What early childhood leadership for what kind of world?

Abstract

This article uses autoethnography as the method of inquiry to explore definitions and contexts of early childhood education leadership. This affords a new space between the subjective and objective, the autobiographical and the cultural, to write in a way that lies between literature and the social sciences. Against a backcloth of scientific and cultural change, five turning-point moments are identified that link personal social circumstances to continuity and change in conceptions of leadership and management, particularly in the early childhood education sector. Modernist hierarchical and more recent subjective or postmodernist models are considered along the way. It is concluded that there is a role for theory in both guiding and interrogating practice. If leaders’ conceptions are to be better informed by knowledge of contrasting and competing theories, then through a process of praxis, critical awareness may increase. This depends, however, on access to the training and development that early childhood education professionals do not currently enjoy.

Introduction

This article uses autoethnography as a method of inquiry to identify five ‘turning-point’ moments in personal experience across a span of 30 years, to reflect on and hence illuminate changing conceptions of leadership and management, specifically in the English early childhood education (ECE) sector.

Background

The narrative’s starting point was an invitation to make an inaugural address on 10 February 2017 to a newly formed special interest group for ECE leadership. This came from a representative of the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS), an independent organisation of practitioners, academics and others in all sectors of education. My presentation’s aim was to consider the nature and relevance of theory to practice in leadership and examine definitions, models and contexts of ECE leadership, both nationally and internationally.

I started to make notes around some basic ideas, which led on to multiple other lines of enquiry related to my experiences of ECE leadership threading through my life over some 30 years. These were revisited and updated; new notes were added and old ones adjusted. The BELMAS presentation served as an anchor point for the flow of thoughts that projected forwards into future planned events, but also reflected back on previous experiences, their meanings to me at the time as I recalled them and their meanings to my more mature present self. As Adlai Stevenson (1952) remarked in a speech in Richmond, Virginia, on 20 September 1952: ‘We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the past which has led to the present’.

I had no personal experience of using autoethnography. Educated as a traditional social scientist in the 1980s, my confidence in conventional social science methodology only gradually eroded over time. I was able to extend my original repertoire of quantitative research skills by incorporating qualitative methods, bringing commitment to a naturalistic and interpretive approach. I acknowledged the socially constructed nature of reality, the reciprocal relationship between researcher and what is researched, and the contextual constraints that shaped the everyday social world. I questioned causal linear theories and problematised concepts of validity, reliability and objectivity, adopting instead their replacement with concepts of trustworthiness and authenticity. I was comfortable to accept that qualitative research provides a set of interpretive activities that do not privilege one methodological approach over another, but I did not fully confront the perspectives and paradigmatic differences among positivist, post-positivist, constructivist and participatory-action models that informed thinking about quantitative and qualitative research at the time. As noted by Denzin and Lincoln (2000: 9), positivism and post-positivism that serve as a backdrop for other paradigms fail to address fully the theory- and value-laden nature of facts, the interactive nature of inquiry, and that the same sets of ‘facts’ can support more than just one theory. Moreover, they fail adequately to address issues surrounding voice, empowerment and praxis. Geertz (1973) had argued that old positivist approaches to human sciences were giving way to more pluralistic, interpretive perspectives, in which the observer has no privileged voice in interpretation and the role of theory is to make sense of the local context through ‘thick descriptions’.

At the time, however, I did not fully appreciate that by the very act of conventionally reporting my research, I was leaving open the possibility of author as subject becoming the ‘site for the production of knowledge/power’ that perpetuated ‘empirical science’s hegemony’ (Clough, 1992, cited in Denzin and Lincoln, 2000: 16). Hence, Ellis and Bochner (2000) were able to develop the argument for writing as a method of inquiry that moves through successive stages of self-reflection. As the fieldworker’s records flow from the field research to the final research text to become the accepted presentation of the ethnographic and narrative experience, so fieldwork and writing become blurred. Denzin and Lincoln (2000) noted that there was no difference between writing and fieldwork, creating a ‘crisis of representation’ that moved qualitative research in new and critical directions. New ways of exploring ethnographic writing were being investigated, opening up space between social science prose and literature, between subjectivity and objectivity, autobiography and culture. Tedlock (1991) described the ‘ethnographic memoire’. Here, the ethnographer, as the focus of the story, tells a personal tale of what went on in the backstage of doing research, where the ethnographer’s experiences are incorporated into the ethnographic description and analysis of encounters between the narrator and members of the group being studied.

