Children’s centres may not be viable once subsidies run out - Times Online

Parents are seen to choose cheaper and more informal childcare during the recession, thus leaving 1/4 of children's centre places unused. Are these the middle-class parents who were said to have 'colonized' the centres in the first place?  Educational policy history tells us that programmes in which a lot of middle-class families take part tend to be the ones that succeed (compared to targeted interventions, which suffer from ghettoization).   Is cost the only factor behind sinking uptake of centre places?  Or are parents voting with their feet to show a preference of home-based over centre care?