The world of high finance may seem an unfamiliar one to parents or to workers in nurseries. But over the past ten years, there have been remarkable changes in the way nurseries are financed and managed. Increasingly, stocks and shares and venture capital have come to underpin and reshape early education and childcare services.
Corporate nursery chains in particular are big business, worth millions of pounds. Of the top ten providers of nursery places in the UK, nine are listed on the stock exchange or owned by private equity groups.
Three of these are owned by foreign investment groups - one from the US, one from Australia and one from India. It is a safe bet that some of these big nursery chains will change hands in the next year, and smaller nursery chains will be swallowed up by bigger ones, as investors jostle for a share of what has become a potentially lucrative market.
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