Global education agendas frequently draw on the construct of 'school readiness', indexing the developmental trajectories of children to the expectations of school systems. Through in-depth ethnographic research in a village in Bihar, India, this paper examines how normative discourses of 'school readiness' govern family strategies for early childhood care and education (ECCE). To navigate the demands of a competitive and socially stratified school system, marginalised families saw it as crucial for their young children to access multiple forms of educational capital: written literacy, discipline, and dominant caste-class codes. In the absence of functioning provision of ECCE by the state, the low-fee and low-quality private market of early childhood education was seen as a key site through which 'school readiness' could be secured. The paper illustrates how normative developmentalism in education, and the 'hegemonic aspirations' it enshrines, has entrenched the marketisation of ECCE and reinscribed forms of caste-class domination.