Abstract
In this study, we examined how early childhood education and care (ECEC) teachers working in segregated urban areas discuss the sociospatial aspects of their work and agency. Our research questions are as follows: (a) How do ECEC teachers in urban areas talk about sociospatial features in their work with children and their families? and (b) how do these sociospatial features relate to the contextual conditions framing the professional agency achievement of teachers as expressed in their interview speech? Our research was based on semi-structured interviews with formally qualified ECEC teachers (N = 24) working in seven Finnish cities with populations exceeding 100,000. This study is based on the ecological approach to teacher agency, exploring how the varying social, cultural and material aspects of specific ECEC workplace contexts shape teachers’ agency achievement in their everyday work. Our results suggest that sociospatial segregation manifests in teachers’ work discourses through two primary relationally constructed categories: relatively homogeneous and relatively diverse compositions of ECEC. These categories refer to the described scope and relevance of cultural-linguistic and socioeconomic heterogeneity among the children and families with whom the teachers work. In the interviews, these relational aspects of work were often spatially framed by discursively connecting them to the cities’ residential segregation. These sociospatial features intertwined with how teachers discussed the contextual conditions framing their range of options for professional action, thus shaping their agency achievement in urban ECEC.
Introduction
As early as 2001, the early childhood education and care (ECEC) teaching sector in the United States (US) was described as ‘alarmingly unstable’ (Whitebook et al., 2001), and difficulties in recruiting and retaining qualified ECEC professionals have since been noted in many countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2019). Suggested factors behind the staffing challenges include increases in ECEC participation rates, relatively frequent professional turnover, an ageing workforce and insufficient supply of educated ECEC professionals (OECD, 2019). Internationally, turnover rates of ECEC workers have been estimated to vary from 26% to 40% (Totenhagen et al., 2016) or from 19% to 35% (OECD, 2019). Additionally, turnover rates of ECEC teachers have been noted to be significantly higher than those of other teaching professionals (Grant et al., 2019a; Phillips et al., 2016). The reasons why teachers stay or leave their profession in ECEC remain somewhat ambiguous, and the role of teachers’ professional agency in this process has gained only limited attention (see Ciuciu, 2023).
Several factors can shape teachers’ professional choices and work commitment on the micro level, while on the macro level, they may contribute to teacher turnover. Intrinsic motivation to teach has been associated with teachers’ stronger commitment to remain in the ECEC profession (Grant et al., 2019b), suggesting that work aligning with teachers’ own values and goals is important for their professional commitment and retention (see also Schaack et al., 2022). However, working conditions are also relevant; several studies have suggested that unsatisfactory contextual aspects of work can be significant for turnover and attrition among ECEC teachers (Doromal and Markowitz, 2023; Grant et al., 2019b; Kangas et al., 2022; Russell et al., 2010; Schaack et al., 2022; Sirviö et al., 2023). Some contextual aspects linked with teacher turnover and attrition include unsupportive relationships between co-workers; inadequate personnel resources at the workplace (Schaack et al., 2022; Sirviö et al., 2023); lack of support from directors (Doromal and Markowitz, 2023; Russell et al., 2010; Sirviö et al., 2023); unsatisfactory material resources such as wages (Kangas et al., 2022; Schaack et al., 2020; Sirviö et al., 2023; Whitebook and Sakai, 2003), working spaces and materials (Sirviö et al., 2023); and planning time for teachers (Schaack et al., 2022; Sirviö et al., 2023). Notable interventions targeting the sustainability of the ECEC teacher profession include measures to align the wages of pre-primary and primary teachers, improved incentives and opportunities for in-service training and public campaigns to enhance the recognition of the ECEC teaching profession (OECD, 2019).
