In recent years, the transition from early childhood education and care (ECEC) to primary education has attracted increasing attention as an international policy issue. While the OECD (2017) has encouraged member states to expand participation in ECEC and improve learning outcomes, it has simultaneously raised concerns about the “schoolification” of ECEC, whereby the distinctive logics and practices of ECEC settings are absorbed into those of primary schooling. In many countries, educational transition has primarily been discussed in terms of institutional design, curricular alignment, and system-level coordination. Comparatively less attention has been paid to how practitioners themselves experience and make sense of transition as a professional and cultural challenge, particularly from an international comparative perspective.

In Japan, the transition between ECEC and primary education has been debated for several decades in both research and practice (Mukuda, 2009; Sakai, 2010). Since 2023, policy initiatives such as the Bridging Programme promoted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) have sought to strengthen institutional collaboration between ECEC and primary education. However, as the OECD (2017) cautions, such initiatives tend to focus on formal coordination and procedural linkage. As a result, the ways in which different educational practices and professional cultures are negotiated, contested, and reorganised at the level of everyday practice remain insufficiently visible.

Against this backdrop, this study conceptualises educational transition not as a discrete institutional shift or a technical problem of linkage, but as an ongoing process in which different educational cultures are brought into relation and reconfigured through practice. This perspective draws on the work of Ukkonen-Mikkola and Kangas (2021), who theorise transition as a process of cultural reorganisation, and Rantavuori et al. (2019), who illuminate how cultural scripts embedded in institutional arrangements shape professional interactions and power relations across educational boundaries.

The study further builds on the understanding that ECEC and primary education constitute distinct communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). From this perspective, professional groups are not merely institutional units but cultural spaces in which values, meanings, norms, language, and identities are shared and reproduced through practice. Viewing educational transition as an encounter between different communities of practice highlights that challenges at transition are not only structural but also cultural and relational.

Within this framework, particular attention is paid to the role of practitioners as key agents in negotiating and reworking educational cultures at the transition. To analyse how practitioners’ expertise is positioned and enacted across professional boundaries, the study draws on Edwards’ (2005, 2010, 2011) concepts of relational agency and relational expertise. These concepts conceptualise professional agency not as an individual capacity, but as the ability to work with others by recognising and mobilising diverse forms of expertise, and by jointly redefining the object of activity. Rooted in Engeström’s (1999) notion of the object of activity, relational agency foregrounds how practitioners negotiate what constitutes a shared concern and how this object is continuously redefined through interaction.

Based on this theoretical grounding, the study addresses the following research question:

How do practitioners in ECEC and primary education in Japan and Finland experience, conceptualise, and respond to challenges at educational transition, and how are such challenges problematised—or not problematised—at the boundaries between communities of practice?

Through a comparative analysis, the study aims to clarify how practitioners’ experiences of transition are shaped by different educational contexts and to offer new perspectives on internationally shared challenges surrounding educational transition beyond institution-centred or schoolification-oriented frameworks.

This study employs a qualitative research design based on semi-structured interviews with practitioners in early childhood education and care (ECEC) and primary education in Japan and Finland. Participants were practitioners with professional experience in either ECEC or primary education. In Japan, data were collected from five ECEC practitioners and two primary education practitioners, including individuals in managerial positions. In Finland, interviews were conducted with nine ECEC practitioners and three primary education practitioners, also including managers. As Finland has a formal one-year pre-primary education system prior to primary education, practitioners responsible for pre-primary education were positioned as ECEC practitioners in this study. The interviews were conducted by a researcher with extensive professional experience in Japanese ECEC as a former kindergarten practitioner. Time was devoted to building trust with participants before the interviews. Interview questions focused on practitioners’ educational priorities, decision-making processes regarding activities and lesson planning, forms of collaboration across educational levels, perceptions of continuity between ECEC and primary education, changes in practitioners’ practices through interaction with other professionals, and their understanding of challenges related to educational transition. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data analysis proceeded in two stages. In the first stage, an inductive thematic analysis was conducted to identify meaning units in practitioners’ narratives reflecting experiences of difficulty, tension, or challenge related to educational transition. This stage was conducted prior to the application of the theoretical framework in order to remain sensitive to participants’ own ways of articulating their experiences. In the second stage, the identified themes were re-examined through the theoretical lens of relational agency (Edwards, 2005, 2010), focusing on how professional expertise and educational challenges were constructed and negotiated at the boundaries between different communities of practice. The Japan–Finland comparison was not intended to evaluate the superiority of one educational system over another. Rather, it functioned as a methodological strategy to make visible implicit assumptions, professional cultures, and taken-for-granted understandings of educational transition by contrasting different educational contexts. The study was conducted in accordance with national ethical guidelines for research involving human participants in Japan. Ethical considerations included providing participants with written information about the study’s aims and methods, obtaining informed consent, ensuring voluntary participation, and anonymising all data, which were used solely for research purposes. The researcher’s positionality as a former ECEC practitioner was not bracketed out but critically examined and treated as an analytical resource in interpreting practitioners’ narratives.

Preliminary analysis reveals distinct patterns in how practitioners in Japan and Finland experience and make sense of educational transition. In the Japanese context, practitioners’ narratives highlight tensions between formal connection and substantive continuity. While policy-led bridging initiatives promote institutional collaboration, practitioners perceive a gap between formal plans and children’s lived learning experiences. A shared perception emerges that discontinuity lies not in children’s learning but in the boundaries practitioners draw between professional domains. Moreover, although terms such as child-centredness are used across educational levels, their meanings differ substantially. ECEC practitioners caution against equating child-centred practice with laissez-faire approaches, while primary education practitioners warn against conflating behavioural compliance with meaningful learning. Practitioners in leadership roles are also described as mediators who protect educational practices from parental and institutional pressures. Practitioners in Finland likewise articulate challenges related to transition, but with a different emphasis. Their concerns focus primarily on structural and pedagogical gaps between pre-primary education and primary education, including increased group sizes, reduced adult support, heightened demands for autonomy, and stricter time schedules. Practitioners also point to developmental diversity among children, pressures surrounding school readiness, shortages of resources, and difficulties in information sharing due to strengthened data protection regulations. Interpreted through the lens of relational agency (Edwards, 2005, 2010), these findings suggest that in Japan, practitioners’ struggles are closely linked to the lack of a shared understanding of what constitutes meaningful learning for children at the boundary between communities of practice, a situation intensified by top-down institutional directives. In Finland, by contrast, conceptions of learning appear to be more widely shared, rendering boundary negotiations less explicit, while challenges are articulated primarily as structural constraints. Overall, the findings highlight that educational transition hinges on how the object of meaningful learning is shared, negotiated, and reconfigured among practitioners across educational contexts.

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