Is leadership the solution to quality issues in the early childhood education and care sector? A poststructural study on Norwegian policy

The current study examines how leadership in Norwegian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is discursively produced within policy documents and how these productions shape governance and everyday educational practice. We explore the ways leadership becomes entangled with national imperatives of quality, competence, and accountability, arguing for attention to the ethical-political dimensions of how policy frames and directs educator work. The research is situated within poststructural and postqualitative approaches that resist universal categories, attending instead to the situated, relational, and contingent nature of policy meanings. Drawing on white papers published between 2006 and 2019 and working with Bacchi’s What is the Problem Represented to Be? approach, we trace how leadership is repeatedly positioned as a solution to quality challenges, which are predominantly represented as problems of staff competence. Yet, despite its centrality to policy ambitions, leadership appears unevenly and often sparsely across the texts. Through this analysis, we offer three stories—leadership as a device for producing quality, as a mechanism for governing through competence, and as an absent-yet-prescriptive figure—that highlight the tensions produced when neoliberal governance logics emphasize efficiency and competence enhancement while systemic issues such as capacity and funding remain unaddressed. The article invites a rethinking of how leadership is conceptualized in policy and how these conceptualizations shape what becomes possible in ECEC practice. By attending to the discursive work that policy performs, we contribute to ongoing conversations about professional learning, governance, and the conditions under which educators and leaders navigate the complexities of their everyday worlds.