The aim has been to explore how a new category of teachers, “first teacher”, has been implemented and positioned in the preschool organization and what kind of tasks that are included in their assignment. Even though the Career Services for Teachers (CST) reform (Prop. 2012/13:136) that was introduced in the Swedish education system in 2013, did not apply to teachers in preschool, several municipalities did nevertheless choose to introduce assignments for particularly skilled preschool teachers. According to previous research (Alvehus et al, 2019; Alvunger, 2015, 2016; Eriksson & Player-Koro, 2019), the implementation of the CST reform in compulsory schools has proved problematic from several aspects. The analysis of data has been theoretically informed by Bourdieu's (1993) concepts field and capital. Data production was conducted through ethnographic fieldwork (Walford, 2008; Jeffrey & Troman, 2004), over a period of six months at one preschool. Several kinds of meetings in which the “first teachers”, the principal and or other preschool staff, participated was observed and interviews and analysis of policy documents were conducted. All participants gave their informed consent to participate in the study. The findings show that the implementation of first teachers led to a more hierarchical organization in which the first teachers were positioned between the principal and the other preschool staff and their assignment comprised a lot of different tasks such as pedagogical-, leadership- and administrative ones. The findings will have implications for policy and practice and provide insights on how a CST reform are interpreted and implemented into practice. 

This article focuses on how responsibilities and tasks have been allocated between preschool teachers and child-care workers some years after the revision of the Swedish National Education Act and the preschool curriculum in 2010, in which the preschool staffs responsibility was clarified. The revision intended to strengthen the educational quality in preschool by providing preschool teachers with an increased responsibility for the educational activities carried out by preschool teams. Our overall aim was to investigate whether the revision has led to a redistribution of responsibilities and/or tasks in the everyday preschool practice carried through by preschool teams consisting of preschool teachers and child-care workers. The investigation is grounded through observations of the daily work of four mixed teams and analyses of local documents, field conversations and interviews with the team members and their heads. Due to the results there has been some redistribution of responsibilities and tasks. For instance, all the heads have made organizational changes in order to enable preschool teachers to take greater responsibility for educational activities and their quality, which in turn resulted in a more hierarchical organization. The article discusses the complexity associated with the interpretation and implementation of an educational reform and its effects.