Staff turnover in ECEC is particularly problematic as it challenges the quality of early education in various ways (see Cassidy et al., 2011). Staff turnover can intersect with child outcomes, as children who experienced a change in teacher between ages one and three were evaluated less positively regarding their socio-emotional behaviour and social competence, suggesting that caregiver stability can be especially beneficial for children's socio-emotional development (Choi et al., 2019). Additionally, developmental gains for four-year-old children, particularly boys, were found to be less optimal when their teacher changed during the school year (Tran and Winsler, 2011). Moreover, staff turnover disrupts the work of the remaining professional community, leading to an increased workload and reorganisation among the remaining staff (Cassidy et al., 2011), highlighting the multiple significances of staff turnover for ECEC quality.
The debate on ECEC teacher retention and turnover has centred on several factors. However, little is known about the work experiences and career choices of ECEC teachers in the context of residential segregation and compositional differentiation of ECEC centres, although these factors have been suggested to potentially shape the turnover of ECEC teachers in low-income areas (Wells, 2015). This study discusses how these forms of segregation can intersect with teachers’ work and agency in urban ECEC. Although residential segregation and ECEC institutional segregation are two phenomena, they often overlap as ‘segregation experienced in one life domain tends to be reproduced in other life domains’ (Tammaru et al., 2021: 68). Residential segregation commonly refers to the social differentiation of neighbourhoods due to the accumulation of social and economic characteristics of the neighbourhood population (Bernelius, 2013). By institutional segregation, we refer to social segregation between ECEC centres, meaning that the social characteristics of families – such as parental education, income levels and ethnic backgrounds – can accumulate in certain centres, often due to urban residential segregation. However, the relationship between centre-level segregation and neighbourhood segregation remains ambiguous. In Germany, research on ECEC segregation has shown notable differences in compositions between institutions, yet segregation patterns can also differ among similar types of regions (Hogrebe et al., 2021). Furthermore, parental choice operates as an additional driver of institutional segregation, resulting in institutions often being more segregated than their surrounding areas (Boterman et al., 2019; Fjellborg and Forsberg, 2023).
The socially differentiated distribution of the population within urban spaces and ECEC settings is conceptualised here as sociospatial segregation. Relatively little is known about teachers’ work experiences and professional choices within the two sociospatial frames of residential and institutional segregation simultaneously. However, previous research has frequently linked children's socioeconomic status to the emotional and instructional quality of ECEC (Aguiar and Aguiar, 2020), indicating that sociospatial segregation in ECEC can also intersect with teachers’ practices. Past research has also indicated that a higher socioeconomic composition of the child group is linked to better learning outcomes for children, regardless of their own socioeconomic background, suggesting that social composition can intersect with ECEC quality, possibly operating through differences in parental involvement and peer effects (Reid and Ready, 2013). Furthermore, sociospatial segregation can shape the career choices of teachers, as higher turnover rates have been observed in schools serving proportionally more disadvantaged pupils (Allen and Sims, 2018).
Aspects related to institutional segregation in segregated urban areas should thus be considered to better understand how ECEC teachers perceive and experience their work in such settings and how the sociospatial features of an urban workplace intertwine with teachers’ intentional professional action, and hence, their agency. In this research, we explore through a thematic analysis of interviews with 24 ECEC teachers how they discuss sociospatial aspects in their work in different urban areas, and how this relates to their perceived range of options for professional action in such contexts, thus contextually shaping teachers’ agency achievement (Priestley et al., 2015) in urban ECEC. In line with the ecological approach described by Mark Priestley, Gert Biesta and Sarah Robinson, we define professional agency as teachers’ ‘capacity to formulate possibilities for action, active consideration of such possibilities and the exercise of choice’ (Priestley et al., 2015: 23), emerging from the interaction between individual capacities and contextual conditions. According to this approach, agency enables teachers to detect and reflect upon varied choices for deliberate action, thus differing from action that is either routinely conducted or constricted due to a lack of any conceivable choices. Hence, strong teacher agency is important for both their job satisfaction and the quality of educational institutions as it enables teachers to act purposefully and dynamically in work situations (Priestley et al., 2015).
