Kasvatus 2023 Vol 54 No 5 The Finnish Journal of Education

The number of private early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers has increased during the recent decade in Finland. The clientele of private ECEC consists typically of families whose socioeconomic status (SES) is higher than on average. In this article, we examine how private and public ECEC centers in Finland are located in different types of neighborhoods. The data consisted of ownership and funding data of ECEC centers and municipality as well as zip code based data of the socioeconomic and urban structure of the areas. The data was analyzed using crosstabulation and multinomial logistic regression. The results indicate that private ECEC centers are overrepresented in urban municipalities and inner urban and high SES neighborhoods. Segregation entails also more subtle differences related to the form of ownership and funding. Based on our research, examining the parents’ early childhood education decisions alone is not sufficient to explain the socioeconomic differentiation of the clientele of private and public ECEC centers. The differentiation seems to be explained at least partly by the different locations of the ECEC centers.