Somehow, I had stumbled on an autobiographic genre of writing and research that allowed me to connect personal to social and cultural, and to give structure to my life by selecting and rearranging the past. This would offer me as author a means of self-discovery, a selective story about finding my way through research, including, in this case, ECE leadership research, in order to achieve a better understanding of its theories, models and practices.

Context to the autoethnographic approach

The autoethnographic genre as a variety of ethnographic writing emerged at a time when other new research approaches were arising. These were a reflection of broader trends in society that led to doubt about traditional models of science and scientific thinking. Kuhn (1962) challenged the then established view of scientific progress through accumulation of accepted facts and theories, arguing for periods of both conceptual continuity and revolutionary science as new paradigms asked new questions of existing data and old ones were overthrown. Although arguing instead for a view of science as evolutionary, Toulmin (1969) also subscribed to the view that the methods of natural science had been overapplied, with notions of validity set aside and ideas of rationality related to functions of human reason abandoned. Rejecting all claims to the mind’s privileged access to ‘things-in-themselves’, Rorty (1979) sought to deal with issues of science and objectivity, and the nature of truth and meaning. In his view, language should be deployed as a tool to deal with natural and social environments, and to provide pragmatic solutions.

The rejection of ideas rooted in beliefs about knowledge construction and scientific reasoning, known as the ‘modernist’ epistemology, was challenging assumptions about an orderly world with universal laws and notions of stable rational subjects with a fixed identity, independent of culture and context. By contrast, ‘postmodern’ thinking was seeking substitutes for universal approaches, essentialism and rational thinking. One consequence of anti-essentialist thinking was to attack the inequalities and oppressions of marginalised groups, highlighting gender, race and disability, with diversity becoming a prominent feature of postmodernist thinking.

Suffice to say, postmodern thinking has presented a challenge to a whole structure of unexamined assumptions and authoritative accounts or ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard, 1984). Lyotard introduced the term ‘postmodern’ into philosophy and social science in his analysis of the notion of knowledge in postmodern society that saw an end to ‘metanarratives’. He preferred instead a plurality of small narratives that compete with one another, thereby replacing the ‘totalising’ grand narratives. Post-structural writers such as Barthes (1968) and Derrida (1978) here undermined modernist views of author, text and audience, arguing that notions of author and authorial authority are projections of meaning, as the author’s mind is ultimately unknowable. Replacing the author by the reader as subject allows examination of other sources for meaning, or ‘deconstruction’. Meanwhile, Foucault (1980) addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how these were used as a form of social control through institutions. Bourdieu (1992) concentrated on symbolic power, in the form of economic, cultural and social capital, present in social relations and used as an instrument of dominance by individuals and groups. Both Foucault and Bourdieu were focused on the dynamics of power in society and how this is passed on in ways that maintain the social order.

Increasingly, postmodern perspectives have been absorbed in the ECE field. For example, Dahlberg et al. (1999) drew on postmodern thinking to propose a reconceptualisation of early childhood, its institutions and pedagogy. Brooker (2002) drew on Bourdieu’s account of various forms of capital to explain the experiences, culture and values of a group of working-class four-year-olds in a London school, their families’ capital and their strategies for maximising it. MacNaughton (2005) brought together a series of case studies demonstrating how Australian teachers and researchers applied the post-structural ideas of Foucault, and critical and feminist theories, to deepen their critical reflections on classroom practice. Osgood (2012) used feminist theories to interrogate English ECE practitioners’ narratives concerning their nursery experiences. In the USA, Bloch et al. (2014) have used critical theory, feminist and post-colonial theory, and a diversity of theories and methods to reconceptualise early childhood care and education.

