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This study examines the reference societies of Norway and Sweden embedded in their education policy documents. We examined 4,260 bibliographic references in 19 white papers and green papers prepared for the 2016/2020 renewal of the Knowledge Promotion Reform in Norway and the 2015/2018 Knowledge Achievement Reform in Sweden. In addition, we interviewed 10 policy experts who participated in the preparation of the analyzed policy documents. The results show that the reference societies overall reflect the existing knowledge production and dissemination mechanisms in education policy; however, they significantly differed between Norway and Sweden regarding whether and to what extent they reference knowledge produced in other Nordic countries. Specifically, while Norway drew extensively on knowledge from its neighbors, particularly Sweden, Sweden seldom referenced knowledge produced in other Nordic countries. Policy actors identified similarity, relevance, accessibility, reform contexts, and institutional arrangements as reasons for (not) referencing neighbors. This study calls for further consideration of the political, social, and cultural embeddedness of the 'socio-logic' to understand implicit reference societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing research interest in school inspection throughout Europe; however, there have been few comparative studies between Swedish and Norwegian school inspectorates. Such a study is necessary since little is known about how inspection policies are shaped through ‘governing modes’ in the two Nordic countries. This paper explores the similarities and differences between state school inspection policies within the two countries from 2002 to 2012. Based on a rigorous, comparative document analysis of 23 policy documents, a particular focus is given to how school inspection adheres to professional-bureaucratic control as a mode of governing and/or details national expectations through performance audit, potentially intervening into school practices. We demonstrate that even if the cases of public administration seem to be somewhat homogenous from the outside, there is substantial evidence of major differences in the inspection policies of these two countries which can be explored by comparative analysis. Specifically, this paper contributes both conceptually and comparatively to understanding how a study of purposive and evaluative modes of governing can add to the field of school inspection studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Digital technology is an expanding area of education policy. There is growing interest, therefore, in how networks of corporate and state policy actors implicit in the formation of (inter)national education technology agendas intersect with local school systems and teachers. In particular, this paper explores the significant policy work that takes place outside schools and classrooms through education trade shows. Based on an in-depth ‘event ethnography’ of one large Scandinavian educational technology show, the paper details how these events function as sites of policy interpretation - ‘sharing’ (or more accurately ‘selling’) global ideas and imperatives to local schools and teachers. These findings highlight the role of trade shows in consolidating policy networks, subsuming public education interests into corporate concerns, and differentiating teacher subjectivities and encouraging teacher entrepreneurship. The paper problematizes the ways in which teacher agency is shaped and controlled by the discursive, material and affective dimensions of such events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private supplementary tutoring (PST) is a worldwide enterprise that comes in a variety of forms and with a growing number of students. Sweden, together with the other Nordic countries, has a relatively short history of large-scale organised supplementary education, which can be explained by its confidence in regular mainstream education. In recent years though, this picture has partly changed, and today families in Sweden are offered different kinds of education services outside the ordinary school system. This paper targets how PST is legitimized and justified through marketing as a solution to problems related to the education of children. Through a positioning analysis of three consumer narratives published online by a PST company, this paper aims to further our understanding of which functions PST fills within the Swedish education system. Results show that private tutors appear in the consumer narratives as compensating for shortcomings in schools and families as well as complementing the support that parents and teachers can offer children. These findings signal that PST marketing creates demands for different kinds of support which may, in the long run, rewrite the map of the Swedish education landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the dual dependencies apparent at the intersection of the media society and the audit society by empirically exploring and discussing the relationship between Swedish local newspaper coverage and school inspection activities. The research questions pertain to the Inspectorate’s media strategy, how inspection is represented and conveyed, the messages sent, and who gets to speak. Literature on governance, and the role and function of the media in the wider audit society is applied theoretically. Four municipalities were selected to represent different demographical and economical structures and previous inspection experiences. The empirical material includes interviews with leading inspection officers and newspaper articles. The local newspapers portray the Inspectorate as a legitimate institution acting on behalf of and protecting the public, and even more so, the educational consumer. The current format used by the Inspectorate – a succinct reporting only on deviations – links with a favored format of the media, reinforcing the tight media–inspection relationship and leading to implications