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Early attention of giftedness is argued to support continued development and learning for gifted children. The focus of this article is therefore on investigating preschool personnel’s perceptions on giftedness and gifted children. Data was produced using a nationwide online survey, including personnel from eleven Swedish preschools (N = 78). The questions spanned between suggestions for their own descriptions of giftedness, views on support for gifted children, to who in the work team they consider should be responsible for adaptations and support for gifted children. The main conclusions from the survey reveals a lack of education of giftedness among the respondents. Furthermore, a majority of the preschool personnel believe that gifted children have the right to be noted in preschool settings, but few have suggestions on how this should be conducted. The respondents had high confidence that their own preschools were sufficient to meet the needs of gifted children, but the obstacles described were lack of time, lack of suitable teaching materials and that the group sizes were too large. Further conclusions are that principals have an important role on drawing attention to giftedness in preschool settings and that there is a need for more research in this area.

The purpose of this article was to investigate the conditions for identifying gifted children in their first encounter with the Swedish school system, the preschool. Interviews were conducted with 10 preschool teachers and 5 principals about their conceptions of giftedness and challenges in meeting the needs of gifted preschoolers in practice. The results explored a lack of knowledge on giftedness among the respondents. Thus, their conceptions of giftedness revealed several dilemmas they face when balancing preschool education between focusing on both the group and individual children, and naming someone as gifted in the strong discourse of egalitarian education in Sweden. The findings identified principals to have a key role in terms of if and how gifted children are supported in preschool settings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this article is to explore how public discussions on giftedness and gifted students are framed in two of Sweden’s leading newspapers over a 25-year period (1995-2019). We explored discourse within 72 articles, using a time-sensitive analysis combined with a ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ approach. The results show that the concept of giftedness became established during the period, although there were also counter-discourses questioning what ‘giftedness’ means and how schools should be organised. There is a lack of more in-depth discussions about how social class, ethnicity, or gender can affect how students are regarded in school, or how teaching can affect intellectual development. Instead, there is a strong stance in favour of individualised teaching.