By Kathy Ligon, Founder & CEO, HINGE Early Education Advisors
Demand has not left early childhood education. Families are calling, booking tours, and asking good questions about programs. In most markets, the inquiries are there. What has changed is the path from an inquiry to a signed enrollment agreement — that stretch has grown longer, and fewer families reach the end of it.
Enrollment is the operational pain point owners raise before any other, and I hear it at conferences, in peer groups, and in nearly every conversation I have with operators across the country. The ECE industry is talking about this openly now. Owners who assumed the problem was theirs alone are finding out otherwise, and that frees them to compare notes instead of guessing.
That path is one owners control. The schools holding their occupancy are not working from an advantage the rest of the industry lacks — they are running a specific set of practices well, and every one of them can be learned.
Kathy Ligon has dedicated her 40+ year career in the industry to helping early learning providers thrive.
How We Got Here
The instincts most owners rely on were built in a market that no longer exists. Tracing how the ground moved explains why familiar approaches stopped filling classrooms the way they used to. The last six years explain most of it:
Pre-COVID: Conditions were about as good as they get. Demand was strong, costs were predictable, and a school that ran well stayed full.
2020 to 2021: Staffing costs climbed 30 to 50%. Tuition rose 8 to 12% annually. Discounts, other than for staff, disappeared because there was no room left to offer them.
2022 to 2023: Infant and toddler demand held even as birth rates fell. Schools right-sized infant tuition, grant funding ended, behavioral challenges in classrooms grew, and insurance costs climbed alongside them.
January 2024: Parents pushed back on rate increases, though the labor market steadied around the same time.
Fall 2025 to Fall 2026: Enrollment volatility and margin compression. Seats fill and empty in ways that are hard to predict, and there is less cushion when they do.
Each of these shifts landed on top of the last, and owning a school is a more complex business for it. The operators finding opportunity in these conditions are the ones who built a strong inquiry-to-enrollment process and who manage it as part of the business.
Start With Occupancy
Occupancy is the pillar your financial model rests on. Your staff and facility costs hold steady no matter how many seats are filled. How full your classrooms are determines whether tuition covers those costs and whether discounting is an option at all. Get occupancy right and every other lever in the business starts working; get it wrong and no rate adjustment will save the year.
That dependency is also why the benchmark has moved. I used to advise owners that roughly 70% was a healthy place to land, back when costs sat at a level that figure could absorb, but it no longer does. With staffing, insurance, and facility expenses where they are today, the target has climbed to 75 to 80%.
Getting there is a classroom-level exercise, and three principles guide the work:
Give your attention each day to where openings are and strategize filling those slots.
Move tuition rates in each category to the actual cost of care as you are able without sacrificing enrollment.
Consider flexibility in scheduling to meet parent demand, trying to pair part-time enrollments when possible.
Where a school lands inside that 75 to 80% range depends on geography, company size, subsidy families versus private pay, program type, and public Pre-K policy, all of which shift the math. Treat the range as the goal to aim for rather than a line every school clears the same way, and let the classroom-level work set your pace toward it.
Inquiries and Follow-Up
Knowing where you stand is the starting point. Track how many inquiries come in, how many turn into tours, and how many tours end in a signed agreement. Most owners who run that exercise find one step where families stop moving forward, and that step is where your attention belongs.
Those drop-offs are steeper than they used to be because inquiries once had the ability to convert on their own. A family called, came by, and signed, because the alternatives were few and the decision happened quickly. Families now shop, compare, and take weeks to decide. The school that waits for them to come back around loses them to the one that reaches out a day after the tour.
That shift is why inquiry handling needs a system behind it. At minimum, that system includes:
A customer relationship management (CRM) platform so every lead is tracked in a centralized space.
Scheduling that books the tour while the family is still on the phone.
A phone script so the first impression holds regardless of who picks up.
Follow-up strategy that continues until the family decides one way or the other.
Your Tour and Your Building Are Part of Your Pitch
Families once had fewer school programs to choose from and a tour was often a formality after the decision had already been made, but parents today have more flexibility than ever. Pre-K competition is real pressure in certain pockets, and brand-new construction is opening in nearly every market, especially the major ones. A family that would have toured one school a decade ago now tours four, and they are no longer confirming a choice when they walk through your door but are making it.
Your pitch starts in the parking lot. A parent forms an impression of your school while they are still in the car before their scheduled tour, and what they see there sets the terms for everything that follows. If the exterior looks worn, the lobby feels like an afterthought, or the signage has not been touched in a decade, you have handed that family a reason to doubt the program before they have seen a single classroom.
