In March 2018, the incoming Minister for Education sent ripples through the New Zealand childcare sector by announcing that the forthcoming Strategic Plan (2019– 2029) would ‘turn the tide’ away from the growing presence of private providers, to favour the community-based non-profit sector (Gerritson, 2018b). History tells us he was not the first Minister for Education to state this intention. Similar comments were made two decades earlier in response to the first Strategic Plan and the 20 hours payment, which sought from the outset to buoy the non-profit sector in the face of an increasingly competitive childcare market. Yet by the time of writing in 2021, relatively little has been done to meet this ambition, indicating the extent of the political lock-in to the current market.

This book has sought to address some of the perplexing tensions inherent in neoliberal childcare markets: that they are tasked with achieving considerable social and economic outcomes, yet are organized through highly inequitable market-based systems; they receive considerable public funding, yet are privately delivered. Media coverage and academic literature drawn on in earlier chapters home in on the problems that manifest from these tensions for those who use and work in childcare. As the proportion of for-profit services grows, these markets have been highlighted as having low(er) quality care and education for young children, suppressing pay and working conditions for staff in the sector, and resulting in the transferral of considerable amounts of public funding to an increasing variety of private entities.

One of the key questions that has shaped the focus of this book is how neoliberal childcare markets are assembled and held together over time, in the face of considerable criticisms and problems. In an interview with the Minister for Education who was in office for the introduction of the 20 hours payment, he queried my assumption that childcare markets were markets at all. In his opinion they were not, as he stated, “government has had a considerable hand in regulating and managing them”.