for education governance and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper analyses quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) policy and activities in mandatory schooling at national level in Sweden. Two studies are reported: a textual analysis of national policy documents concerning QAE, and an interview study conducted with national policy brokers. Questions addressed are: What are the characteristics of Swedish QAE activities? What European and international ideas on QAE are considered relevant to Swedish national policy? To what degree is international QAE policy disseminated across the Swedish school system? And, does Sweden influence international QAE policy in any way? QAE activities are analysed in relation to the European Union's and international organisations' efforts to influence national education policy. Results show that Sweden was historically early equipped with means to control quality in schooling. By the end of the 1990s, there was a marked increase in national regulations, increasing the number of QAE activities directed at Swedish schooling. The development of QAE in Sweden, therefore, has been related to a shift in governing policies and practices towards governing by objectives and results; and national QAE policies have successively strengthened this governing doctrine. Finally, Swedish national brokers maintain an image of doing quite well on QAE policy and practice compared to other European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the movements of some Swedish former education policy-makers that are currently active as commercial edu-business actors with the ambition to expand in the Global Education Industry (GEI). The aim is to map and analyze how a selection of Swedish edu-preneurs affiliated with a particular Swedish school chain enter the GEI and thereby market both their commercialized servicesandthe policy ideas about so-called free schools, in its Swedish version. The study shows how these edu-preneurs move from the domestic to global arenas and how their business and policy advocacy activities are framed and represented. Mobilization and public exposure of previous and present policy advocacy networks are important assets for these edu-preneurs as they navigate the GEI. The study illustrates how these actors make use of particular forms of knowledge, from department ministerial work and party politics, which blends with work in public relations and various edu-businesses, pointing to the interrelatedness of politics, policy, business, power, and ideology. The paper concludes by raising issues in need of further exploration and debate, pertaining to our understanding of education policy-making and, ultimately, democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden's education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected to produce higher-quality education at lower cost, in both independent and public schools. This two-pronged study first examines to what extent the consequences of this reform deviate from the predicted results. It demonstrates increasing discrepancies between absolute test results and grades, suggesting grade inflation. Secondly, the study investigates whether the school choice reform was institutionally secured against school competition based on phenomena that are unrelated with educational quality, such as grading. It reveals that the architects of the school choice reform overemphasized the potential positive implications of market reforms and, therefore, did not deem it necessary to establish appropriate rules and institutions for school competition. Instead, grading and curriculum reforms had unintended consequences such as grade inflation and similar forms of school competition in dimensions other than school quality. The analysis of how the objective of raising the quality in Sweden's schools through competition and choice was inadvertently undermined contains practical lessons for policymakers with regard to the use of privatization and co-production both in schools and in other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A historical tension between a more general and a more specific focus in post-compulsory education is made visible in some educational systems by the division into more academic and more vocational programmes. Embedded in this tension are questions of social justice and the purposes of education. In addition, division into academic and vocational programmes has class dimensions since youth with working class backgrounds are often over-represented in vocational programmes. This study investigates how this tension is handled in the Swedish upper secondary curriculum, which reflects an international neoliberal policy trend in promoting competition, employability and employer influence over the curriculum. By analysing how the educational content of vocational educational and training (VET) programmes and higher educational preparatory (HEP) programmes is contextualised, we found that the two programme types were based on very different logics. In VET programmes, knowledge is strongly context-bound and often related to regulating behaviours. This contrasts sharply with the way knowledge is contextualised in HEP programmes in which less context-bound knowledge and skills such as using concepts, models and critical thinking are dominant. Students in VET programmes are trained to ‘do’ and to ‘adapt’, while the students in HEP programmes are trained to ‘think’ and to ‘imagine possibilities’. Thus, students from different social classes are prepared for very different roles in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analysing five separate OECD reviews of evaluation and assessment practices with Norway and Sweden as cases, our study illustrates different ways in which a specific international educational reasoning is blended into more context-based national education policies and, as such, works in parallel with internal reforms and agendas. It is evident that an overarching narrative promotes the importance of coherent and integrated systems of