According to CEPAL-UNESCO (2020), 191 countries, 60 million teachers, and 1.5 billion students at all levels have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic due to extensive closures of educational centres as a preventive measure. Chile was not exempt from the effects of Covid-19.

Given the lack of experience regarding the management of a pandemic, there was a period of confusion in the educational system and actors involved. In this period, there was an absence of guidelines regarding how the educational process would be managed. During 2020, educational centres combined distance education with some attempts to reopen schools, depending on the local health indicators for COVID-19 pandemic.

For several months distance education was established, implementing the pedagogical activities from their homes, to reduce the risk of contagion. This implies a change in teachers' and students’ roles and intensifying family roles as links in this process (Muñoz & Lluch, 2020).

In early childhood education (ECE), teachers must work in close relationships with families, but Covid-19 pandemic implies challenges that go far beyond the way that this relationship was established. Given that, the double care and learning function of ECE, as well as the few opportunities for socialization in distance education, the learning experiences were less effective (Andrisyah and Ismiatun, 2021). Besides, social, emotional, and cognitive development of children depends on the diversity and frequency of their interactions with others (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2001; Vandell, Burchinal, Vandergrift, Belsky, Steinberg & NICHD, 2010; Cortázar, 2015), which can hardly be replaced by their families, especially in a context of lockdown. Also, conciliation of paid work and children’s care and education has been especially difficult for families during COVID-19 pandemic.

In this situation, early childhood educational centres are fundamental, and the leadership practices are crucial to manage uncertainty and develop the pedagogical orientation and emotional support that children, families, and educators demand.

Leadership practice in ECE is “a holistic process that involves not only the leader and the administration, but also personnel and indirectly parents and everyone else who has an influence on the implementation of early education practices” (Hujala and Eskelinen, 2013, p. 214). Besides, leadership in this level is characterized by a great sense of vocation or "passion" for the care, development, and learning of children, concept that Siraj-Blatchford & Hallet (2014) have called “caring leadership”. This concept highlights an ethical component in leadership practice, which is related to the ethics of care, that implies the development of a relationship based on concern and care toward children and families. Leadership practices in ECE are also characterized by a balance among care, wellbeing, and learning, a focus on pedagogical intentionality in everyday activities, and a high concern of context and community networks where the educational centre is situated (Colmer, Waniganayake, and Field, 2014; Waniganayake, 2014; Strehmel, 2016). Besides, at this level, most of the leaders are women (Siraj-Blatchford & Hallet, 2014) which might imply a particular way to enact leadership practices.

In Chile, ECE has legal recognition, public institutions specialized in this level, a curricular and regulatory framework, and a wide network of educational centre (Minister of Education, 2019). The enrolment rate for children under six years is 52,8% (Minister of Education, 2019), with centres that are mainly financed by the State by funds to private and public institutions.

This research addresses the analysis of the experience during COVID-19 pandemic for a group of leaders in ECE in Chile from a qualitative perspective seeking to understand how leadership practices were enacted during pandemic and analysed the particular challenges and features of this level in this uncertain situation.

This research presents a qualitative orientation, with an interest to understand a social phenomenon from the discourses of the participants, and seeks to examine the way people experience the world, from their ideas, feelings, and motives (Taylor and Bogdan, 1997). Participants include six early childhood teachers that work as leaders in early childhood centres from a non-profit institution that provides education to 0-4 years old children from families from vulnerable socioeconomic situations. Participants accomplish two criteria: at least five years of professional experience as leaders, and work in region with high population in Chile. Three educators work in the Metropolitan region, while the other three are in a central area. Participants lead educational centres with different features. For example, enrolment varied from 80 children to 220 children, and also have different numbers of teachers and assistants, from small groups with 8 persons to big teams with more than 30 persons. Participants sign an informed consent approved by the institutional ethical board, that includes confidentiality of the information provided and the right to decline their participation at any moment. Semi-structured interviews were conducted for this research during June and September 2020. The interviews allow certain flexibility in the sequence of open questions regarding one or more topics studied (Gorman and Clayton, 1997) and allow to analyse their experience regarding leadership practice during COVID-19 pandemic. Interviews were focused on the experiences during COVID-19 pandemic including the work with educational teams, families, and children, the institutional relationship, and regulations and guidelines derived from authorities. Data were analyzed descriptively by means of open coding using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), supported by ATLAS.ti software. All the transcripts were read and re-read, individually and collectively, to elicit patterns in the data and support identification of codes, rather than to allow for triangulation of data (Guba, 1981). The categories emerged both deductively and inductively, in that some categories were derived from the literature about ECE while others addressed aspects that emerged from the data. In this process, extracts from the data were used to illustrate them and were translated from Spanish into English.

Participants identified several aspects related to their leadership practice during pandemic. Some of them refer to contextual factors, like the media whose influence was perceived as responsible for a culture of fear. Consequently, one participant expressed: "I don't know if we are making the best decisions … we get misinformed by formal media … they generate fear" (Ed.1). They also identified institutional tension regarding work modalities during lockdown, mentioned that “there is no definition of remote work. There is no formal guide, (depends on) the will of each one” (Ed.2). These external conditions influence the work in the educational centre, mainly regarding work climate, and distribution of responsibilities “because you cannot force them (teachers) to do that, you have to ask them" (Ed. 2), and besides, they recognized the complexities of work-family conciliation for their teachers. Another aspect identified refer to the lack of both during lockdown and reopen, when “there are no conditions for remote work, from our institution" (Ed. 2), and there is a request for adequate material, because “teachers want other types of masks (…) because their families are behind them” (Ed. 3). There are also personal experiences with COVID-19 that are shared by teachers in workspaces in formal and informal communication. In those spaces, there is a concern about well-being in work “because there is fear" (Ed. 3). During the lockdown, they claim regarding the invisibility of biopsychosocial needs of childhood, when “(spaces of recreation and socialization) has been reduced (…) but you can go to the mall, but you can't go to the park " (Ed. 5). During reopening, there were internal disputes in the work teams that lead them to consider that "they do not feel in a position to fulfill with their work” (Ed.3), situation that difficult the operation of educational centres.

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