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The aim of this article is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the internationalisation of the Swedish school, seen from a municipal level. The paper draws on an examination of local school policy in two Swedish municipalities between 1950-2000 from a historical curriculum theory perspective, taking into account the socio-historical context of schooling, including school politics, school administration and school practice. The international influences and exchange within the two municipality cases has been traced by searching for educational efforts that include international elements such as introducing new subjects, programmes, immigrant education, study trips abroad and/or conferences. The result shows that the Swedish school has been subject to transnational exchange long before entering the ‘era of globalisation’. It also shows that the extent and the forms of transnational exchange differ radically between municipalities, which in this paper are discussed in terms of ‘different worlds of internationalisation’.

The movement towards greater decentralisation is not seldom the obvious starting point for the study of school governance. In this article this assumption is analysed and problematised based on a reading of central education policy texts related to the last two curriculum reforms for the Swedish compulsory school ( Lpo 94, Lgr 11) and the EU’s overall growth policy from 2000 onwards. The result shows that although the school’s governance rightly can be described in terms of decentralisation, there are several parallel movements that point in the opposite direction. An increased influence from the EU over Swedish education policy, an increased central interest for school content issues, concentration of free schools to a few large corporations, and that teachers’ professional judgments are replaced by standardised and centrally-designed material are discussed as four such processes. The assumption of school decentralisation thus requires qualification and clarification in order to serve as a basis for the study of school governance.