Ideas of postmodernity in the context of ECE were also explored by Grieshaber (2016; Grieshaber and Ryan, 2013). She proposed that postmodern ideas are political as they identify modernist discourses that control, classify and normalise children, childhood, families and childhood education, exposing them as regulatory, inequitable and discriminatory. Significant in this respect are child development and standards discourses. Challenges to these dominant modernist discourses were based on their application to notions of ‘developmentally appropriate practice’ and child-centredness approaches that had been adapted globally as if culture- and context-free (Burman, 2017; Walkerdine, 1984). Grieshaber noted how feminist post-structural theory had enabled research to address gender and power relations in ECE, how the profession was feminised, the role of men and masculinity theory, and the ways in which gender was still an inequitable aspect of children’s everyday lives (Yelland, 2005). Post-colonial, post-structural and feminist structural theories were used to examine intersections among race, ethnicity and gender, including equity strategies (Cannella, 1997; Viruru, 2001). The new sociology of childhood, conceptualising children as cultural and historical constructions rather than biological subjects, had opened up the possibility of children having social agency (James et al., 1998) and made possible the positioning of children as active participants in researching their lives. This has opened the way for new methodologies focused on researching with children, listening to them and involving them in research design. In sum, postmodern critique opened up the possibility of contesting competing discourses in ECE. It offers alternative ways of thinking and working, and exposes practices that marginalise and disempower particular groups. It reflects a growing interest in ontologies and epistemologies that differ from those underpinning conventional social science, which have, in turn, opened the way to more socially just and equitable practice. At the same time, it could not offer all the answers or the means to provide the solutions.

In the field of ECE leadership, leadership conceptions were also being subjected to critical examination. Nicholson and Maniates (2016) attempted to identify modernist epistemologies’ employment to theorise ECE leadership and to consider the potential of postmodern perspectives to address implicit and often uncritical modernist perspectives. Three conceptions were proposed: traditional leadership that privileges formal position and authority, underpinned by a modernist epistemology; expanding definitions that recognise the involvement of a wider range of ECE professionals; and a relational and distributed construct, open to power-sharing, questioning and revision. They argued that postmodern conceptions of leadership begin with an understanding that identities are not fixed by individual traits, and that becoming a leader is not a matter of hierarchical and linear progression up a fixed career ladder. Instead, it was recognised that ECE workplaces are contextually defined and constrained, that leaders have agency to influence the construction of identities, and that these might change dynamically over time. Central to this was working respectfully with diverse groups. They noted increasing evidence of postmodern epistemology having influence on ECE leadership literature, a shift in ECE leadership theorising, a movement towards a more inclusive construct involving a wider range of ECE professionals, and a greater fluidity in ECE discussion. They proposed using a multilevel model of intersectionality to problematise the way identities are described in ECE leadership, and called for a revision and reimagining of leadership concepts by promoting a postmodern turn in theorising.

Nicholson et al. (2018) have followed this by reviewing ECE leadership literature between 1995 and 2015 to expose embedded epistemological assumptions, uncover the stated purposes of leadership work, and examine the extent, if any, to which it incorporates considerations of social justice and equity. They found that whilst traditional modern conceptions were still common, there has been a shift towards more distributed and relational understandings, with leadership recognised as socially constructed, culturally informed and dynamic. Overall, there has been an increased emphasis on postmodern thinking over time, although it was felt that there was a need for more intentional links to be made between leadership and goals to address the social injustices of children, families and ECE professionals. The authors claim that no one has yet systematically examined the epistemological assumptions embedded in the ECE leadership literature.

Embracing a modernist systematic review approach, with its epistemological assumptions and its step-by-step procedures, the researchers positioned themselves as authoritative authors who ‘know’ and ‘tell’, whilst at the same time avowing their postmodern sensibilities. To ECE leaders, practitioners and researchers, this illustrates how we are all still immersed in a modernist environment of narratives, counternarratives and hybridity.