evaluation and assessment in order to strengthen social and political endeavours for equity, quality and achievements. The parallel mix of OECD discourses and national discourses creates a combined narrative in which evaluations and assessments appear natural, self-evident and rational as well as highly adaptable to national settings. The study shows that national vertical and/or horizontal developments are intertwined with the OECD policy recommendations, which are quite general in character. In a continuing process of uploading and downloading, within different contexts, policies are elaborated and recontextualised. Evaluations and assessments are part of a contemporary rational paradigm for mapping and promoting performance in national educational systems – what we identify as a comparative curriculum code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2009, the Swedish Government uses an ‘audit’ agency – the Swedish Schools Inspectorate – to monitor and assess the accuracy with which teachers grade student responses on national tests. This study explores the introduction and subsequent establishment of the Inspectorate’s regrading programme as an example of political management of the tensions between competition and equity inherent in neoliberal regulatory regimes. The programme is considered a case for examining contemporary policies and discourses on fairness and government actions undertaken to resolve issues of unfair assessment and safeguard students’ rights. Work of Carol Bacchi forms part of the theoretical background for the investigation of problem representations around and within the programme. The article demonstrates how discursive practices in the fields of government, audit and media have worked to frame teachers’ assessments as incorrect, unfair and as jeopardizing the credibility of the grading system, thus justifying increased central control and authority over teacher assessments. As such, the regrading programme contributed to increased mistrust in teacher professionalism. A legal discourse is identified, and we argue the examination system is being juridified where the abundance of control over knowledge risks turning into a deficit of that same knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses a specific part of the actions taken to improve the quality of Swedish education, namely the expectations formulated in national policy documents for the quality work that local authorities, schools and teachers are supposed to undertake. For the empirical analysis of how these expectations have changed over the last two decades, two sets of theoretical concepts have been combined: management of placement and management of expectation and autonomy and control. The specific research question is: How can local systematic quality work be understood in an age of accountability and what are the implications for teachers’ practices? The results show that expectations for local quality work have changed radically during the studied period. There has been a significant change in the language used, the content of education has been recontextualised and there are obvious changes in the relation between local autonomy and national control. It is argued that these changes are a consequence of the changed design of the education system, rather than an answer to a content-related question of what is educationally desirable. As a consequence, paradoxical expectations land at the local level and have to be resolved by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to contribute to the ongoing discussion on teacher professionalism by analyzing the professional strategies of Sweden's two teachers' unions from an organizational perspective. Drawing on institutional theory, the article argues that the teachers' unions' focus on strategies of professionalization has as much to do with questions of legitimacy in the eyes of the public, as with any specific effort at transforming the practice of teaching in a professional direction. Against the background of two recent Swedish education reforms, the article shows that the unions are 'trapped' within a normative order emphasizing professionalization as the primary way of organizational development and legitimacy, resulting in a need for the unions to adopt professional attributes. In the case of the Swedish unions, this is accomplished through mimetic processes whereby union policies, aimed at the improvement of teaching, are modeled upon the medical profession, regardless of the differences between the technologies and practices of the occupations. In this way, the professional rhetoric of the unions is decoupled from the practice of teaching in order to maximize the public legitimacy needed for improving the declining societal status of teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the upper secondary (or post-16) school market. The study on which it is based, funded by the Swedish Research Council, was entitled 'Upper-secondary education as a market'. Empirical data include official statistics, policy documents, school publications, company reports and school visits. Printed and other news media were also scrutinised to identify how the marketisation of education is represented in public discourse. A number of themes emerged from the study which included mapping the expansion of the school market, chains of ownership and influence, marketing strategies, choice and the school market and issues raised in the media. These imply that there is a new market discourse which represents a clear break with previous social democratic education policies primarily aimed at enhancing citizenship and wider democratic values within an inclusive public school. However, critiques have also emerged including a call for strengthened regulations of and control over independent schools and concern about an education market equated more with shares and profits rather than pedagogy and student citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, governing through partnerships has become more and more common and is today reflected in a