Abstract
Nursery schools' needs are becoming more complex and diverse. Although a comprehensive policy that covers the guardians' requirements is therefore necessary, it is difficult to provide the wide variety of services required to adequately meet the needs of all the families who use nursery schools. This study aimed to identify priority matters for improvement of nursery school as part of the future improvement policy on the basis of the hypothesis that an improvement of issues that strongly influence evaluation of other issues would push up comprehensive evaluation of nursery school. The study objectives were authorized nursery schools located in Saga City in Japan, and a questionnaire survey evaluating the nursery schools was carried out. First, relationships among evaluation items were made clear through calculations of multiple correlation coefficient value by use of the questionnaire data. Second, the near future's important improvement matters for nursery schools were clarified by the construction of "evaluation structure model" through the Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) using these relationships. Through the analysis, the following matters of priority were identified: enhancement of educational services; appropriate placement of nursery school according to the relation to workplace location; and provision of a venue in the nursery schools that give guardians an opportunity to socialize with each other. Moreover, the study showed that these measures would improve the general value of nursery school.