Towards autoethnography

In this environment, in which a variety of approaches to knowing and telling coexists, there remains a core doubt that any method, theory, discourse, genre or tradition has privileged status or universal claim as ‘right’ (Richardson, 2000). Post-structuralism is helpful in linking language, subjectivity, social organisation and power. Competing discourses, ways of bestowing meaning and organising the social world situate language as a place for exploration as well as struggle. Different forms of writing have proliferated as social science writing practices are no longer held inviolate. One form of writing to emerge has been autoethnography, in which authors tell stories about their own lived experiences, relating the personal to the cultural. As Ellis and Bochner (2000) indicate, this varies according to the emphasis on the research process (graphy), culture (ethnos) and self (auto), but many writers shift focus even within a single piece of writing. For instance, reflexive ethnography focuses on a culture or subculture, with authors using their own experiences in the culture or subculture reflexively and their personal experience becoming important chiefly in terms of the way in which it illuminates the culture under study (Warren, 2011). A complete-member or analytic ethnography refers to researchers who explore a group of which they are already full members; they are fully identified with the group and committed to developing broader theoretical understanding of it. In contrast, social scientists who wish to distance themselves from realist or analytic traditions and draw on postmodern ideas may write evocative personal ethnography focused on academic as well as personal lives (Anderson, 2006). This latter was suitable to my needs.

As a social science academic with long-term interest in ECE leadership, I still had unanswered questions from my own experiences of working with leaders, and I was seeking new perspectives. I liked the notion of Denshire (2014: 831) that autoethnography is an alternative method and form of writing that can make for uncomfortable reading as a ‘transgressive account in the context of professional practice [that has] open[ed] out a professional’s life, remaking power relations in the process’.

But what claims for veracity could I make for a medium that was so relatively new? How could I best keep notes on experience that, in turn, stimulated a raft of fresh recollections leading to the uncovering of still other sources that might inform events yet to take place? How best to analyse these? What models could I find to give a steer? Sumsion (2000) learned from male ECE practitioners’ biographies about gender-positioning from in-depth interviews and informal conversations. Henderson’s (2018) autoethnography has presented seven stories drawn from her own ECE professional journey, spanning more than 30 years, which were ‘turning-point moments’ (Denzin, 2014: 35). Each story was followed by a reflexive account and exploration of the self-narratives, using literature and current discourses to consider possible influences at work and contextualise the stories (‘I remember, I write’; ‘I think reflexively’; ‘I wonder critically’). A final section reflected more widely on autoethnography as a research methodology and its challenges. I liked Henderson’s approach, but also thought that informal conversations with someone close to me over my lifespan might provide additional insights.

In summary, autoethnography opened a space for me to write between social science prose and literature, a space between subjectivity and objectivity, autobiography and culture. The very act of writing this introduction has already changed how I think about ECE leadership, and this needs capturing in writing before it is lost.

Autoethnography: my method of inquiry

An important first task was to locate my voice as narrator in the English ECE system, where all three- and four-year-olds are entitled to 15 hours of free nursery education, with extended entitlement for three- to four-year-olds of working parents and those two-year-olds deemed most disadvantaged. ECE takes place in a variety of settings, including state nursery schools, nursery classes and reception classes within primary schools, as well as settings outside the state sector, such as voluntary preschools, privately run nurseries or childminders. An Early Years Foundation Stage came into force in September 2008, with a regulatory and quality framework for provision of learning, development and care for children in all registered early years settings between birth and the academic year in which they reach five. All publicly funded preschools, nurseries and state schools must also identify and help children with special educational needs and disability, and educational psychologists have a role in assessing and providing advice to families and other professionals to tackle these difficulties.

As a lifelong writer and researcher, it was clear to me that my books, chapters, edited texts and journal articles would provide a backbone to my account, insight into my experience and patterns of thinking over time. Equally important to this present piece of writing as it grew were the accumulating scribbled comments and Post-it notes capturing reflections along the way and helping me embellish turning-point moments.

1. My emerging identity as a writer

My first turning-point moment came in 1967 towards the end of my teacher training when I happened to be talking to my tutor. Unexpectedly, she asked: ‘What are you going to do when you leave? Are you going to write?’ To which I replied: ‘Write what?’ She did not offer a particularly satisfactory answer, thereby leaving the question in the air. Maybe she felt that I should have to take responsibility for determining what I wrote. The message that I took from this exchange was that she thought I could write, and it was an important affirmation that stayed with me, although it also puzzled me.

