Teachers’ perceptions of their personal early childhood special education competence in day care Teija K. Holst a * and Päivi M. Pihlaja b a Department of Teacher Education, University of Turku, Turku, Finland; b Department of Education, University of Turku, Turku, Finland (Received 1 March 2010; final version received 29 November 2010) The purpose of this study is to examine and compare kindergarten and special kindergarten teachers’ perceptions of their own competence in early childhood special education (ECSE) in Finnish day care. This comparison is based on the kindergarten teachers’ and special kindergarten teachers’ self-evaluation. Teach- ers evaluated their theoretical and practical ECSE competence. The research questionnaire consisted of six ECSE working areas. The aim of this study is to integrate theory and practice, and participation in expert culture by bringing educational research and practical education closer to each other. The results reported here imply that the respondents evaluate their theoretical and practical ECSE competence to be better than moderate; the test reliability was quite high. Special kindergarten teachers assess their knowledge competence more highly than kindergarten teachers. Teachers ranked their practical competence higher than their theoretical competence. Keywords: theoretical and practical competence; early childhood special educa- tion; day care; special needs; kindergarten teacher; special kindergarten teacher Special education in day care has occasionally been a focus of interest at the national level in Finland since the 1980s, when The Board of Social Affairs defined special day care and its key tasks, and addressed the demands of children with spe- cial care and education needs (see, e.g. Sosiaalihallitus 1981, 1986). This theme resurfaced in a national survey at the end of the 1990s. Pihlaja’ s (1998) survey showed that there is great variation in the proportion of children with special needs in public day care (0–49%), the mean being 8.5%. The majority (85%) of these with a written statement from a specialist had been placed in ordinary children’ s groups. This means that kindergarten teachers are in charge of the pedagogy of chil- dren with special needs. Special kindergarten teachers are available mainly in larger municipalities. The inclusive structure, the definitions of early childhood special education (ECSE) and the opinions as to who needs special education vary a lot, which makes day care an interesting study context. Discussion of inclusion has been one of the key themes in international research and practice during the past decade. The starting point of inclusive *Corresponding author. Email: teihil@utu.fi Teacher DevelopmentAquatic Insects Vol. 15, No. 3, August 2011, 349–362 ISSN 1366-4530 print/ISSN 1747-5120 online Ó 2011 Teacher Development http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2011.608517 http://www.tandfonline.com