – The customer i.e. the student here completes his education and leaves after 1-2 years’ time to schools offering higher education. Therefore, playschools require a very tiring and expensive approach to keep generating leads for new admissions.
2. Low barrier for competition – Being a small set-up, there are many investors who look to start off another playschool with the same model if one establishment succeeds in generating a successful venture. This can lead to undercutting.
3. Low Scalability – Most of these playschool establishments work out of rented buildings, flats and apartments making it problematic for the business owner to scale up operations beyond a certain strength.
