This article provides the assessments of a joint leadership model based on research in early childhood education (ECE) leadership in the city of Hämeenlinna, Finland. In this new leadership model, each ECE unit was led by a pair of directors, with one responsible for the financial and human resources aspects and the other responsible for the pedagogy and client processes. The aim of the new leadership model was to strengthen the leadership and pedagogy as the core of leadership. The study explored how the staff members evaluated the quality of leadership within several ECE units. Furthermore, this study examined if there were differences in the assessments of the quality of leadership of the pair of two directors. The quantitative data for the study were collected by an electronic questionnaire completed by ECE directors and staff. Statistically significant differences were found in the assessments of the units led by the same director pair. The parallel line in high and low assessments indicated that satisfaction or dissatisfaction with leadership was a holistic way to see the impact of leadership on the organisational culture of the units. The findings drew attention to the question of how the conditions that were necessary for distributed leadership should be supported.

This study addresses leadership enactment in the context of early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres in Finland. The study was implemented at a time when the ECEC legislation has changed. The research draws from relational leadership theory to address the following questions: How do leaders, practitioners and parents evaluate ad interpret the impacts of changing ECEC legislation in private Finnish centres? How do these evaluations and interpretations reflect leadership enactment? This study conceptualises leadership as a context-dependent phenomenon constituted by shared meanings and relationships among leaders and other human actors in private centres. To achieve a multi-level picture about leadership enactment in private ECEC centres, this study employed a mixed-method approach. The data was collected through three online surveys and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings revealed that private centres form a heterogeneous context for leadership enactment in Finnish ECEC. Compared with practitioners and parents, the leaders were the most positive in their interpretations of the legislative changes. Especially, the study found a gap between the leaders' and parents' evaluations on how the legislative changes have impacted the daily praxis. The study calls for further research and tools for developing leadership enactment in private ECEC. Keywords:Early childhood education and care, Finland, leadership enactment, private early childhood education and care centre, relational leadership, societal change (2011), for instance, raised the question of how Nordic countries can maintain high-quality ECEC in the midst of societal changes driven by neoliberalism and increased marketisation. Moss (2016) pointed out that the marketisation approach makes quality of services a question of choice. Because marketisation and privatisation have emerged as global considerations in ECEC, it is important to explore the directions taken in various countries.The concept of marketisation has different meanings depending on time and place. In this study, marketisation refers to governmentally driven policies that support, enforce, and authorise market mechanisms and procedures to provide public services, including privatisation, outsourcing, competition, and choice (Brennan et al. 2012;Dýrfjörð and Magnúsdóttir 2016). Privatisation is

This article provides the assessments of a joint leadership model based on research in early childhood education (ECE) leadership in the city of Hämeenlinna, Finland. In this new leadership model, each ECE unit was led by a pair of directors, with one responsible for the financial and human resources aspects and the other responsible for the pedagogy and client processes. The aim of the new leadership model was to strengthen the leadership and pedagogy as the core of leadership. The study explored how the staff members evaluated the quality of leadership within several ECE units. Furthermore, this study examined if there were differences in the assessments of the quality of leadership of the pair of two directors. The quantitative data for the study were collected by an electronic questionnaire completed by ECE directors and staff. Statistically significant differences were found in the assessments of the units led by the same director pair. The parallel line in high and low assessments indicated that satisfaction or dissatisfaction with leadership was a holistic way to see the impact of leadership on the organisational culture of the units. The findings drew attention to the question of how the conditions that were necessary for distributed leadership should be supported.

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