Although I chose the social science route and, in time, became an educational psychologist, I did indeed begin presenting at psychology conferences, writing and publishing journal articles. I never questioned that I should become a social science writer or thought this in any way out of the ordinary. Writing creatively was something that I have never returned to. Over recent years, I have had the opportunity to research creative partnerships between young children and practising artists, and, more specifically, to explore the ways in which established writers (novelists, poets and scriptwriters) mentor writing groups of children of various ages. Although this brought me closer to literary writing, it was from the position of a social science researcher. Discussing writing as a form of inquiry, Richardson (2000: 926) identified that an unfolding over the 20th century of the relationship between social scientific writing and literary writing grew in complexity. The boundary lines between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ and between ‘true’ and ‘imagined’ were blurring. Despite the blurring of genres and our contemporary understanding that all writing is narrative, she averred that fiction is separated from scientific writing by the context and intended audience for the text, and by the ‘truth claims’ advanced and how these will be evaluated. Perhaps the conversation with my tutor simply set an expectation on my part of horizons beyond teaching lying ahead.

2. ‘Aren’t you going to mention “Tyro”?’

After completing some years of teaching and a three-year research contract, in 1983 I trained then began work as an educational psychologist. At the time, broader dissatisfactions with traditional scientific models and conceptions were driving psychologists to seek alternative ways to practise. Modernist discourses that sought to control, classify and regulate disabled children and young people were being challenged. Fixed notions of special educational need and disability as disempowering static traits were being challenged by ideas that viewed disability as socially and culturally constructed. Despite differences, scholars of the time (e.g. Oliver, 1990; Shakespeare, 1991) were rejecting medical or biomedical models of disability. They saw disability not simply as an attribute of an individual, but as resulting from a complex mix of conditions, activities and relationships, created in the social environment. Such ideas had a powerful effect on psychological practice in education, health and social welfare. Radical psychologists proposed that psychological practice should be reconstructed by moving away from what happened ‘within’ the individual to create a ‘social practice’, examining how individuals are affected by organisations and social systems (McPherson and Sutton, 1981: 167).

Whilst considering the next turning-point moment, a close friend, the second author of the ‘reconstructing’ text quoted above, reminded me of an angry article that I published under the protective pseudonym ‘Tyro’ (1985), following a heated exchange with my principal psychologist. My friend queried: ‘Aren’t you going to mention “Tyro”?’ The article was written for a professional journal for educational psychologists and entitled ‘Musings of a recently-trained educational psychologist’, stimulated by a first interview with my boss, who had assured me that I had scope to develop my own style of work:

Before long I discovered that the pace of work left little time to discuss programmes of intervention with teachers or give necessary support and follow-up. One fateful day, I drove to the administrative centre to clear paperwork and was hauled into the boss’s office. I was told to recite the schools that I had attended and those I intended to visit, and yelled at for wasting petrol and valuable school time. I was reminded that a request that I had made to present at a conference would be reconsidered and possibly withdrawn … I recalled my boss’s words when I started the job – ‘Yes, systems approaches are fine, so long as your case figures don’t go down, and then you’d better watch out!’ I learned that ‘hero-innovators’, girded with new technology and beliefs, did not assault their organisational fortress and institute changes in themselves and others, at a stroke. Little did I think that the organisation which ate hero-innovators for breakfast would be the very organisation that employed me (Tyro, 1985: 331).

I asked my friend why he had recommended including this piece. He said that because of its polemic and confrontative nature, I might not have considered it in my collection of contemporaneous notes. It did, however, illustrate the conflict when a professional training and belief system does not sit well with the social context and serves to constrain any worth the job might confer. My acceptance of a university post three years later he saw as a means to ‘cast off’ bureaucratic practice for the supposed greater freedom of an academic post.

This new context also led to my first edited text (Aubrey, 1990: 12–14), representing one direction taken by psychologists of the time to create social practice that examines how individuals are affected by organisations and social systems. It was oriented towards identifying organisational problems, analysing situations, recommending actions and solutions, and, if required, helping to implement such solutions. Importantly for me, it brought contact with leading writers on educational management of the time and a step closer to leadership and management. ‘Tyro’ did indeed mark a turning-point moment in my life.