Your real estate should reflect the same quality on the outside that families find once they walk in. The age of a building matters far less than what it signals about how the business is run, and three things carry that signal:
Branding upgrades: The visual identity families see before they meet anyone.
The exterior: What sets expectations from the parking lot forward.
The lobby: The first interior space a family judges you on.
Branding and your building matter more when something newly built opens down the road and gives families an easy comparison. The same pressure explains why branding cannot be treated as just colors and a logo. Branding is the exterior, lobby, signage, and every point where a parent touches your school. Each touchpoint either backs up what you are telling families or works against it.
The tour works the same way, which means it cannot change depending on who gives it. Five things keep it consistent:
Open by asking what matters most to that family, then address it at each stop.
Build the tour around set stops, and let each one show something that sets your school apart from the others they are seeing.
Introduce your teaching staff by name as you go and say out loud how long they have been with you and what they are good at. Families read team longevity as stability, and your teachers hear themselves praised in front of a parent.
Put the tour in writing so a director, an assistant, or you on a busy morning all deliver the same experience.
Name the technology you already have. Owners invest in systems families would care about and then never mention them.
Try trading places with the lead teacher for a few minutes in the classroom the child would join. The teacher walks the family through the room while you cover the class. Families start bonding with the person who will care for their child, and that connection does more for a decision than anything you can say about the room.
The building and the tour are one pitch, and families experience them that way whether you plan it or not. Walk your own property the way a parent does, starting in the parking lot and ending wherever the tour stops, and ask what each point is telling them. Fix what works against you and name what works for you out loud.
What Families Remember
Check in with new families regularly through their first few months and ask how things are going while there is still time to make improvements. Then at six months, ask what made them choose your school in the first place. They will likely describe the people — how your team made them feel on the tour, how the first phone call went, how the school came across online before they ever walked in. Feeling is what a family carries forward, so how your team shows up at each of those moments is doing more work than any program description.
The same holds for what you offer, because the things that once set a school apart have become a list families expect like a communication app, enrichment activities, standard curriculum, and camera systems.
What still separates a school now sits in two places. The first is the program itself — language immersion, Montessori or Reggio, conscious discipline, an outdoor classroom. These are what families can name when someone asks why they chose you. The second is evidence that the school is running well, which shows up as team longevity, flexible scheduling, and the newer technology families are starting to look for.
Meeting the standard is safe, and plenty of schools stop there without recognizing the position it leaves them in. A family who sees only what they expected has no reason to choose you over the school down the road. Whatever genuinely sets your school apart has to come up while the family is in your building, not after they have gone home to compare.
Enrollment and Retention Are One System
Once a school wins the enrollment, the problem I hear about most often from the early childhood education community is some version of “we can enroll, but we cannot close the back door.”
Closing that back door is the part schools tend to leave alone, and it undoes the enrollment they worked to win. Filling a classroom in September means very little if those families are gone by spring, and the schools working hardest on conversion are often the same ones losing families out the other side without tracking why.
When I look into those departures, the program is almost never the reason. Families stay where they feel known, and that comes down to steady communication past the first few weeks and concerns that get real answers. None of it requires a new program or a bigger building, which is why retention is often the most reachable work on an owner's list.
Treating enrollment and retention as two separate projects with two separate owners is what creates that gap. Bringing a family in and keeping them are the same work, judged by the same people, against the same standard.
Free Your Director to Lead
If families stay where they feel known, your director is the one who makes that happen. The role is being redefined across the industry, and rightly so. Companies are moving directors toward the staff and family experience and away from the administrative work that has traditionally taken up their week. The logic holds up: the person best positioned to shape how families feel about a school is the one who knows every child by name, and that work cannot be done from behind a desk.
Leaders build culture when the administrative load comes off their plate. Look honestly at what sits on your director's desk right now and ask how much of it has to be done by that person, in that building, at that level. Most owners find more than they expected.
The Path Forward
Nothing here is a demand problem, which is why the answer is operational.
What separates the schools doing well right now is that they manage every stage from the first phone call through a family's first year. Occupancy gets read classroom by classroom, inquiries move through an established system, the building and the tour tell the same story, and the director is free to lead. None of these are dramatic changes, and together they account for most of the difference between a school holding its numbers and one watching them slide.
You don’t have to rebuild all of this at once. Start by pulling your figures against the benchmarks and finding the stage where you are losing most families. The fix is usually smaller than the problem looks from the outside.
If you are weighing larger decisions about your school — what it is worth, whether to grow, or what comes next — reach out to us at HINGE Advisors so we can help you learn more.