ABC Learning, the parent company of Busy Bees, bought Leapfrog Day Nurseries last month and is now the largest nursery chain in the UK.
In Australia, ABC's presence dominates the sector. It owns 29 per cent of 3,886 for-profit childcare centres and 21 per cent of a total of all 5,372 childcare centres.
Professor Jennifer Sumsion from Charles Sturt University in New South Wales says questions should be asked about whether the vast expansion of corporate childcare, with an emphasis on generating profit for shareholders, is incompatible with high-quality provision.
Professor Sumsion told Nursery World, 'It's a very grey area, with an urgent need for more robust data. There are lots of claims that it poses a threat and quite a lot of worrying anecdotal evidence, but there is very little systematic evidence that it does.'
She also speculated about what ABC's entry into the UK market could mean for private nurseries. 'I suspect that there will be much more concentration of ownership of services achieved by ABC buying up a lot of independent centres. Some of the owners of those centres might find they have little real choice but to sell.'
Speaking at the launch of an international centre set up at the University of East London to study the mixed economy in childcare, she highlighted research showing that in New South Wales for-profit services employed proportionately fewer qualified teachers than community-based centres.
Professor Sumsion also cited a study that highlighted ABC employees' views. It found that when asked whether they would be happy to enrol their own children at the centre or one with comparable quality, 18 per cent of ABC employees surveyed said 'no' because of quality concerns, compared with 4 per cent of employees in community-based centres.