Ecological approach to teacher agency
In the ecological approach, the significance of contextual and temporal aspects for professional agency is depicted through three conceptually distinct dimensions: the iterational, projective and practical-evaluative modes of agency (Biesta and Tedder, 2007; Priestley et al., 2015). These concepts draw attention to individuals’ life history and future orientations, as well as workplace-specific material and structural and cultural conditions, for the emergence of teachers’ agentic action (Priestley et al., 2015). The iterational and projective agency dimensions are linked to the life histories and future orientations of individual teachers, encompassing aspects such as beliefs and values based on past experiences as well as future goals and aspirations, which are also ‘largely rooted in teachers’ prior experiences’ (Priestley et al., 2015: 32). These dimensions reflect the extended temporal formation of agentic action, emphasising both the significance of earlier experiences and capacities acquired through education (iterational dimension) as well as the role of future-directed goals and aspirations (projective dimension).
In this research, we specifically examine the significance of the practical-evaluative dimension of teachers’ agency by investigating how they discuss sociospatial aspects in their everyday work in urban areas and how this relates to their agency achievement. This dimension, as a general feature of agency, is associated with context-specific cultural, structural and material resources that are deployed in real situations to evaluate and implement professional action, and these contextual conditions and resources can either hinder or enable the emergence of teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015). For example, collaborative and informal relationships between colleagues support teacher agency, while more hierarchically oriented collegial relationships hinder it (Priestley et al., 2015). Focusing on the practical-evaluative dimension is essential to better understand how teacher agency is achieved through its contextual conditions in ECEC (Nelis et al., 2025). It can also help elucidate how teachers experience possible contextual limitations and affordances that shape their agency achievement in the context of sociospatial segregation.
Commenting on the ecological framework of teacher agency, Rushton and Bird (2024) suggested that spatial conceptualisations are also relevant to consider since ‘[s]pace helps us understand the non-linear entanglement of the cultural, material and relational conditions and qualities of agency made explicit in the ecological approach’ (2024: 267). Teachers with different experiences, values and goals may perceive and utilise the contextual resources of specific relationally constructed spaces variably, thus pointing to the ‘nonlinear entanglement’ of agency constituents described by Rushton and Bird. In this research, by relational space, we are referring to a conception of space that depicts the social positioning of actors in relation to one another, thus differing from a more territorial or fixed conception of space (see e.g. Lubienski and Lee, 2017). The relational space of urban ECEC examines how people with varied social and economic resources are discursively positioned in relation to one another across urban working environments. The purpose of this research is to grasp nuances of the subjectively experienced landscapes of those relational spaces for teachers working in urban ECEC, to understand their significance for teacher agency. In particular, we approach teachers’ experiences regarding the sociospatial features of a workplace as social structures, which are ‘primarily relational, concerning the ways in which people are positioned relative to each other’ (Priestley et al., 2015: 86), and which can provide contextual conditions for teacher agency. For example, Taylor and Lelliott (2022) observed that teachers’ views regarding the skills of students, interpreted as contextual structural resources for agency, frame the perceived possibilities and decision-making of teachers working in under-resourced schools with disadvantaged student compositions. However, contextual affordances supporting teacher agency can also extend beyond a given workplace, as Anderson (2010) suggested, teachers working in deprived urban schools can gain additional resources for their agency from beyond-school support networks.
The Finnish ECEC context
The Finnish ECEC system is strongly related to the Nordic welfare state model, aiming to guarantee education and care to all children. Municipalities are the main providers of both schools and ECEC in Finland and organise how children are allocated to ECEC centres. The principle of (geographic) proximity generally guides the allocation of ECEC placements, thus supporting children's ECEC participation in the relative vicinity of their residential location (Bernelius et al., 2018). Families may also apply for a place directly to private ECEC centres, where customer fees are usually a bit higher than those in the public sector, although publicly subsidised. Different actors may found and organise both for-profit and non-profit private centres; however, they need permission from the Regional State Administrative Agency. The number of private centres has been increasing, indicating marketisation of ECEC also in Finland (see Ruutiainen et al., 2021). In 2019, 72.5% of the ECEC centres were publicly organised, while 27.5% were private (Finnish Education Evaluation Centre (FINEEC), 2019); and all centres are obliged to follow the same national curriculum and legislation. The number of children attending ECEC has also been increasing, yet the amount is smaller than that in other Nordic countries (Paananen et al., 2019; Statistics Finland, 2024). In 2023, 42% of children under the age of three and 90% of three- to five-year-olds participated in ECEC (Statistics Finland, 2024). These rates cover attendance in both family daycare and ECEC centres, yet most of the children participate in centre-based ECEC. Preschool in Finland begins at the age of six and is compulsory for all children.