3. Early encounters with management theory

Fittingly, when I entered higher education in the autumn of 1987, it was to lead a Master’s programme designed for senior teachers with a responsibility for children with special educational needs and disability (SEND), from a systems perspective. This provided me with an opportunity to shift my attention away from the individual child, which educational psychology practice had required, and towards a focus on social practice within an organisation’s social system. As the course focused on institutional change, I proposed that individual students, as agents of change in their own institutions, should have training in using a problem-solving model of investigation to assist in identifying priority educational needs in their own schools. I recorded my experience at the time as a chapter from the above text:

Aims were two-fold, to obtain personal change in the individual student; and institutional change in the student’s ‘home’ school organisation, leading to the development of improved policies, procedures, programmes or practices for SEND pupils. Course material was influenced by, and derived from a range of knowledge bases: organisational psychology, social psychology and sociology, applied behavioural analysis, school organisation development, management theory and education research … [I noted] …we know much less about effective school-wide strategies … the school effectiveness literature is clear in identifying the leader as focal point for innovation but less clear what constitutes effective leadership (Aubrey, 2000: 12, 22).

I observed at the time that the internal forces acting on the institution will be both the formal and informal structures of the organisation, its leadership, the framework of roles and responsibilities, and, less visibly, the informal norms, the powerful informal leaders, the strengths, biases and coping patterns of subgroups and their alliances, and some emergent others, based on historical conflict. External forces came in the form of unprecedented changes in a new era of accountability and performance indicators, heralded in by the Education Reform Act (Department of Education and Science, 1988), including the introduction of a national curriculum and associated assessment and testing, together with the local management of schools.

Regulation and inspection of schools by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) followed in 1992 to determine how well schools were managed and what processes were in place to ensure standards of teaching and learning. Now, the inspection process covers all educational institutions, state schools and some independent schools, early years and children’s services, and initial teaching training, strongly influencing what is defined as ‘strong’ leadership. In parallel, educational management as a field of study had been developing, influenced by management theories and bureaucratic models developed outside education. Ball (2004) described the stress in English schools’ standards and targets as a culture of accountability, and competition as a ‘performativity’ – a mode of regulation that uses judgements about performance as measures or inspections of the worth of individuals’ and institutions’ outputs. The question of who controls the judgement leads back to Lyotard’s (1984) notion of a ‘discourse of power’. The pressures on head teachers to demonstrate improved performance, through appraisal, annual reviews and data collected for Ofsted inspectors and their staff, are still strong.

4. Towards early childhood leadership?

The next 10 years, from 1989 to 1998, were dedicated to initial teacher education, during which I had my own experience of leadership, first as a director of a primary and early years postgraduate certificate of education course and later as a deputy and acting head of department of a university institute of education. Suffice to say that I was too overwhelmed by my bureaucratic role to consider theories of management and leadership.

From 1999 to 2009, however, after changing institutions, I was freed to focus primarily on research in ECE policy, which was continuing to undergo rapid change. A Labour government, in power from 1997 to 2010, inherited a system of ECE that included very little state provision. The early 2000s saw the expansion of childcare and other services for children and families. A National Childcare Strategy, introduced in 1998, signalled a new centrality of early years in the political agenda that intended to merge care and education services and extend ECE workforce training and provision. The climate allowed me to raise questions about ECE leadership such as: What do practitioners know about ECE leadership? What knowledge is essential and who produces such knowledge? This suggested that a different type of investigation was needed to capture what ECE leaders actually do, as well as what they report about their practice. This all occurred when ECE had never been higher on the English policy agenda, and involved a range of leaders and their staff responding to this agenda in a variety of settings – state-funded and private or voluntary – taking the opportunity to reflect on their own leadership practice through survey questionnaires, follow-up interviews and observations.

