Why 70 preschools close in Singapore every year… and how parents saved ours
Wonder Yard Schoolhouse was recently featured in The Straits Times’ report on why so many preschools in Singapore are closing. A national article can only hold so much, so here is the fuller conversation from us: what we told the reporter and also what we’ve learnt from saving the school and in our first months as accidental preschool owners.
You can read the original Straits Times article here.
A snippet from The Straits Times Article published on 15 August 2026 about what is driving the large number of preschool closures in Singapore.
We are parents first
We never in a million years planned to run a preschool. We were customers, the same normal parents doing drop-off and pickups just like everyone else. This was until the previous operator announced in November 2025 that our children’s school would close down.
Losing the school was a complete shock. So we rallied fellow parents, and somehow, we managed to keep the doors open. On 1 April this year, we officially took over the center. It has been a learn-as -we-go journey from customer to accidental business owner ever since.
Wonder Yard Schoolhouse (at the time of writing) now has 23 children enrolled, with 5 more starting within the year. We are small both by design and circumstance.
What we saw when we stepped behind the curtain
Coming into this as parents, the thing that struck us was how brutal the economics of running a small independent preschool actually is. Within a few months, we understood how extremely fortunate we were to have saved our school at all.
The Straits Times reports that around 70 preschools closed each year from 2023 to 2025. From the inside, that number stopped being abstract very quickly.
When our school’s closure was first announced, families were recommended another private preschool nearby. But before any of our children could even start there that school announced its closure too.
In the last few months, we have interviewed more than 100 teachers, expecting to find candidates from a range of backgrounds. What shocked us was an obvious pattern: more than half of the teaching candidates we interviewed were coming from private preschools that were shutting down or already shut down. That’s not even including our interviews fro non-teaching staff, where it was closer to 80%. Interview after interview, we heard versions of the same story.
Of the 100+ interviews, about 20% were principals or center leaders looking for jobs. Half of these educators were even willing to step down from leadership back into teaching roles. We are still receiving multiple enquiries about leadership positions every week, though we have filled all our vacancies.
Almost every candidate we interviewed already knew our story before they walked in. Many told us they'd been cheering us on. The challenges of this industry, it turns out, made all of us fast friends — teachers and parents alike, drawn together by the same fight to keep non-traditional education alive in Singapore.
As the Wonder Yard story spread, teachers and parents from across Singapore reached out to us. Some asked for advice on saving their own schools. Others simply wrote in solidarity. It is telling that “how do I save my child’s preschool” is a question enough people are asking to find us.
One centre leader reached out to us directly, not for herself, but with a recommendation for one of her long-time teachers. Her own school was closing, and she was trying to find a good and suitable place for this teacher before it did. We are endlessly thankful that her recommendation brought us one wonderful educator who has become an invaluable part of our team. But it's hard not to wonder how many teachers weren't so lucky, how many good ones the industry simply lost.
The maths that shuts families out before they enquire
Our fees are $1655 a month. We have kept them as low as we possibly can, because we genuinely believe that play-based education should be accessible to as many families as possible. We even deregistered from GST, against our accountant’s advice, when we took over, purely to lower the cost to families.
But a government supported preschool can cost families over $1000 less each month. That gap alone shuts out a huge segment of local families before they even enquire. This expectation is set by the price, and no amount of quality or philosophy can overcome this first filter. Local families at Wonder Yard do receive Working Mother’s and Additional subsidies, since we are ECDA-registered. This does help to narrow the gap, but the difference is still significant.
This is the quiet squeeze on every small independent preschool in Singapore: the families who love what you do often cannot get past the first number they see $$$.
A community of families who come… and go
We are very fortunate to be strategically situated near three large international schools, and our philosophy resonates strongly with foreign families. It has created a genuinely diverse, dynamic and warm community.
It is also an enrollment challenge that no amount of quality can solve. Expat families are transient. It is August now, the time of the summer holidays for international schools. This is also the end of their academic year, and we have had a number of withdrawals due to relocation. New foreign and local families are enquiringly and enrolling, but this is a variable outside our control, and it is one reason our overall numbers haven’t increased dramatically despite all the media coverage we’ve gotten.
Enrollment also moves slowly in the preschool industry. Unlike most other services, we cannot bill monthly fees upon confirmation. Families commonly register far ahead of their start date. We already have interested and enrolled families for 2027 and even 2028. That is wonderful for planning… and also does nothing for this month’s rent or payroll.
Why we still insist on 2 teachers per class
Government-supported centers can offer teachers better packages than we can. Strangely, that has been a double-edged sword in our favour: the teachers who choose Wonder Yard are the ones who truly believe in play-based pedagogy and the deeper relationships that low teacher-child ratios make possible.
What shocked us as parents entering this industry is how low preschool teacher wages are across the board. We believe our teachers deserve fair pay. But fair pay, plus rent, materials and monthly overheads, means every single enrollment counts — and once we hit an enrollment ceiling, we need more staff, which pushes costs up again.
We also insist on one Chinese teacher and one English teacher per class, because genuine bilingual immersion cannot be done with a visiting language teacher and a flashcard deck. It is not great for our costs, but it is non-negotiable for our children.
Featuring our handmade outdoor mud kitchen buffet table
Families often come together to join in activities
Running a business like a non-profit
Because this began as a passion project to save a school, we have more or less accepted our fate to run Wonder Yard Schoolhouse like a non-profit. Honestly, it is so liberating because it means we can prioritize teacher quality and children’s learning experience over margins.
It also means we are extremely hands-on in all we do. We are at the school most weekends and after hours, upgrading things with our own (and our husbands’) two hands. We drove to tree yards to source logs and stumps for the garden. We built mud kitchens from marine wood, completely from scratch. We renovated the front room with the help of our community. A play workshop and children’s gym room conversion are next on our list. We are so lucky to have very handy, supportive husbands, and a community that keeps showing up.
It also means we have to be creative in our realizing all our dreams for the program and premises. We spend late nights scouring the web and second-hand platforms for good deals on YOTO players, open-ended toys and good quality furniture for Wonder Yard. We'd rather our budget go to teacher support and children's experiences than to a preschool admin platform that costs thousands a month, for what a few extra hours in Excel can do. The title of “co-founder’ sounds nice, but none of this is glamorous. When the budget is small, every line item is a statement of what you believe in, and ours reads: teachers and children.
Why we’re telling you this
Preschools usually market certainty with their gleaming facilities, polished programmes and looking like everything is completely under control (at least more under control than when our kids are at home). As parents, we think families deserve the honesty instead.
The truth is that small independent preschools in Singapore, ones with real grass, real ratios and teachers who truly know your child, survive one enrollment at a time. Behind the 70 closures a year, are educators and communities exactly like ours who ran out of road.
We got lucky. We had a community willing to fight for the school, amazing teachers who supported our initiative and our children, a kind landlord who continues to support our cause when he could have sold the property for millions, and certainly a personal privilege that allows us to even make this decision to buy a school. We do not take any of it for granted, and we intend to spend that luck building something worth fighting for: a place where children get to be unhurried, full of wonder, and stay little, for just a little longer.
Wonder Yard Schoolhouse is a parent-owned, play-based, bilingual preschool at 22 Li Hwan View, between Serangoon Gardens and Lorong Chuan, building on a 17-year heritage of early childhood education on this site. We are ECDA-registered, and eligible families receive Working Mother's and additional subsidies.If our story resonates — or if you're a parent or teacher trying to save your own school — we'd love to hear from you. And if you'd like to see what an unhurried childhood looks like, book a tour on WhatsApp.