range of policy areas. In the following article, governing through partnerships is analysed in Swedish education policy around the turn of the millennium, where the notion of partnership has had a large impact. Using as its point of departure a theoretical perspective inspired by Michel Foucault, the article analyses the calls for partnership in Swedish education policy as part of a set of governmental rationalities forming individuals into partnering, that is active and responsible, citizens. In the article, some of the long-term consequences of the uses of the concept of partnership in Swedish education policy are discussed, focusing particularly on issues of inclusion/exclusion and democratic regeneration. With the idea of governing through partnerships, it is argued that the political landscape is redrawn. The role of the State, for instance, is increasingly to leave room for various voluntary and independent actors and associations, to co-ordinate and interact, as a partner, among others, rather than directing society 'from above'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contains results from a study based on locally produced planning and evaluation texts from 10 preschool settings in a Swedish middle-sized town. The texts were mainly from 1999 to 2005, a period during which Swedish preschools were implementing their first curriculum and were subject to several changes including decentralisation, marketisation and competition which taken together brought new demands on visibility. The overarching aim is to investigate and describe the meaning of content and formulations in the texts in relation to the teachers' professionalism in this era of performativity. The texts were analysed as institutional narratives that underline what the preschool is and ought to be and we thereby regard the texts as governing. Analyses based on the theoretical concepts of technologies and positioning not only show how the teachers are simultaneously controlled and control themselves by the descriptions in the texts, but also how they position themselves as highly professional and present resistance to the control. One conclusion drawn from the analyses is that the profession of the teacher is changing and a new way of being professional might be to be good at positioning oneself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recognition of prior learning (RPL) has been a part of adult education policy and practice for a long time, but in different ways and in different times and places. In Sweden, RPL has been an explicit part of the policy since 1996. This policy analysis starts with the current Swedish policy concerning RPL. The figures of thought expressed in official policy texts are traced in, and compared to what is expressed in, the (discursive) practice of a case of local policy and development initiatives. The objective of the analysis is to see how the policy in official texts is reproduced and transformed at the local level. The theoretical starting point is the Foucauldian concept of 'governmentality', and RPL is seen as a technique for governing adult education, the adult learner and also adult learning. The analysis focuses particularly on the governing of adult education, expressed in the 'salvation narrative' of RPL, and in ideas of what RPL is and how it should be organised. Indirect as well as direct techniques of governing are identified in the governing of and through RPL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the recognition of prior learning and the figure of thought it represents in Swedish policy on adult education. It can be seen as a technique for governing the adult learner and a way of fabricating the subject. We are tracing this thought back in time to see how it has changed and what it consists of. The material analysed consists of Swedish official documents published between 1948 and 2004. We draw on two concepts from the Foucauldian toolbox: genealogy and governmentality. The result shows that this technique for governing and fabricating the adult subject is not new. It has been present during all periods analysed. However, there is a difference in how the ideas of competence and knowledge are stressed. Today the focus is on the subject's specific experience, which means competence. You are constructed as an adult with experiences that are to be evaluated. During the 1960s and 1970s the focus was rather on general experience. There was also discussion concerning the subject's ability to study. During the 1950s this figure of thought focused on ability was dominant. Those with the talent/ability to study were to be accepted for adult education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aims of this article are (1) to describe features of Swedish education politics over a 25 year period, with a focus on the 1990s and the first years of the 21st Century, and (2) to discuss how education politics relate to the socio-economic changes which have taken place during the last 10-15 years. Three time periods, based on the prevailing view of education governance and the role of the State, are identified: 1975-1990, 1991-1998 and 1999-2002, respectively. For each period, the context/agenda, processes and outcomes of education policy are discussed. The article is based on statistical data, public reports, policy documents and interviews with central and local actors in the field of education. It is concluded that access to education has increased at all levels during the last 25 years. However, young people's transition to the labour market takes place later, has become more complicated, and in reality requires successful completion of at least upper-secondary education. In the wake of reductions, decentralization and deregulation of education, the differences and divisions between municipalities, schools and different pupils have increased. It is argued that active efforts to counteract such tendencies were weak in the 1990s, and that education politics may instead have reinforced social division and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]