My own reflections were recorded at the end of the investigation:

The role of EC [early childhood] leaders has become more challenging due to the raft of new interrelated policies and associated initiatives. The range and complexity of tasks required has increased the need for expanded expertise. While EC leaders still tend to be line-managed in traditionally organised local-authority hierarchies, the work they carry out is pulling them in new directions. These demand different models of leadership, taking account of their partnerships with other agencies and operation in leadership teams that create flatter organisational structures and collaborative cultures. Among leaders in state schools, teaching is still the dominant activity … Administrative and organisational activities take a substantial amount of the working day, particularly for the private and voluntary sector. The scale and range of children and communities, professionals and agencies, and, hence, degree of specialisation, delegation and distribution of responsibility within settings varies considerably. It is unlikely that one model or a single approach can be appropriate for such a diverse sector. There is clear need for ECE leaders to develop and ‘bring staff on’, that is distribute leadership through the setting. This depends upon an appropriately trained and experienced workforce (Aubrey, 2011: 140).

Our investigation’s survey data showed that respondents from state provision had significantly higher initial qualifications than those in the private and voluntary sector. Those with higher qualifications were more likely to believe that leaders should be authoritative but engage in collaborative leadership. In fact, in interview, both leaders and staff described their organisations as hierarchical in structure but collaborative in culture. Those with higher initial qualifications were more likely to believe that leaders should be warm, kind and sympathetic. When directly observed, leaders in state provision retained their direct teaching responsibility and, whilst administration, management and leadership activities were incorporated, they carried out a range of tasks collaboratively with co-workers for the maximum benefit of the organisation. By contrast, those in private and voluntary organisations were observed to spend a large part of the day, without administrative assistance, engaged in technical and managerial tasks related to staff cover in holiday periods, dealing with salaries and processing fees. This removed them largely from direct teaching responsibility but reduced their collaborative interactions with staff and children. Structural and economic differences in service provision between state and private providers related to:

• Organisational arrangements – sessional or full day;

• Ownership by private organisation or government agency;

• Type of learning environment provided and staff qualifications;

• Philosophy adopted;

• Meeting costs through fee-paying parents or state funding;

• Range and complexity in involvement of other agencies.

These reflections demonstrate the significant impact of cultural and contextual difference in setting on enactment of leadership.

In many ways, they also illustrate and echo observations from our own review of the ECE leadership literature and those of others (Dunlop, 2008; Muijs et al., 2004; Nicholson et al., 2018) that, due to the complexity of ECE leadership, there has been an absence of a universal definition of leadership and it is not well informed by theory and research in the wider field. This, coupled with historically low rates of pay and hence the low value of the ECE sector, and with the absence of a career ladder or leadership training, has limited theorising and engagement with broader debates within the fields of business and educational leadership.

As noted by Bush (2011), educational institutions’ approaches to management vary according to their size, organisational structure, the time available for management, the availability of resources and the external environment. Accordingly, it is unlikely that any single theory can capture the reality of leadership or management; ‘[r]ather, aspects of several perspectives are present in different proportions within each institution’ (Bush, 2011: 205). Hence, we find pedagogical leadership in ECE running alongside modes of distributive and participative practice within a broader centralised and bureaucratic national system. Facing such conceptual pluralism created another turning-point moment for me, and it seemed reasonable to return to my starting point – the nature and relevance of theory to practice.

5. What ECE leadership?

From this point on, my ECE leadership research, writing and teaching activities increased, and an invitation to contribute the ‘leadership in ECE’ entry for The SAGE Encyclopedia of Contemporary Early Childhood Education (Couchenour and Chrisman, 2016: 808–810) led to a reassessment of the existing literature to reflect current thinking in the field, spanning multiple countries:

Globally, policymakers are increasingly aware of the importance of ECE, particularly for children from low-income households and effective leadership is now recognised as central to improvement. Thus, additional research regarding the meaning of leadership in ECE is needed … For all educational leaders, this may be best accomplished through an identification of ways that ECE is a unique field of study with multiple areas of research … Lack of leadership development programmes remains an unresolved problem (Aubrey, 2016: 810).

