In our experience this is the admission that causes families the most anxiety, and it gives them the least to go on. Applications open early, places are limited, criteria are often not published in full, and parents are making a fourteen- or fifteen-year decision about a three-year-old.
Of the 144 schools, whose class range we now hold for every one, 115 admit at pre-primary, LKG or UKG. Most run right through: of those 115, 78 go on to Class 12 and 36 stop at Class 10 (one ends at Class 9).
That matters more than anything else on this page. Choosing a pre-primary is usually choosing a school for the next fourteen or fifteen years, and the right question at three is not "is this a good nursery" but "is this where I want an eighteen-year-old to be".
Age criteria decide more than you expect
Every school sets a cut-off age as at a stated date, and applies it strictly. A child born a few weeks past a cut-off waits a year. This is a common reason a family's first-choice school is simply unavailable, and it has nothing to do with the child.
Two consequences worth planning around:
- Check the age criterion before building the shortlist, not after. It removes schools from consideration faster than anything else, and saves months.
- Where a child sits near a cut-off, the two adjacent years have different competition. Ask the school which year they would place the child in, in writing.
Twenty-one of the schools we hold show their age criteria on their pages. Where a school does not, ask — and make sure you are given the date the age is measured as at, not just the age.
How the process usually runs
- The window opens — often almost a year before the child would start.
- The form, usually online, sometimes with a fee.
- An interaction — with the child, the parents, or both.
- The offer, with a short window to accept and pay.
Step four catches families. Offers arrive with deadlines measured in days, several schools' deadlines overlap, and a family holding out for a first choice can lose a second choice already in hand. Decide your order of preference before the offers arrive, not during.
What the law does and does not cover here — because you will be told otherwise. Section 13 of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 says that no school or person shall, while admitting a child, collect any capitation fee and subject the child or the parents to any screening procedure, and the Act sets fines for both. Parents quote that section at nursery admissions all the time. It does not straightforwardly apply at this stage. The same Act defines a child as aged six to fourteen and elementary education as Classes I to VIII, and the Delhi High Court has held (Social Jurist v. Govt of NCT of Delhi, 19 February 2013) that the screening ban does not extend to nursery admission on the unreserved seats of private unaided schools — a ruling from another state, and one that leaves the position on the 25% disadvantaged-group seats untouched, but the clearest statement of the position there is. So do not walk into a school interaction believing you hold a right you may not hold.
What does apply in Karnataka at every level is the Karnataka Educational Institutions (Prohibition of Capitation Fee) Act, 1984, which prohibits any payment demanded outside the prescribed fee. In practice: ask for the school's admission criteria in writing, keep what you are given, and treat a request for money outside the published fee as the thing to walk away from. If you believe you have been treated unfairly, take advice before asserting a right rather than after.
What schools publish, and what they do not
Fifty-one of the 144 show their admission process. Sixty-seven publish an application URL. Twenty-six have published a 2027-28 admission status; 118 have not yet.
No school fee appears anywhere on this site. Early-years fees vary by class, by component and by year, and a published figure is misleading more often than it helps. Each school page says that fees are as the school prescribes for the year of entry and points you to the school's own admissions office — and to its website, for the 142 schools that publish one.
What to actually do, in order
- Fix the radius first. A twenty-minute commute at four is a different life from an hour. Our area pages list schools by locality.
- Filter by age criterion. Ruthlessly. It is binary.
- Decide the board before the school, if the board matters to you at all — there is a guide to that.
- Check the class range. If the school ends at Class 10, you are choosing again at fifteen.
- Visit. Nothing on any website, including this one, tells you how a school feels at nine in the morning.
- Apply to more than one, and rank them before offers arrive.
A word about the pressure
Bengaluru's early-years admission market is built to make families feel they are late. Most are not. A child who starts at a good school near home, with parents who are not financially stretched, is in a better position than one at a famous school across the city. We publish no school fee and cannot tell you which is which — only the schools can, and asking them early is exactly the point.
When to handle this yourself, and when not to
Much of this you can do alone, and if your radius is clear, your child's age is comfortably inside the cut-offs and two or three good schools are within reach, you should. That is what this page is for.
It becomes worth a conversation when the variables start fighting each other: a child sitting on the wrong side of a cut-off, two schools whose fees you have been quoted and expect to diverge as the child moves up, a family weighing a long commute against a shorter list, overlapping offer deadlines from schools you are ranking differently, or a move to Bengaluru with no local knowledge to draw on and one admission season to get it right.
If that is where you are: tell us the child's date of birth, where you live or are moving to, the boards you are open to, and what the family can comfortably sustain to the end of school. We will work through the criteria each school publishes — age, class range, process, dates — and tell you which schools those criteria leave open to you, which are ruled out before you apply and why, what order to apply in, and what to do when two offers arrive in the same week. We do not predict which school will offer a place; that is the school's decision and nobody outside it can tell you.
We are paid by families and by no school. Our service fee is agreed in writing before we begin and is entirely separate from anything a school charges.
This page is guidance. Age criteria, processes and dates are set by each school and should be confirmed with the school directly.
The counts on this page are as at 2026-09-19 and come from our own records, which change as institutions publish.