Towards a European policy discourse on compulsory education: The case of Sweden

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show how the European Union (EU) and the Swedish government have recently become co-producers of education policy that increasingly emphasises compulsory education. The paper draws on the following two kinds of empirical material: 1) an analysis of central official policy documents produced by the EU and the Swedish government; and 2) documents related to the development, communication and implementation of country-specific recommendations within the EU, using Sweden as the national policy arena. Theoretically, the paper is inspired by discursive institutionalism and uses critical discourse analysis for the systematic analysis. The result shows that beginning around the mid-2000s, both the EU and the Swedish government have demonstrated an increased interest in compulsory education as a solution to a wide range of societal and individual problems. Initially, the coordination of policy concerned with compulsory education was communicated implicitly, discursively embedded into a variety of policy areas. From 2013 onwards, however, the result shows the emergence of a new and more explicit European policy discourse on compulsory education, which is discussed as an interesting area of research still in its infancy.