As the participation of married women in the labor market increases, they are demanding more public care services. In response to this, the primary school childcare programmes (hereafter PSCP) are seeking for its improvement. In this context, this paper aims to explore the directions of refinement of PSCP based on the perspectives of the parents of primary school pupils. In particular, four dimensions were investigated: 1) resolving the absence/blind spot of childcare, 2) parents’ participation in labour market and work-parenting compatibility, 3) the time and the cost of private tutoring, 4) children’s educational achievement. In this study, one-on-one interviews were conducted with eighteen parents. The variations of the participants’ socio-economic backgrounds were considered such as their household incomes, places of residence, and their dual-income statuses. The analysis suggests that, in general, the PSCP was currently meeting the demands of middle-class working mothers, that is, the child ‘care for safety’ contributes to the mothers’ economic participation. Meanwhile, the demands of the mothers from disadvantaged backgrounds (e.g. low-income families, single-parents, multi-cultural families, etc.) were different from that of middle-class working mothers. The mothers from disadvantaged backgrounds expect child ‘care for education.’ As a result, the upper-middle class parents tended to consider the PSCP and private education separately. Thus, they combined the PSCP and private education in their childcare practices. By contrast, the parents from disadvantaged backgrounds were likely to depend solely on the PSCP in their childcare practices. They could hardly afford to have private education for their children. Accordingly, this study argues for the refinement of the PSCP into two directions, namely, the care ’for safety’ and that ‘for education’.