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Staff retention and functional teamwork are major challenges in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), where leadership is increasingly viewed as a shared team-level process. This study investigates how team leadership (TL), conceptualised as the functions through which teams meet their needs, is enacted among Swedish ECEC staff and how it supports collaborative work under current policy conditions. Using a revised version of the Team Leadership Taxonomy. 122 ECEC professionals completed a survey with both quantitative items and open-ended responses. The results show patterns of strong strategic alignment, high awareness of pedagogical goals, and robust relational support within teams, but substantial variability in operational clarity, task distribution, problem-solving responsibility, and psychological safety. Participants described challenges linked to shifting team compositions, unequal pedagogical competence, and inconsistent organisational support from principals, which often constrained their ability to enact both positional and distributed leadership. Overall, the findings suggest that ECEC teams possess considerable capacity for collaborative leadership, yet uneven organisational conditions limit the consistency of TL functions. Strengthening role clarity, planning structures, and reflective routines may enhance team functioning and contribute to a more sustainable ECEC workforce.

Children’s learning about artefacts as technological solutions is a central part of early childhood technology education. This study investigates what aspects of artefacts teachers address in their teaching as well as any relationships between teachers’ conceptions of technology and their teaching of artefacts. We investigated this using a questionnaire and conducting factor and cluster analyses. Results showed that most preschool teachers include artefacts in their technology teaching. Aspects addressed in this teaching are the artefact’s common use and name, the fact that the artefact solves a problem and has a (purposefully designed) physical nature, humans’ role in its development, and the temporal aspect of the development and that the artefact is a technological object. The most common aspects addressed are the name of the artefact and what it is normally used for. The least common aspects include the artefacts temporal development and the human’s role in their development. Only one cluster-group stated they teach this more often than “almost never”, this is the group that strongly agreed with statements referring to technology as both an artefact and a process. However, agreement with technology being both artefact and process was no guarantee for including this kind of content. This relation is further discussed.

In Sweden, the Compulsory School for Students with Intellectual Disabilites (CSSID) is currently experiencing political change, as this type of school is being renamed and is undergoing organisational changes. The inclusion of children with intellectual disabilities (ID) in schooling, and in general society, has been challenged and debated for decades; such debates are at the heart of some of these changes. In this study, we have systematically investigated the policy work (e.g. government reports and statements) preceding and governing the changes. Hence, the purpose of the study is to contribute knowledge on how policy documents inscribe meaning to the inclusion of children with ID. Results show that discourses on inclusion are connected to neoliberal values and practices, such as assessment, global comparison, and accountability. It has been suggested that this may have a profound and long-term effect on how children with ID are fabricated and hence, how the child with ID and their education can be understood in terms of being included in the idea of ‘all students’ in policy, and in addition, in practice.

The revised Swedish national curriculum stresses that preschools should, on the one hand, place emphasis on stimulating children’s language development in Swedish, while on the other hand help children with a mother tongue other than Swedish develop their mother tongue. The aim of this study is to analyse preschool teachers’ strategies to develop multilingualism in daily life in preschools. The analysis was conducted by analysing their reflections on multilingualism and how their beliefs are transformed into educational strategies and parental cooperation. The results reveal two main strategies: joint language expression and reflection with children and parental cooperation in developing children’s multilingualism. The analysis revealed patterns of strategies for activities that we argue form multilingual educational strategies. These various strategies tend to occur in the daily work of the preschool staff.

För fritidshemmet betonar policydokument att elever ska stöttas särskilt utifrån det sociala lärandet. Elevers sociala lärande kan tolkas utifrån det som i läroplanen beskrivs som arbetet med skolans värdegrund. Värdegrundsarbetet är en central del av uppdraget och i läroplanen betonas även vikten av att personal är aktiva och medvetna i sitt uppdrag. Detta kapitel baseras på en studie, vars syfte är att belysa fritidshemspersonals perspektiv på arbetet med socialt lärande i fritidshemmet. Sammanlagt gjordes fyra gruppintervjuer med totalt 21 fritidspersonal, på deras respektive arbetsplatser. Resultatet visar skilda perspektiv på hur personalen förhåller sig till att samtala om värdegrundsarbetet och hur de beskriver sin verksamhet utifrån det. Dels visar sig en uppfattning om värdegrunden som underförstådd och att den inte är nödvändig att samtala om. Dels framträder bilden av en verksamhet med en uttalad medvetenhet om betydelsen av de kollegiala samtalen som grund för arbetet med att kontinuerligt främja elevers sociala lärande. Utifrån dessa perspektiv diskuterar vi kollegiala samtal som en del av ett didaktiskt reflekterat värdegrundsarbete i fritidshemmet.

Swedish leisure time centres (LTCs) are included in the Swedish Education Act and are used by almost every pupil in the age range of 6–9 years. They are governed by national policy documents with a certain emphasis on social learning. This article aims to highlight the LTC staff’s perspectives on their work of promoting social learning in the Swedish LTC. The article is based on a qualitative study, with data from group interviews with 21 LTC staff. The data are analysed with an abductive approach, with Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory as a theoretical point of departure. Our results show that the work is directed both by the staff’s beliefs and by the structural conditions of the activities, which the staff seldom feel able to influence. This causes frustration among staff and, owing to a lack of didactic reflections, social learning among pupils is not optimised. We argue that the LTC needs to be further explored, at the municipal and local management levels, to enable optimised social learning for pupils in the LTC.