Search

Swedish compulsory schools are committed to work for equality and social cohesion. Increasing school segregation, however, challenges this commitment. Based on survey data from Swedish municipalities, this article maps and analyses local initiatives that counteract school segregation. We identify three main types of initiatives—reinforcement, dispersal, and merging—and the exogenous (school external) and endogenous (school internal) drivers involved in each of them. The analysis reveals several gaps between the national level, the municipal level and local schools that hamper local efforts to counter school segregation. This article contributes to increased knowledge on how local initiatives of counteracting segregation are constrained by national policies about school choice and independent versus municipal schools, but also how local initiatives tend to focus on organizational dynamics rather than on social and pedagogical processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article demonstrates how changes in the language of Swedish education policy have opened up a new social perception of education, in which space has been created for new actors, models and solutions in terms of managing activities in schools. Specifically, it seeks to illustrate how variouspromotion and prevention programmeshave been authorized and disseminated without critical inquiry or resistance in the education sector. To this end, we analyse how the specific, essentially contested concepts ofhealth,value baseandcommunicationhave been employed in authoritative national documents over the two last decades. For our analysis, we draw onspeech act theory, with a focus on linguisticperformativity, as we have been interested in analysing how concrete authoritative actors have ‘performed’ various arguments. The analysis helps us to understand how the linguistic force originating from authoritative agencies can be used by different actors as a way to legitimize their arguments and actions. The results demonstrate how different national authorities, as a consequence of their use of the three concepts analysed, have contributed to the establishment of promotion and prevention programmes in education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The legal framing of national education systems has been subject to substantial change in the past decade, especially in Nordic countries. Earlier research has called for better understanding of the implications of these changes which, in turn, points to a need for conceptual development. With an emphasis on legal and education scholarly work, this article explores concepts for further research on juridification in relation to education. This is done through an abductive process of inquiry, in which interpretations of the concept of juridification developed in previous research are explored in relation to changes in Swedish education policy on the area of equal treatment. We distinguish conceptually between juridification of and in education and propose a conceptual framework based on six dimensions of juridification, contributing to a view of policy as both formally regulated and enacted by education actors at different levels. This conceptual framework opens up new directions for further research in different areas and contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]