In many countries in Europe, pre-school education dates back to the heyday of the welfare state. In Denmark and Italy, the public sector has a role as service provider and as financier. The Netherlands opted, in 2005, for a politics of the market to deliver services for children less than 4 years (Moss & Humblet, 2007). In Sweden, pre-school education was essentially public until the 1990s, since when the state has promoted the privatisation and marketization of the public sector (Löfdahl & Perez Prieto, 2009). In Portugal, however, the network of pre-school education was included within the public sector only after April 25, 1974. Currently, Portuguese pre-school education has coverage of about 70%, of which, however, 50% is provided by the private sector (in existence since the nineteenth century).

In a previous study (Marta, 2003, Marta & Lopes, 2008), it was observed that the professional identities of teachers within each sector were sharply differentiated and that the collective identity of public sector preschool teachers was similar to that claimed internationally today for pre-school education in general (OECD, 2000). These results stressed the importance of analyzing the impact of work contexts (public or private) on the quality of education offered, in particular its contribution to a quality public education.

Since this study has examined pre-school teachers with careers solely within the public sector or solely within the private sector, the specific objective of the study we will present is to explore the impact of the work experiences in the public sector on the construction of preschool teachers identities, by means of examining preschool teachers with work experiences in both sectors.

The study adopts the notion of professional identity construction advanced by Claude Dubar (1997) and Lopes (2009) and the notion of individual and collective identity proffered by Louis Guérin and Zavalloni (1984) and Lopes (2001, 2008). According to Dubar (ibid.) the construction of professional identities proceeds from a double transaction: the one subjective, internal or biographical, between what the individual has been and wants to be; and other objective external or relational, between the individual and others with whom he interacts. According to Lopes (2009), the relational transaction is established at different levels of the ecological system, which possess specificities and are simultaneously interdependent, so that at each level studied, all the others make their presence.

Also according to Lopes (2008), professional identity is individual and collective. At the individual level it is "one of the social identities of the person, dependent on personal identity as a whole" and of the collective identities possible for the professional group present in the culture, which are defined as "systems of action and interpretation [on the part of] actors in social interaction" (ibid., p.3). Along the same lines, Louis-Guérin and Zavalloni (1984, p. 17) state that (professional) social identity expresses "the interaction between the social and personal components of identity." Zavalloni (1979) considered it as a cognitive structure, linked to representational thought, whose content and dynamics emerge from personal biography and social history.

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