In trust we trust’: ECE teachers’ leadership enactment

In this article, we explore and discuss Swedish Early Childhood Education (ECE) teachers’ professional mandates related to recent policy of teachers’ responsibility for leadership in teaching activities. Through written descriptions and group interviews, data were compiled on ECE teachers’ experiences and visions of leadership as well as evaluations of their leadership practice. The results show that the ECE teachers’ enactment of leadership consists of both professional responsibility and accountability logics in different fields of tension. ECE teachers stressed trust in characteristics such as children’s needs and interests to be part of leading teaching activities, simultaneously as they emphasised trust in predefined evaluation through systematic quality work. We interpret the ambiguous emphasis on trust as an expression of “in trust we trust”. This ambiguity might hinder the development of a good ECE practice. We conclude that leadership in ECE as a concept needs to be discussed to avoid a fixed and predefined leadership practice. The responsibility for what direction this discussion will take must be shared among ECE practitioners, policy makers and researchers in the field.