Several districts in southern industrial hub Guangzhou, Guangdong province, released notices this month that enrollment will be tight in 2023, as the number of children entering primary schools is expected to be greater than last year.

Around 50 primary and secondary schools in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern province Sichuan, have also alerted parents of the potential limited spaces, with one district pointing to “rapid population growth” in the region. In northeast China, several schools in Changchun, Jilin province, also warned there would be too few seats for primary school students this year.

China began to phase out its decadeslong “one-child” policy at the end of 2013 and launched a nationwide “two-child” policy in 2015. The following year, there were 17.86 million births, an 8.6% increase from the average of 16.44 million between 2011 and 2015.

The number of children born in 2017 dipped to 17.23 million. But despite the slowdown, which led to a record-low birthrate last year, the demand for school enrollment in some megacities will likely continue to increase in the next two to three years due to the delayed impact of the falling fertility rate on the population.

In Guangdong, primary school-level education enrollment is expected to peak in 2025, according to a 2021 statement from the province’s Department of Education. It added that the pressure on schools to provide places for students will increase due to the introduction of the “three-child” policy in May 2021.

A 2020 study published by Cao Haowen, an assistant researcher at the Beijing Academy of Educational Sciences, estimated that the capital will see primary school enrollment demand peak this year, with 10.82 million students needing a place.

But the school system is also faced with state efforts to boost the fertility rate as it tries to tackle an aging population, which shrank for the first time in six decades last year. In southern metropolis Shenzhen in Guangdong province, the local government recently proposed to provide child care subsidies for parents with newborns, up to when the child turns 3.

A lack of public school capacity has become the norm in megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, where demand for education has grown rapidly with a large inflow of rural migrants.

In 2021, Guangdong province proposed adding more than 4 million public school seats by 2025 for basic-level education, which is kindergarten through high school. In the city of Shenzhen alone, more than 206,000 seats were added in 2022, official data showed.

Caixin saw in the summer of 2022 at a school in Shenzhen more than 50 first graders were crowded into one classroom, after the school had expanded its 36 classes to 54 the previous year.