A welfare state for all? An analysis of social inequalities in applications for and use of public childcare services, and the role of social policy in alleviating them

Abstract

Early childhood education and care is seen as a key social investment policy for helping to mitigate social inequalities. The Matthew effect (ME from now on) is the process that explains how suffering social disadvantages leads to more disadvantages. Following the logic of the ME, it will be the most disadvantaged families that have proportionally less access to these services. This study investigates the mechanisms that produce these inequalities and to what extent they can be reduced by ECEC access criteria that promote equal opportunities. An analysis is carried out of a survey addressed to 1,219 mothers in Catalonia with children under 3 years of age about the use of different types of informal and formal care services. The results show that nursery services, through progressive access criteria, can significantly reduce inequalities that are due to the mother’s income. Likewise, sliding-scale pricing and social services are effective public policies for reducing the ME. However, despite these measures, the mother’s level of education and place of birth are factors that continue to lead to an unequal proportion of places being taken up, which is not explained by preferences expressed by the mother. Two possible causes are suggested: first, in a context of scarcity of supply, mothers with university studies have more resources for obtaining nursery places in the allocation system; second, mothers without studies or born outside of Spain often lack job stability and have to cope with atypical schedules.