Educating for the New Sweden?

Abstract

Here we focus on Sweden as an advanced welfare state with a centralised educational system stressing modernisation and democratisation that was rapidly restructured into a deregulated, decentralised system based on vouchers and parental choice. The design was based on the collection of different kinds of data: policy texts, public statistics, in depth interviews with policy makers and administrators at different levels ( n = 12) and teachers and headteachers ( n = 42), surveys of students in Grade 9 in comprehensive schools ( n = 413) in different contexts. In the interviews we found different recurrent themes in the narratives dealing with changes in education governance and on the subjects, students and teachers, in the system. By means of this we could portray a field of different conceptions of relations between education governance and social inclusion and exclusion among actors in different positions in Swedish education. The study showed large differences in the context of schools in terms of social and cultural backgrounds among students. We also found distinct differences between students in different cultural contexts. Those in contexts dominated by students of 'foreign background' were more loyal to traditional schooling cultures compared to more sceptical students from other contexts. In sum, our studies show a transition in the education culture in Sweden. This was conceptualised as a change in hegemony in the former welfare state where no alternatives are present in the current discourse on restructuring.