Note that centres operate in different circumstances since there are over 300 municipalities in Finland, with varying social and economic structures. For example, in urban areas, some ECEC centres have over 50% of their children with a first language other than the national languages (Bernelius and Huilla, 2021), while centres in some municipalities might have much more homogeneous child compositions. Compared internationally, the socioeconomic differentiation of Finnish urban areas remains relatively modest (Bernelius and Huilla, 2021). However, such differentiation shapes educational attainment (Bernelius, 2013), and sociospatial differences have also been observed in studies on teaching personnel in comprehensive schools (Ervasti et al., 2025; Virtanen et al., 2010). Teachers working in more socioeconomically vulnerable areas are more likely to take sick leave (Virtanen et al., 2010) and report higher alcohol consumption (Virtanen et al., 2007), suggesting that sociospatial factors can also shape teachers’ work experiences. Teachers also encounter higher rates and threats of violence in schools located in less affluent neighbourhoods in Finland (Ervasti et al., 2025). Recruitment difficulties (Kosunen et al., 2024), work commitment (Linnansaari-Rajalin et al., 2015) and teacher turnover (Ervasti et al., 2013) vary, to some extent, in relation to sociospatial factors. Similar peer-reviewed research is yet to be conducted on teachers working in Finnish ECEC (see, however, Kosunen et al., 2024) despite residential differentiation at the city level having a greater impact on the areas surrounding ECEC centres than on school catchment areas (Bernelius et al., 2018). However, a recently published report by The Urban Policy Council (2025) suggests significant regional variation in the distribution of formally qualified ECEC teachers in the Helsinki metropolitan area, with lower relative proportion of qualified teachers working in socioeconomically more vulnerable areas. At the policy level, differing working environments have been somewhat acknowledged through application-based additional economic resourcing of institutions (Bernelius and Huilla, 2021), some of which is channelled to teachers working in schools and ECEC institutions serving more vulnerable populations.
The educational qualifications of ECEC teachers are regulated by Finnish legislation and consist of a bachelor's degree in educational sciences, including studies that provide professional competencies. Currently, a significant lack of qualified ECEC teachers among job applicants has been reported in many parts of the country (Larja and Peltonen, 2023). When qualified teachers are not available, the centres can hire substitutes without formal qualifications to work as ECEC teachers. In urban contexts, difficulty in recruiting ECEC teachers are particularly pronounced in specific areas of Finland's largest cities (Kuusikko Working Group, 2023). Therefore, it is alarming that the socioeconomic differentiation of urban neighbourhoods has been suggested to affect teachers’ working conditions, resulting in ECEC teacher segregation – that is, the uneven distribution of qualified teaching personnel across different urban areas (Bernelius and Huilla, 2021), with more qualified personnel clustering in affluent regions (The Urban Policy Council, 2025). Although recruiting qualified ECEC teachers is challenging in various socioeconomic areas of Finland (Kosunen et al., 2024), ECEC directors describe the sociospatial aspects of ECEC centres as factors influencing both the nature of the work and teacher recruitment patterns (Pylkkö et al., 2026).
