This article aims to deepen our knowledge about the work and competences of local education authority (LEA) officials when implementing new policy directives for documentation in the decentralized Swedish school system. The results show that the LEA officials used strategies and actions that improved relevance for principals and schools through…

Purpose: Using a large-scale school improvement program in Sweden as a case, this article aims to explore the state governance of a large-scale school improvement program in Sweden and how officials at the state agency level made sense of the reform ideas and operationalized them in policy actions. Design/methodology/approach: Data were integrated…

This article reports on teachers' experience of working during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis is based on a thematic analysis of group interviews with 76 teachers working throughout the Swedish school system, i.e., preschools, primary, secondary school, and municipal adult education. The interviews were conducted during autumn 2021.…

The aim for this study is to investigate the role of large-scale data in the formation of Swedish upper secondary programme structures, in relation to gender. In the analysis we draw from theories of hegemonic power relations and the concept of assemblage. The results suggest that large-scale evaluations have taken part in forming a two-by two…

The article re-imagines the current developments of Swedish education into a possible future. Historically, education was organized and funded by the state; however, reforms towards privatization in the 1990s implemented school choice, private schools and a tax-financed voucher system with the option of turning profits on education. A new judicial…

The Swedish educational system is recognized as being highly inclusive. Nevertheless, support in special classes and placing students with intellectual disabilities in special schools have increased after the mid-1990s. The study involves 65 thousand students in seven cohorts (born 1967-2004), participating in the Swedish longitudinal project…

This paper explores school leaders' and teachers' ideas about drivers of improvement at local level in the decentralised Swedish school system. An institutional perspective is applied to investigate how institutional logics at macro level are played out at micro level in improvement processes. The paper draws on a three-year collaborative research…

Purpose: This report provides an overview of social science education in primary and secondary education in Sweden with the purpose of introducing the international research community to policy-related issues concerning citizenship education, educational institutions and the scholarly state of the art. The principal topics are: a context of Sweden…

Sweden has a long tradition of comprehensive upper-secondary education. This began in the early 1970s. It culminated in 1994 with all the programmes having a core curriculum that gave general eligibility to higher education. Conservative and liberal governments have introduced several neoliberal school reforms, which the subsequent social…

The modest impact of national policy efforts on school digitalisation relates to a gap between views among policy-makers and practitioners, giving rise to complexity in translating policy into action. Acknowledging changes in governing through alternative policy formation-processes, and Ward and Parr's (2011) arguing for the importance of…

Problematic aspects of implementing policy are not simply a product of the policy message, but rather are constructed by the actors engaged in the process. This qualitative interview study addresses the role of school leader's organizational identity beliefs in constructing policy problems and demonstrates how these perceptions seem to play an…

This paper explores the work of a particular document in issuing educational values. The document is the report "Embedding Values and Attitudes in Curriculum": "Shaping a Better Future", launched in 2021 and published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Inspired by a practice-oriented method of…

During the twentieth century, an increasing amount of data was collected in connection with engineering of the modern states including their education systems. In the Nordic welfare states post WW2, such data were also generated in experimental projects aiming at reforming curriculum and education, and the data were accumulated either as…

In recent years, research has pointed to the development of 'post-performative' teachers and cultures within the education system. This article provides explanations for how it is possible that teachers marked by performative rationality also hold and enact seemingly humanistic professional values. The study points to three interplay mechanisms…

Political reforms of the 1990s ushered in sweeping socio-economic changes in the Nordic countries, including radical changes in their vocational education and training systems. However, the reforms led to a school-based vocational education and training system with a strong orientation towards higher education in Sweden, and a hybrid system with a…