Preschool teacher profession and Swedish preschool - restructuring in a time of reduced birth rates and financial cuts

“Stop it” - do you really need all the preschools you are planning?" This is the call in the fall of 2024 from the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR) to municipalities planning new preschools. The call highlights a future scenario for Swedish preschools based on a reduced birth rate over the next ten years. Every tenth preschool will need to be closed and resources must be reduced by approximately 12% compared to today’s allocation. At the same time, research shows how demands on teaching work are increasing and the work is becoming increasingly complex to carry out.

Against this background, the project aims to contribute knowledge about how societal changes affect the Swedish education system - here limited to the example of preschools, preschool teachers and preschool teacher training. The project is relevant to the entire education system; how planning, finances, recruitment as well as how teachers’ professional identities are affected by restructuring and cuts. By understanding the education system as an ecologically interacting system, rather than as independent parts, we can better identify how different parts influence each other and which different co-varying aspects that educational policy must ultimately take into account.

The project's data highlights and focuses on different consequences of restructuring and cutbacks in Swedish preschool. Methodologically and theoretically, the project aims to contribute to the interpretation and understanding of both the dynamic and the context-dependent through:

• Semi-structured interviews with preschool teachers, students, guardians, union representatives and municipal officials. Data are described and interpreted in terms of agents (experiences and visions) and how policy is enacted in preschool activities (policy enactment)

• via responses to structured and open-ended survey questions to preschool teacher students (final semesters) analyse visions and possible concerns that students express about their future professional practice

• narrative analyses of political and union official decision documents

Project participants: Professor Annica Löfdahl Hultman (PI), senior lecturer Katarina Ribaeus, PhD Maria Lennartsdotter, teacher educator Karolina Kjellberg, teacher educator Majvor Dahlgren Levin, senior lecturer Susanne Hansson, PhD student Martina Jordan