(Yicai) March 1 -- The number of students attending kindergartens in China declined for the third year in a row last year, according to the latest official data.

Some 40.9 million children were registered for preschool education in China last year, down 5.3 million or 11.6 percent from the year before, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a bulletin yesterday, citing data from the Ministry of Education.

The peak of China’s preschool education was reached in 2020, as after a 17-year continuous growth, the number of children enrolled in kindergartens hit 48.2 million. The figure then started dropping in 2020, mainly because of the decline in newborns. Only 12 million babies were born in the country in 2020, down nearly 30 percent from 2016, when the second-child policy was introduced.

Since the beginning of last year, many kindergartens have shut down in lower-tier cities, mainly because of the lower number of students and the population trend of migrating to larger cities, which resulted in adjustments to education resources.

Many local governments issued new measures last year to improve the allocation of education resources, given the population changes.

For example, Hunan province announced at the end of last year that new government-funded kindergartens should be built, and existing ones should be renovated in areas where the population has risen. Moreover, kindergartens built near new residential communities should be government-run, and no more such schools should be built in rural areas.

Editors: Liao Shumin, Futura Costaglione