I was reminded of the views of the ECE leaders taking part in the investigation that led to the fourth turning-point moment, who regarded training courses as just one source for their ideas on leadership. They saw themselves as ‘leading by example’ and responding intuitively ‘on the spot’. There was a strong sense of ‘learning on the job’, ‘learning by leading others’ and observing other leaders as role models, good and bad. Their verdict was that ‘experience was more use than theory’. I wondered at the time who produced practitioner knowledge. It was certainly not the case that practitioner leaders were not sophisticated consumers, or users, of other people’s knowledge. Rather, the practitioner leader was a professional producer, participating in the creation and use of leader knowledge in the field. At this point, I was led back to reflect on ‘practical knowledge’, with its implicit rules that guide what to do in a particular situation and practical principles that provide more inclusive formulations of what to do in a particular situation (Schön, 1983). This is an embodied knowledge that develops from participating in reflection on action or experience. It is the knowledge that professionals produce and possess which captures the essential elements of practice and serves to organise knowledge in relevant areas.

Revisiting this encyclopaedia entry did not, in itself, lead to my fifth turning-point moment. BELMAS’s request to consider the nature and relevance of theory to practice in ECE leadership did lead me to radical reassessment of ECE leadership theorising. In terms of the relevance of leadership theory to practice, there has to be a role for theory in both guiding and interrogating practice. Freire (1985) stressed the dynamic relationship between theory and practice as active reflection and reflective action. Through this process of praxis, we use awareness of our situation and circumstances to seek change in them. This does presuppose that ECE leaders have access to professional training and development that simply is not available, bearing in mind that dialogue and knowledge alone – even dialogue with others – are insufficient to know their social reality. They must act together to transform their world through further action and critical reflection.

Conclusion

Looking through the notes that have accumulated in the process of writing this autoethnography, I note that I have focused outward on social and cultural aspects of personal experience and then inward to shed light on the self as writer and social scientist. Putting together evidence in written form as a basis for interpretation has been insightful and gives me confidence in the account’s validity. As noted by Hujala et al. (2013), researchers from different countries have attempted to deconstruct leadership attributes, skills and knowledge, at the same time acknowledging the lack of agreed definitions and terminology. Whilst recognising the importance of pedagogical leadership to achievement, they highlight the impact on ECE of a politicised educational reform agenda in many countries, with effective leadership being associated with standards and outcomes. Male and Palaiologou (2015) argued that ‘pedagogy’ and ‘leadership’ have many times been joined together in judging the educational organisation’s achievement in meeting targets and outcomes to serve the performativity agenda. They emphasised that leadership should be context-dependent rather than model-dependent, based on a ‘how-to-do’ approach. They proposed leadership for learning contexts that was fluid and subject to negotiation between teachers and learners, the classroom and community ecology. Effective leadership, for them, was not a role, function or practice but, in essence, a praxis, in the sense of reflection and action on the world linked to values and making a difference to the world.

So, what kind of ECE leadership for what kind of world? Given the variety of ideas, values and discourses reflecting broader national and international ECE contextual trends, it is unlikely that there can be any one overarching theory. A new ‘leadership-as-practice’ movement has conceived of leadership as a social, material and jointly accomplished process (Railin, 2016: 2). The fundamental belief that leadership occurs as a practice has been one theme running through this article, and a strong view expressed by ECE leaders in our investigation. In the context of the leadership-as-practice movement, a ‘practice’ refers to a coordinated effort among participants to reach a distinctive outcome. In order to find leadership, it is necessary to investigate the practice in which it is occurring. The action is collective, although leadership may originate from efforts of particular individuals who have wisdom or experience, or already occupy management roles. Leadership-as-practice does free the leadership concept from the ‘grand narratives’ of ECE leadership theory and their claims to legitimate truth. Leadership-as-practice seeks to understand leadership wherever it appears, and so its construction is always context-specific and value-driven. Practice theory arises from everyday actions and interactions rather than norms of culture. It values collective engagement, divergence and ambiguity, and potentially offers an alternative critical discourse to traditional management and leadership theory. By not requiring pre-specified outcomes and a narrow performativity, practice can incorporate the processes of participants’ shared and exploratory discourses.

Inevitably, the changing educational context as described here is partial, and the examples from ECE leadership are merely illustrative. The aim has been to disturb some of the dominant discourses underpinning ECE leadership, uncover some of the assumptions supporting them, and offer an alternative leadership-as-practice model that is consistent with both ECE leaders’ own constructions of leadership and resonates with existing shared and distributed traditions.