Finland has participated in the global reviews of early childhood undertaken by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that have been conducted since 1998 (OECD, 2006). In these reviews, Finland has consistently performed as one of the world’s best providers of early childhood education. In the most recent global report card that was used to monitor and compare the performance of 29 OECD countries prepared by the Innocenti Research Centre (Adamson, 2008), Finland was ranked number three from the top. The 10 benchmarks used reflected minimum standards on access, quality, and support attributes of early childhood provision within a country (Adamson, 2008). However, according to OECD’s national report (OECD, 2012), Finland faces challenges in leadership skills and competencies which were found essential for efficient curriculum development and provision of early education. This has resulted mainly from limited attention to leadership theorising and research, and a lack of awareness of the relevance of leadership for quality of professional devel-opment of ECE staff.
According to the universal entitlement prescribed by law (Laki lasten päivähoi-dosta 36/1973), all children before comprehensive school starting from the age of 7 years old are entitled to municipal ECE and one-year pre-school for 6-year-olds.
In accessing ECE programs, moderate customer payments might be required.
Nearly 60% of all Finnish children between years 1–6 benefit from public early childhood services. Only a small percentage of all families are customers of private ECE services. In addition to early childhood centres, early childhood services include family day care and various open activities. Almost 100% of all children participate in pre-schools (Säkkinen & Kuoppala, 2012).
Customership of ECE in Finland is twofold. Firstly, entitlement to services as a part of labour policy serves parents. Secondly, ECE supports children as users of services. According to the Finnish Child Care Act (Laki lasten päivähoidosta 36/1973), ECE is required to support the overall development of the child. When addressing the core purposes of ECE services from the perspective of a child as a customer, high quality pedagogy is emphasised. This study focuses on studying ECE leadership from the point of view of ECE pedagogy.
The practice of ECE pedagogy is guided by the National Curriculum Guide-lines on Early Childhood Education and Care in Finland (STAKES, 2003) and the Core Curriculum for Pre-School Education (Opetushallitus, 2010). In this study, for ease of reference, henceforth the National Curriculum Guidelines on Early Childhood Education and Care in Finland document will be referred to as the Finnish National Curriculum (STAKES, 2003). It should be noted that this policy document was revised in 2005. The 2003 document is referred to in this study as it is the only translated version available for international authors, readers, and evaluators of this study. Minor changes were undertaken in the revision of the document in 2005. The completion of the articles of this dissertation involved co-authors, so the translated document was the only artefact available for evaluation and critiquing by international author groups in the Articles 1 and 2.
STAKES has since been transferred in 2009 to THL (National Institute for Health and Welfare). THL functions as a research and development institute un-der the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. Despite the fact that the drafting, administration and steering of legislation governing ECE were trans-ferred from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health to the Ministry of Educa-tion and Culture at the beginning of the year 2013, THL retains the steering role in the content of ECE.
Functioning of municipal self-government is based on maintaining of demo-cratic practices in municipal decision-making. The dualistic management struc-ture forms a foundational platform for democratic practices as interaction be-tween political decision-makers (e.g., municipal committees) and civil servants (e.g., ECE leaders). Behind this dualistic management structure implemented in
Finnish municipalities is an ideal model of classical bureaucracy (Weber, 1922) which creates the hierarchical structures for decision-making. Co-operation be-tween political decision-makers and civil servants realises, for example, when a political decision-maker uses the suggestions and information generated by civil servants as a basis for decision-making. Political decision-makers are dependent on the quality and usefulness of the information which civil servants produce and represent for them. However, the current contextual changes in Finnish munici-palities have created pressures for development of the roles and interaction be-tween political decision-makers in municipal decision-making. (Niiranen, Joen-suu, & Martikainen, 2013.)
In Finnish municipalities, elected municipal councils decide on the principles for the organisation of municipal administration (Kuntalaki 365/1995). Due to the decentralisation of community services, the municipal organisation varies be-tween municipalities. Even though the establishment of the committees is not ob-ligatory, the implementation of ECE services is usually administrated by the mu-nicipal committees set up by mumu-nicipal council. The mumu-nicipality can decide on the committee which is responsible for enacting the Child Care Act (Laki lasten päivähoidosta 36/1973) in the municipality. Most of the municipalities (67%) organised the responsibilities of ECE services under the municipal committees of Educational Affairs in the year 2012 (Kuntaliitto, 2013). During the last decade there has been growing transference of ECE from municipal committees of Social Affairs to municipal committees of Educational Affairs. ECE was administered by the municipal committees of Educational Affairs in the municipalities selected for this study.
The organisational contexts of ECE, in terms of their structure and govern-ance, incorporated a variety of programs and the personnel employed in these organisations. As such, the unit of analysis in studying leadership may vary to include leaders on vertical as well as horizontal dimensions of the organisation depending on the particular focus of the study. Early childhood settings are re-flective of the diversity of organisational structures including schools, preschools, early childhood centres, and home-based arrangements. Accordingly, instead of focusing on one school or centre, the unit of leadership analysis within early childhood education could, for example, be one municipality or local govern-ment authority. These matters can also impact on the selection of participants, raise questions about compatibility and representatives of samples included, and thereby inhibit growth of research on distributed leadership.
In this study, a vertical set of the key stakeholder groups that were involved in the leadership of pedagogical functions of ECE, those being municipal com-mittees; ECE leaders; centre directors; and teachers, were selected to be the participants of the study. Understanding leadership from the perspective of the stakeholders is particularly important in ECE settings where decision-makers and
practitioners share a diversity of roles and responsibilities, either as employers and employees or as clients and professionals respectively. Moreover, the geographi-cally and vertigeographi-cally dispersed set of stakeholders chosen as participants of this study raised methodological and theoretical challenges in the application of pre-viously used research methods and theories of distributed leadership. Because of the complexity of the Finnish municipalities as a research context, this study had limited possibilities in choosing approaches used worldwide in investigations of leadership, those being for example observation or shadowing techniques. More detailed descriptions of the key stakeholders are presented in chapter 3.3. Partici-pants of the study.
In Finnish national policy documents for ECE, leadership is rarely men-tioned. Similarly, although distributed leadership approaches have been noted among Finnish scholars and practitioners, they have not received any attention in policy documents. However, the importance of shared understandings of ECE between stakeholders is emphasised. For example, the Finnish National Cur-riculum (STAKES, 2003) states the importance of increasing co-operation be-tween stakeholders such as early childhood staff, parents, and multi-disciplinary professionals. How these partnerships are described is aligned with distributed leadership thinking because of the notion of a “shared understanding” between stakeholders (STAKES, 2003, p. 3). It was also noted that in Finland, launching of Finnish National Curriculum (STAKES, 2003) signalled the need to enhance leadership capacity within early childhood education organisations and explore effective leadership strategies to enable the enactment of complex policy changes.