Jamshedpur: Parents who can't get their children admitted to private English-medium schools in the steel city by January, can try their luck during June-July.

Most of the schools have decided to make the 25 per cent seats reserved for underprivileged children under Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) available to general category students by the middle of next year.

The move will help those deserving students who fail to get entry-level admissions through the lottery system even as most of the reserved seats remain vacant.

"The maximum number of students we have had under the RTE category is 12 compared with the available 62. The parents can't bear the expense of the bus service, uniforms and books and prefer to stay away keeping the seats empty," Nandini Shukla, principal of Kerala Samajam Model School in Sakchi, which has 250 seats in LKG, said.

Therefore, the vacant seats will be made available to the general students on a first come, first served basis after the summer vacation.

"There is a gap that has to be plugged. It's not that parents from that background are unwilling to educate their children but they avoid bearing the extra cost in private schools. I have around 40 reserved seats out of a total 160 at the entry-level but they hardly fill up," said Swarna Mishra, principal of Dayanand Public School.

The schools have already started issuing admission forms from October and will shortlist the students through a random selection process and declare the results in January.

The state literacy department has asked schools to keep the seats vacant till September but they are not prepared to wait that long.