The number of private daycare centres in Denmark more than doubled from 243 in 2007 to 512 in 2014, according to figures from the Ministry for Children, Education and Gender Equality.
Meanwhile, the number of municipal daycare centres dropped down by 20 percent to 2,645 during the same period.
About 6,800 children were registered at private daycare centres in 2007, but eight years later the number nearly tripled to 18,000.
Parents prefer private institutions over municipal ones because they are smaller in size, contends Birgitte Conradsen, the deputy chairwoman at the educators’ union Bupl.
Although there are no studies comparing the quality of services in private and municipal daycare centres, Grethe Kragh-Müller, a child psychologist and child care researcher at Aarhus University, argues that employees at large daycare institutions cannot give children as much attention as they can get in smaller centres.
