As offices open up for employees to return to work, working parents focus shifts to safe childcare centres for their children shows ProEves survey

ProEves, India’s largest online platform that helps parents to discover and book preschool and daycare centres for kids, is leading the charge in ensuring facilities are equipped to take care of the children of working parents. With offices ramping up to open and welcome employees back on premises whether returning on a hybrid or even full-time basis, the chief concern on parents’ minds, is how to meaningfully engage their children while they are at work, without compromising on their health, safety and security.

With the Karnataka and Haryana governments approving the opening schools over November and December, ProEves has started a Safety First Certification Training programme. The training aims to build awareness amongst the preschools, creches and daycare centres to better equip their staff and facilities, before opening up the centres to welcome back kids, as office life is poised to return to normal. As part of the programme, ProEves has already trained 500 Centre Staff, and aims to support 5000 centre staff by next year. The states leading the training participation are Karnataka, Haryana, Delhi NCR and Maharashtra.

Ketika Kapoor, Co-founder and CEO of ProEves states that, “More than 50% of centres in India are gearing up to welcome small tots back to the centre by end of the year. However with Karnataka & Haryana guidelines on preschools, the reopening percentage is doubled up for state of Karnataka & Delhi-NCR and it’s been welcome move by parents.”

Table 1: Preschool/Daycare Centres Reopening Plan (800 Total,  Karnataka-150, Delhi – 180, Gurgaon – 100 )	Prevalence %
Next Year	35%  (Karnataka : 20%) (Delhi :29%)  (Gurgaon: 27%)
Nov -Dec	45% (Karnataka: 50%) (Delhi: 49%) (Gurgaon : 54%)
Already Open	20% (Karnataka: 30%) (Delhi : 22%)    (Gurgaon: 19%)

Survey : ProEves Preschool Survey, Oct 2021

Speaking further about the insights from the survey, Ketika emphasizes that almost 70% of Parents are keen to start their child’s  Preschool/Daycare support if they follow the right Covid Safety measures. This is the reason centres across India are lining up for ProEves Covid Safety first training to ensure they open up with right protocols and with their staff full trained and vaccinated.

Table 2 : Parent Preferences wrt Preschool & Daycare (800 Total,  Karnataka-150, Delhi – 180, Gurgaon – 100 )	Prevalence %
Eager to start	22% (Karnataka: 30%) (Delhi – NCR: 25%)
Happy & welcoming to centres opening up with right safety measures	46% (Karnataka: 40%) (Delhi – NCR: 44%)
Not interested till next year	32% (Karnataka : 30%) (Delhi-NCR: 31%)

Survey : ProEves Preschool Survey, Oct 2021

After the latest updates from the Karnataka Govt. & Haryana on guidelines for preschools and day-cares, ProEves has seen a surge in the number of inquiries from Karnataka & Delhi-NCR.  With almost 40% of the inquiries & bookings in last 1 week are from Karnataka parents & second to it is Delhi – NCR trending at 30% of total inquiries & bookings of parents who are eager to start preschool for their kids.