My purpose with this essay was to study if there was any difference in competence between preschool teachers and child minders at a preschool outside of Stockholm. To determine what the differences consisted of, if there was any. The questions I wanted answered were as follows: Are there any differences in competence between preschool teachers and child minders? Do the two different occupations have different ways at looking at what the children need and their abilities? Do they see that they have different skills depending on what occupation they belong to? What do they believe that the people from the other occupation contribute to the preschool which compliments their own working skills?

I used a qualitative method which included interviews and observations to find out the answers to these questions. My results from these interviews and observations indicated that experience, personality and attitudes are very important as well as education. To reflect everything that you do with the children, what is this exercise good for? And what do they learn from this?  What was considered to be a key skill among the staff if you wanted to be a good teacher? This is to be a reflecting practioner, according to Schön (according to Tomassen 2007:37). Because they had trouble to see how the child minder was contributing with the work in the preschool that was different from the preschool teachers abilities, they couldn’t really complement one other. To talk about the differences between the two occupations was a very sensitive subject and the child minder job was very hard to define. In the early days of the preschools in Sweden, for example, during the forties there was a big difference in the roles of a preschool teacher and a child minder (Enö, 2005:25).