Has something changed? Leaders’, practitioners’ and parents’ interpretations after renewed early childhood education and care legislation in Finnish private centres

Abstract

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

Selectivity of clientele in finnish private early childhood education and care

“…This study complements previous research (e.g. Abrassart & Bonoli, 2015;Mäntyjärvi & Puroila, 2019;Pavolini & Van Lancker, 2018;Van Lancker, 2017) according to which local and national ECEC policies play a crucial role in the accessibility of ECEC by suggesting that on the micro level these policies also serve as external authors which the private providers can use to legitimate their actions.…”

“…However, neoliberal policy discourses have spread to Nordic welfare regimes as well (Brennan et al, 2012;Mahon et al, 2012), and there have been various shifts towards marketoriented systems (e.g. Dýrfjörð & Magnúsdóttir, 2016;Haug, 2014;Mäntyjärvi & Puroila, 2019;Naumann, 2011;Vlasov, 2018). For example, in Sweden roughly 20% (EURYDYCE, 2018) and in Norway around half (Jacobsen & Vollset, 2012) of ECEC is privately provided, with a growing focus on for-profit provision.…”

“…The other stream of research has touched upon affordability, accessibility and availability or other characteristics of ECEC systems that potentially increase or reduce the selectivity of ECEC(e.g. Barnett, 2010;Lloyd & Penn, 2012;Mäntyjärvi & Puroila, 2019;Noailly & Visser, 2009;Vandenbroeck & Lazzari, 2014;Van Lancker, 2017). The research on parents' ECEC choices, in turn, argues that successful choices in ECEC markets require skills and resources (economic and cultural).…”

“…However, in their study, the state, municipal and private providers' policies rarely differed from each other. Mäntyjärvi and Puroila (2019) research in the Finnish context, in turn, indicates that some private providers value their freedom to choose their customers (e.g. only children in need of whole-day-ECEC) and resist public interference in that freedom.…”

Finnish early childhood education and care leaders’ perceptions of pedagogical leadership and assessment of the implementation of the National Core Curriculum in times of change

“…However, the private service sector has started to expand within the ECEC. In 1997, the private sector proportion of ECEC services was only 2.5% (Mäntyjärvi & Puroila, 2019); currently, 18.2% of children participate in ECEC organised by private service providers, and further, 54% of Finnish municipalities provide private services along with the public ones (Finnish Education Evaluation Centre [FINEEC], 2019).…”