Data and methodology
Our objective was to examine how teachers working in segregated urban areas discuss the sociospatial aspects of their work and agency. Through a pragmatic enquiry, we aimed to clarify how teachers make sense of these issues in their interview speech. Such sense-making through speech is seen as a historically situated social practice (Fraser, 1991), contextualised within the wider social structures of ECEC centres, urban neighbourhoods and society at large. Therefore, our analytical focus extends to the social context of such practices, along with the socio-historically situated sense-making of the interview discourses. We posed the following questions:
How do ECEC teachers working in urban areas discuss sociospatial features in their work with children and their families? How do these sociospatial features relate to the contextual conditions framing the professional agency achievement of teachers in their interview speech?
We analysed semi-structured interviews (N = 24) with qualified ECEC teachers. They were working in 21 ECEC centres in seven of Finland's nine cities with over 100,000 inhabitants (Statistics Finland, 2023). As sociospatial segregation concerns all large urban contexts in Finland (Bernelius and Huilla, 2021), all interviewees were assumed to have experience with the phenomenon. Interviews were conducted as part of the KOTOPE research project using two distinct datasets. For one dataset, interviewees were recruited based on a previously conducted nationwide questionnaire research of the KOTOPE project. The questionnaire respondents had expressed their willingness to participate in an interview. From this interview dataset, the interviews with qualified ECEC teachers working in cities with over 100,000 inhabitants were included in this research. Another dataset from the KOTOPE research project was included, comprising interviews with both qualified and unqualified ECEC teachers working in the Helsinki metropolitan area. In this dataset, interviewees were recruited from selected ECEC centres located in socioeconomically varying areas. From the latter dataset, only interviews with formally qualified ECEC teachers were included in the analysis. Statistical information regarding the socioeconomic status of the ECEC workplace locations or ECEC compositions was not assessed, as we were primarily interested in how the respondents themselves experienced and discussed the sociospatial aspects in their work. The interviewees worked in public (n = 23) and private (n = 1) ECEC centres during the interviews. The interviews, conducted in 2022–2023, lasted between 45 and 120 min, were conducted either face-to-face or through video meetings and were audio recorded and transcribed with consent. All interviews were conducted by two authors and one research assistant, with informed consent obtained from each interviewee. The interviews covered three main themes: the personal background and career path of the interviewee, work experiences in the centres where they had been employed and the advantages and disadvantages of their occupation (including relationships with families, resources and teacher turnover). Interview excerpts in this paper have been translated from Finnish to English, and we have removed repetitive and filler words from them to improve readability.
The analysis followed a thematic approach (Boyatzis, 1998). Interview data were first coded in Atlas.ti based on the research questions, then thematically organised and finally interpreted in conjunction with the theoretical framework and research questions. For the first research question, the data were initially organised by codes related to the social characteristics of the child group, the ECEC centre or its location. Codes were inductively formulated from the raw data to capture meaningful occurrences, and instances with similar underlying qualities were grouped under the same code (e.g. ‘high socioeconomic status of the parents’). One researcher was responsible for coding the raw data. Finally, codes were organised into main interpretive themes representing relatively diverse or homogeneous ECEC compositions and further analysed using the theoretical framework to answer the research question. For the second research question, we specifically sought examples in the interview data that addressed contextual conditions shaping teachers’ agency achievement. We focused on instances in which teachers discussed possibilities for and limitations to professional action in their everyday work. Coded excerpts were then grouped and analysed as themes representing contextual issues that frame teachers’ options for professional action, interpreted in relation to diverse or homogenous workplace contexts. Our focus in this study was on how teachers talk about the contextual conditions that limit their options for professional action, thereby shaping agency achievement in different workplace contexts. Contextual conditions that afford teachers a range of options for professional action and agency will be assessed in a forthcoming sub-study of the OpeSegr research project. We understand that such specific analytical focus poses challenges for representing sociospatially varying workplace contexts. Therefore, we emphasise that both constraints and affordances shaping teachers’ agency achievement were discussed in all workplace contexts.
