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.'
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