Preschool provision and children of migrants in Beijing

Chinese children with an urban household registration (hukou) normally attend subsidized preschools for three years prior to primary school. This is an experience available to relatively few of China's many millions of migrant children whose families are registered as rural residents but choose to migrate to urban areas. This paper presents research, in the form of a case study, which examined an informal playgroup for rural-registered migrant children whose parents worked in a Beijing market. The playgroup was established by volunteers to provide an affordable, though limited, alternative preschool experience for migrant children. The original programme was derived from community concepts that initially underpinned the “Sure Start” intervention in the United Kingdom. In the paper, survey data is utilized to determine if an informal playgroup can be a positive alternative in a context where migrant children have little capacity to access the preschool programmes available to their urban counterparts.