Abstract
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.
Highlights
This paper1 targets private supplementary tutoring (PST) as a relatively new phenomenon in Sweden
Through a positioning analysis of three consumer narratives published online by a Private supplementary tutoring (PST) company, this paper aims to further our understanding of which functions PST fills within the Swedish education system
As positioning theory is concerned with how duties and rights are distributed in changing patterns among people engaged in various kinds of social actions (Davies and Harré 1990), we look at the written consumer narratives as social acts designed by the PST company to address certain reader audiences
Summary
This paper targets private supplementary tutoring (PST) as a relatively new phenomenon in Sweden. PST companies sell education services to families with children enrolled in the formal school system and can thereby be seen as both products and producers of a changing education landscape. The paper aims to further our understanding of which functions PST fills within the Swedish education system; more precisely, how PST is legitimized and justified through marketing as a solution to problems related to the education of children. Today PST has a worldwide presence, involving a great variety of forms and a growing number of students (Bray 2011, 2017). In Sweden, the market for PST is limited because the country, in common with the other Nordic countries, has a relatively short history of large-scale organised supplementary education. The late establishment of this phenomenon in these countries has been explained by the well-developed mandatory state-funded school system. Bray (2011) states that within the EU, the Nordic states are the ones least affected by
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