Man är inte starkare än sin svagaste länk : En studie om hur åtta rektorer och biträdande rektorer resonerar om en likvärdig utbildning i förskolan

Sammanfattning: Children have the by law regulated right to an equal education and they also have the right to equivalence in their education. Furthermore, it is also important that their education should lead to equity. Equal, equivalence and equity are different words used in the same context. They stand for somewhat different meanings, but they are used as an important objective of the educational system. Equivalence is a word with a wide meaning and how you define the word might impact your educational practice of equivalence somewhat differently. Although the meaning of equivalence as a concept have differed during the past decades, it is an important part of the school policies in Sweden. This means that although the School law and the Curriculum regulating the Early Childhood Education and Care regards equivalence as an important part of our children’s education, the people implementing the concept might actualize equivalence differently. The purpose of our study is to explore how four principals' and four assistant principals' reasons about their implementation of the equivalent education in preschools from eight different catchment areas. We also wish to study if there are any significant variation in the implementation strategies between the two municipalities (equable in their population) regarding an equal education for the youngest children in the educational system. In our study we used qualitative interviews with prepared questions as a method for gathering our empiric material. After transcribing the interviews, we used specific keywords to search through the material as a preparation for a content analysis of the transcribed interviews. Our theoretical basis used in our results is selected models of implementation strategies, including the aspects that may influence the process of implementation. Our result points to both similarities and variations in our respondents reasoning. We also found that different strategies are used in separate stages of the implementation process. These different strategies also use variations in the distribution of accountability within the chain of implementation participants.