Rationalising public support for private early childhood education and care: the case of Finland

ABSTRACT

In Finland, early childhood education and care (ECEC) is traditionally publicly provided. However, private ECEC provision has increased during the past decade, largely as a result of financial support from the public sector. Drawing on qualitative interviews with municipal decision-makers, this article identifies three frames within which publicly subsidised private ECEC provision and marketisation are rationalised: the pragmatic frame, the government frame and the choice frame. The results show that even though market logics and tendencies seem to have gained a strong foothold in local policies, there is a keen interest in universalism and maintaining public control over local ECEC provision.

Keywords:

• early childhood education and care
• marketisation
• Nordic countries
• choice
• public subsidies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Municipalities’ costs are covered by municipal taxes and government transfers, which cover around 25% of municipal spending (MoF 2018).

2 Voucher values in different municipalities range typically from €371 to €1148. Depending on parents’ income, the value of the PDA ranges from €173.74 to €319.85 and of the municipal supplement from €100 to €860 (Lahtinen and Selkee 2016).

3 The populations of the municipalities ranged from around 13,000 to 650,000 inhabitants.

4 The data imply a sort of political consensus about public support for private ECEC provision at the local level. This is visible, for example, in the way that interviewees justify and accept local developments even if they contradict the party’s national policies. The administrators, for their part, described the daily practices and the situation of local ECEC in more detail and more comprehensively than politicians, but nonetheless drew on the same discourses as the politicians in their accounts.

5 Transcription key: […], excluded section; [], author’s comment; …, sentence is not completed, address continues.

6 In Finland, the provision of primary and secondary education is statutorily a public responsibility.