Introduction

The care and education of young children has been subject to ‘a surge of policy attention’ since the 1990s (OECD, 2006). According to some policy experts, high quality education and care services are ‘the centrepiece of progressive institution-building in the early 21st century’ (Pearce and Paxton, 2005: xxi). Early childhood education and care (ECEC) can contribute to multiple goals: facilitating the labour force participation of mothers, boosting children's educational and social development and providing a platform for a more equitable division of labour between men and women. Once the domain of philanthropists, feminists and progressive educators, early childhood education has attracted the attention of economists, human capital theorists and brain scientists. The notion that expenditure on high quality early education is a form of investment, producing measurable returns through reduced expenditure on remedial education, juvenile justice and unemployment benefits in the later years, has captured the imagination of politicians and policy makers around the world.

Yet, as ECEC assumed its place on national policy agendas, many countries experienced a ‘turn to the market’ in human service provision (Brennan et al., 2012). Governments in English speaking liberal welfare states, in particular, and in Europe to a lesser extent (Plantenga, 2012) began to withdraw from, or reduce, direct funding of services and to introduce supply-side strategies such as vouchers that enable those seeking care to purchase services in a competitive market. Private investors responded with enthusiasm: childcare is now big business. But reorienting childcare from a nonprofit community service to a commodity to be bought and sold involves more than a simple change in the mode of delivery. As political philosopher Michael Sandel observes, ‘… markets don't only allocate goods; they also express and promote certain attitudes towards the goods being exchanged’ (Sandel, 2012, p 9).

This chapter examines the shift in Australia from a nonprofit childcare sector to one that is heavily marketised. It considers the impact of this shift on the broader social purposes of childcare and, in particular, the tension between official claims of social investment in the early years and the reality of a system in which most providers are driven by the imperatives of private investment and profit.