Regulating leadership in child and youth care. A qualitative multiple case study in three countries using value driven regulation

Leadership in Child and Youth Care (CYC) is important due to its impact on the quality of care. Research shows that leadership behavior affects employee well-being and organizational commitment. Leadership may also influence organizational factors, such as a culture that supports quality improvement. These factors indirectly affect the quality of CYC. This study examines how regulatory agencies in CYC in three countries make 'leadership' inspectable in regulatory frameworks and how these frameworks support inspectors' assessment of leadership in practice, as experienced by inspectors.

We use a qualitative multiple case study design involving regulatory agencies in England, Scotland, and the Netherlands. The study includes observations of seven inspection visits in Scotland and the Netherlands conducted by twenty-one inspectors between October 2022 and March 2023. In addition, nineteen interviews with participating inspectors and three additional inspectors from England were conducted between December 2022 and December 2023. We use the heuristic framework of Value-Driven Regulation (VDR) to analyze regulatory frameworks, examining how leadership is made inspectable through quality indicators and associated descriptions of expected leadership behavior. We employ an inductive approach to study how inspectors experience regulatory frameworks for leadership in practice.

Findings show that many quality indicators for leadership do not meet the criteria outlined in the VDR framework. Indicators should address societally relevant issues, enable identification of gaps between current and desired practice, contribute to increasing societal value by reducing these gaps, and be meaningful and understandable to relevant stakeholders. This study showed that leadership indicators without descriptions of expected behavior and connections to societal value are more difficult to assess. This reinforces inspectors' tendency to focus on tangible quality indicators and use them in a tick-box manner, thereby increasing the likelihood that inspectors value compliance with formal criteria over the underlying objectives of regulation. Finally, tacit knowledge plays a dual role: it can enrich assessments when used appropriately but may undermine framework effectiveness if it leads to inspectors developing their own criteria for leadership.

The study suggests that clearer definitions of leadership could lead to more consistent assessment and does increase opportunities for leadership to contribute positively to improving the quality of CYC.