Early education and the unloved market of commercial childcare in Luxembourg

Since the late 1990s, the development and qualification of early childhood education in Europe have been directly linked to social investment welfare policies (Esping-Andersen 2002a, 2002b;Lister 2004;OECD 2011). In the wake of the European Union’s ‘Lisbon process’, early childhood and after-school care for children rapidly expanded in Luxembourg (Hartmann-Hirsch 2009, 2010) and have jointly evolved into an autonomous branch of the Luxembourg educational and social system. Following some rudimentary beginnings in the 1980s (Achten 2012; Achten et al. 2009; Marth and Ramponi 2009), the development of a publicly funded system of extrafamilial childcare was given an initial impulse by the European Employment Initiative of 1997. The present chapter argues that the significance gained by for-profit childcare in Luxembourg’s care system has resulted both from singular political decisions and from traditions in effect long-term (Penn 2011, 2013).