Results
Teachers talk about sociospatial segregation in urban ECEC institutions
When analysing teachers’ discussions about sociospatial features in their work with children and families in ECEC, two main types of urban ECEC workplace contexts emerged in the interview data: relatively diverse and relatively homogeneous child groups and ECEC centres. The teachers’ discourses suggested that children in their ECEC groups tended to come from either relatively similar (relatively homogeneous) or noticeably different (relatively diverse) social and cultural backgrounds in relation to each other. The relatively diverse workplace context was characterised by a high proportion of families with migration backgrounds, notable linguistic diversity and more frequent socioeconomic vulnerability. Occasionally, this was also linked with locally experienced recruitment challenges, as reflected in the interview data: [This city district] is a totally unique area. Surely, we probably have some other similar [areas] as well. But it always shows as a recruiting difficulty for us, the uniqueness of this area, precisely since we have many immigrant families and also families with weak life management skills.
In contrast to relatively diverse workplace contexts, environments with relatively homogeneous compositions were discussed as involving children and families with largely similar social, cultural and economic characteristics and with little or no linguistic variation. Some of these homogeneous child groups and ECEC centres were further characterised by the generally high socioeconomic status of the children's guardians, often linked to high levels of education or economic wealth. In such socially homogeneous and affluent settings, the limited linguistic diversity was frequently attributed to the work-related migration of parents. Discourses about these migrant caregivers included mentions of their high educational and professional statuses: Are there different linguistic backgrounds? To some extent, yes, but fairly few. And they are often quite educated, working in [a company] or something like that. Including those with an immigrant background? Yes, they actually moved here for work. So, it's relatively easy [for us] to communicate with the parents … I can’t remember a family with which I haven’t been able to communicate in English.
Both relatively homogeneous and relatively diverse compositions were frequently linked to the perceived demographic features of the centre's location, with families seen as residing relatively close to these units. In principle, teachers working in Finnish ECEC are not provided with direct knowledge of parental income, educational levels or occupations, although they do have information concerning the child's home language. During our interviews, some teachers recounted that their views regarding families’ socioeconomical characteristics, such as educational, professional or economic status, were based on discussions with the children or their guardians. Additionally, teachers often evoked common discourse about the city district to make sense of families’ social characteristics in the ECEC setting. These depictions of relational spaces, meaning the positioning of social actors in relation to each other, are interpreted as social structures shaping teachers’ agency achievement through their practical-evaluative dimension (i.e. the everyday working environment of teachers) (Priestley et al., 2015).
Contextual issues shaping teachers’ agency achievement
In general, teachers working in both relatively homogeneous and relatively diverse ECEC contexts discussed similar contextual issues framing their options for professional agency, such as insufficient resources and challenges related to collegial cooperation and leadership. These factors have also been observed as constraints on agency in earlier research (Ciuciu, 2023) and reflect broader work-related aspects linked to ECEC teacher turnover (e.g. Doromal and Markowitz, 2023; Schaack et al., 2022; Sirviö et al., 2023). In this study, such constraints did not appear to differ significantly across sociospatially varying work contexts, as they were discussed in both homogeneous and diverse ECEC settings.
Teachers in relatively diverse ECEC settings often recounted additional context-specific issues that framed their range of options for professional action and were thus interpreted as shaping their agency achievement. These included social, linguistic and intercultural issues encountered in daily work with children and families. While intercultural issues were primarily related to intercultural communication between the staff and children's guardians, social and linguistic issues were related to the high needs for support of both children and their guardians, as well as a lack of Finnish language skills. For some teachers, these issues were perceived as directly shaping their professional possibilities in diverse ECEC contexts: And in my ECEC centre, we have many Finnish-as-a-second-language learners – approximately half of our group. And it's also an area where there are quite a lot of socially disadvantaged families. How might this manifest in your work? … half of our group's children are designated to the highest support categories. And it shows in so many ways, but what is challenging for us, in my opinion, is that it's harder to create a situation where children can learn from each other's good example and get into that good flow of action where they can learn from each other … Another area where it shows: parents are often fairly lost and need a lot of support and help with the most basic matters. We can’t even expect that if we give some forms to fill out, more than one in four will come back completed. Or if I write a weekly letter and check the [digital] system to see how many parents have read it, it's perhaps two out of 18 parents. And some of the parents can’t even log into those systems or use them. It also shows in the large amount of multiprofessional cooperation we conduct, which then again … consumes most of the [ECEC teachers’] planning time, then … you almost have to use your own free time to plan the programme.
