In recent years, education systems worldwide have undergone a number of major reforms. National education policy has been revised with the expressed aim of improving education quality and competitiveness. Regarding the recent education reform in the Swedish preschool sector, the 2010 revision of the National School Law (SFS 2010: 800) and the preschool curriculum (Skolverket, 2010) implied both higher demands on educational quality of the subject-related educational content and explicit demands regarding quality assurance for the educational activities in preschools. From a national political point of view these demands were expected to be achieved by providing the preschool teacher with an expanded and clarified register of professional responsibility based on her or his formal professional university education. The revisions meant a discursive change in terms of a transition from a way of talking about the education teams joint responsibility to a special and increased preschool teacher responsibility in the preschool. This change can also be described in terms of a discursive hierarchisation in which the preschool teacher was given an overall educational responsibility while team responsibility was reduced. The paper deals with questions about what happens when this discursive change in the national policy documents is interpreted and implemented on a local preschool level in different municipalities.

The research presented in this paper belongs to a research project about the preschool teacher's changing responsibilities on the basis of the 2010 policy revisions. The present paper deals with a specific part of the project, namely the preschool staff (pre-school heads, preschool teachers and child-care workers) way of talking about the preschool teacher's clarified and changed responsibility and mission in everyday preschool practice. More specifically the purpose is to investigate how the preschool teachers clarified and changed responsibility is interpreted, negotiated and discussed by the heads of the preschools, preschool teachers and child-care workers and how their way of talking about this is related to the discourse of the national policy documents.

The analysis of data has been informed by a combination of critical discourse analysis (Faircloughs, 1992, 1995, 2003), education sociological theory (Bernstein, 1995, 2000, 2003) and professions theory (Abbott, 2010; Brante, 2013; Freidson, 2001; Svensson, 2011). Fairclioughs theoretical and metodological framework has been used as a way to investigate and understand how the 2010 policy revisions are transformed and implemented from the national to the local municipality and preschool level. Parts of Bernstein's theoretical framework (horisontal and vertical discourse, fraiming and recontextualisation) have been important tools in the analysis of the content in preschool staff's way of talking about and how they interpret, negotiate and discuss the preschool teacher's responsibility in relation to the educational practice and to highlight the conditions that affect this. Profession theory has contributed to a problematization of how talk about preschool teacher responsibility can be understood from a professional perspective, i.e. whether it supports or prevents increased professionalization. In addition, Solbrekkes and Englunds (2011,  2014) and Englunds and Dyrdal Solbrekkes (2011) concept of professional responsibility respectively professional accountability has been used in the analysis of whether a preschool teacher is described as being professionally responsible or being held accountable in policy documents respectively the preschool staff speaking of the preschool teacher's responsibility.

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