The notion of social investment as a new policy paradigm has so far travelled to the Eastern part of Europe only to a limited extent and rarely as an explicit project of policy reform. Research on childcare policies in Visegrad countries show that what these countries have in common is a low emphasis placed on childcare services for the children under three, demonstrated by low enrollment rates. Some of the countries have introduce reforms. Common features of these reforms are: their limited character and limited funding, the use of the EU structural funds, support for alternative, non-public, privately co-financed forms of childcare services, as opposed to the public crèches or those provided by the municipalities. The main goal of our paper is to analyze recent reforms of childcare policies in Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. We will do a systematic comparison of the reforms taking into account their possible (or already observed) impact, whether targeted at the public or private sector, the mode of their financing and the possible redistributive effect. Our argument is that while the new forms of childcare are usually labelled as “alternative”, the reforms might often lead a growth of the private sector, higher prices for services and as a result – further polarization of the users and non-users of services. In other words, while the government programs indeed lead to increase in services availability (with less emphasis on quality), they also lead to privatization of the services sector and to stratification of access to childcare.