While previous examples mostly reflect social and linguistic challenges framing teachers’ range of options at work, intercultural issues in relatively diverse ECEC contexts were also addressed during the interviews. For example, There, we had to start from how to explain to the parents what is allowed in Finnish child-rearing. That it is not allowed to hit a child here. All sorts of cultural issues that you can think of; every day, we had to be open to encountering anything. And I probably had to ask the parents daily, ‘What is the issue here?’ They had a completely different cultural view of the world, of child-rearing and of being a family. It was quite a long journey for me to learn. At first, I was astonished by the different customs, and then I learned to open my mouth and ask, ‘Why are you doing that?’ And then they explained it to us, and I understood, and that was it.
These discourses seem to portray relatively diverse ECEC as a distinct work context in which the range of options for professional action and decision-making is discursively framed as somewhat restricted, as the available contextual resources of the sociospatially distinct workplace do not align adequately with the context-specific demands for professional action. However, agency achievement was also discussed in relatively diverse ECEC contexts, and a pronounced sense of professional pride and success was sometimes evoked when teachers addressed their sense of professional agency in these contexts: I have said to some new employees of ours that definitely this [work here] is burdensome, and [it] can be challenging too, and one may even end up questioning their own professionalism, but what I have personally aspired to think is that, if I can make it here, in this [disadvantaged and ethnically diverse] area, professionally, then I will be able to overcome anything.
In contrast, teachers working in relatively homogeneous ECEC centres generally did not address similar context-specific issues as shaping the contextual conditions for professional action and agency at their workplace. When sociospatial issues were discussed in these contexts, the contextual social structures were seen as supporting teachers’ range of options for professional action. Hence, in homogeneous settings, context-specific social structures were sometimes experienced as a contextual resource shaping the agency of teachers: I happen to have a group of, I call my child group an elite squad … I don’t have any concern whatsoever about them … But when I was working in [another urban district], and the children in our group came mostly from [neighbourhood's] rental apartments, it was something completely different, for I had 11 children designated to support categories there. So, of course, it had an influence on how we were able to secure the best possible day for children every day. It's completely different now since I don’t have to think about [various requirements for intensified and special support].
Occasionally, sociospatially framed work contexts were valued differently in interview speech. Some teachers working in relatively homogeneous ECEC settings expressed beliefs that working in more disadvantaged ECEC settings was more burdensome, and some interviewees even mentioned that this affected their choice of workplace: What is important for you when choosing a workplace? It's mostly the environment where it's located. Especially if the wage is the same in every workplace, you’ll surely consider where the work might be the easiest. For instance, in these suburbs – well, this place they offered me at first – I suspected that there would’ve been more social problems based on the residential district itself. So, it's a criterion when choosing a workplace to look at where the work might be as easy as possible. Why do you think it's important to focus on the work being as easy as possible? Just for the sake of coping with the work. This work is burdensome enough in any case, so why on earth would I go to [work in] a district where the child groups are possibly more challenging?
Conversely, several interviewees had intentionally chosen to work in more disadvantaged urban regions, and some teachers moreover described sociospatially disadvantaged ECEC contexts as rather desirable workplace options. Positive valuation of such workplace contexts was also associated with area-specific professional challenges by some interviewees, for example, What I’ve been thinking is the so-called glue that has made me stay here at this centre – it's that this is the most challenging residential area of the city, which means that we also experience and encounter different challenges here in our daily [work]. I’ve experienced it so that I gladly take up the challenge. And it keeps my own professionalism and professional development strong.
