Increasing diversity in Finland, in line with broader European trends, has introduced new demands on school leadership and prompted principals to reassess their understandings of inclusion (Jantunen et al., 2022). This shift has underscored the need to reconceptualize inclusion, particularly given its long tradition regarding association with special education (Carpelan & Lahtero, 2025; Jahnukainen, 2015; Schuelka et al., 2019). Consequently, over the past decade, Finnish discourse on inclusion has gradually started to shift from narrow special education frameworks toward broader understandings of diversity. Research indicates, however, that while principals commonly express support for inclusion, their more detailed descriptions of their everyday practices or deeper understandings expose constraint‑driven realities in which pragmatic judgments about feasibility tend to override ideological commitments or be elusive by their nature (Jahnukainen, 2015; Jantunen, Sormunen et al., 2025). To understand this landscape, this paper demonstrates how discourse analysis can reveal the complex ways principals navigate inclusion, providing actionable insights for school improvement and principal training (Jantunen, Carpelan et al., 2025). Thus, examining discourse rather than just practices help educators and policymakers understand the underlying value constructions that enable or constrain inclusive development. We discuss a study focusing on how Finnish comprehensive school principals construct the meaning of inclusion and manage tensions between ideological commitment and practical implementation. The study drew on a discourse theory (Laclau & Mouffe, 2014) to analyse focus group interviews with 21 principals, revealing three major discourses: constructing value foundations for inclusion, defining teachers' roles in promoting inclusion, and assembling the inclusive school community puzzle. Our findings demonstrate how principals actively bridge competing discourses: justice and equality, individual needs, and pragmatic realism. In addition, reoccurring discussion topics included managing resource constraints and teacher resistance. We aim at enlightening, first, how principals frame teacher resistance as competence concerns rather than ideological opposition; we reveal opportunities for targeted professional development. Second, we identify professional identity as a critical nodal point showing where interventions can be most effective. Third, our analysis of leadership groups as spaces for negotiating competing perspectives offers a concrete model for distributed leadership in practice. Our study provides practical implications for principal training, suggesting that effective inclusive leadership requires understanding inclusion comprehensively (beyond special education), reconstructing teachers’ professional identities toward collective responsibility, and implementing gradual change strategies that respect teacher readiness while maintaining clear value-based direction.

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