Conclusion
We examined how ECEC teachers discuss sociospatial features, such as residential and institutional segregation, in their work, and how these discourses shape their perceived options for professional action and agency in Finnish urban areas. These issues are particularly important since Finnish ECEC currently experiences an acute workforce crisis due to a significant lack of formally qualified ECEC teacher applicants (Kosunen et al., 2024; Larja and Peltonen, 2023). Additionally, spatial disparities have been observed in distribution patterns (The Urban Policy Council, 2025) and difficulties in recruiting ECEC teachers (Kuusikko Working Group, 2023) in the largest cities, suggesting that our findings can be beneficial for the development of policies that strengthen teacher retention in urban ECEC.
According to our results, the common discourse on residential segregation intertwines with professionals’ discourses about their work in urban ECEC. As the proximity areas of Finnish urban ECEC centres have been observed to be even more sociospatially segregated than those of school catchment areas (Bernelius et al., 2018), this finding is hardly surprising. The main variations in ECEC centres were conceptualised as relatively homogeneous and relatively diverse ECEC workplace contexts. These sociospatially framed contextual variations reflect institutional segregation in urban ECEC as indicated in professionals’ discourses. The observed contextual variations further challenge the ideal of social inclusion in ECEC (see Hogrebe et al., 2021; Nebe, 2022), as the contrast between relatively diverse and homogeneous ECEC contexts suggests significant compositional differences between ECEC centres instead of a more equal demographic distribution.
Our observations suggest variation in how teachers talk about the contextual conditions shaping their achievement of professional agency (Priestley et al., 2015). In relatively diverse ECEC contexts, sociospatial aspects were more frequently discussed in ways that highlighted contextual conditions framing the range of options for professional action and agency. Yet agency achievement was also discussed, with some teachers expressing a pronounced sense of professional success and agency associated with the sociospatially specific work context. In relatively homogeneous ECEC settings, sociospatially framed issues were mostly not discussed as limiting teachers’ professional options. Together, these observations suggest that perceived sociospatial features intersect with contextual conditions shaping teachers’ agency achievement in segregated urban ECEC. While these issues primarily reflect the practical-evaluative aspect of agency in the ecological model (Priestley et al., 2015), the iterational and projective dimensions of agency also intersected with how teachers view and value the contextual conditions associated with different work settings, thus illustrating the complex and tangled formation of relationally constructed spaces for agency (Rushton and Bird, 2024). Therefore, in the relational space of segregated urban ECEC, the social positioning of actors is being depicted through teachers’ perceptions on varying social features across urban workplace contexts. Perceived social features provide social structures for teacher agency and, together with contextual resources, varying personal resources and teachers’ views, shape teachers’ perceptions regarding their professional options and decision-making, thus framing their agency achievement in segregated urban ECEC.
Furthermore, sociospatially framed discourses also manifested as an issue guiding some teachers’ choice of work placement and commitment in urban space, suggesting their potential significance for their turnover and retention in ECEC. In particular, work in more vulnerable urban areas was considered either desirable or undesirable, depending on how the assumed contextual challenges of such areas were valued. This suggests that if a teacher feels that they cannot properly execute their professional agency in a certain area due to an imbalance between work demands, contextual resources and personal resources, this might shape their career choices (see also Schaack et al., 2022). These observations add to previous studies on teacher agency in ECEC linked to their turnover and retention (Ciuciu, 2023).
Limitations of this study arise from the small number of interviewed ECEC professionals compared to the number of ECEC centres. Additionally, a more robust spatial analysis would benefit from a mixed-methods approach covering both residential and institutional segregation through measurable demographic data alongside qualitative data. Furthermore, future studies might benefit from placing greater emphasis on the iterational and projective dimensions of agency in relation to its practical-evaluative constituents when examining teacher agency in segregated urban areas, as these were observed to intersect with teachers’ evaluations of the contextual conditions shaping their agency achievement.
Footnotes
Authors’ note
Data collection for this research was conducted at the University of Helsinki.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The work was conducted as part of the School Well-Being, Learning Support and Segregation of Teachers (KOTOPE) project, which is funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, and as part of the Segregation of Teachers in Finland (OpeSegr) project, which is funded by the Kone Foundation.
