Åsa Söderström

A School for Every Child in Sweden

Behind the introduction of a public primary school in 1842 was the idea of education for all its children and youth. These discussions were intense among the political parties in Sweden throughout the nineteenth century and reached its culmination in preparation of the comprehensive school reform in 1962. The vision of a school for all, where all children from the society met, has been one of the cornerstones in the social democratic building of an equal and democratic society from the 1960s to the 1980s. But time changes and in the twenty-first century and the new era of globalisation and market-oriented education, the question can be asked: What has become of the vision of a school for all?

Preschool Work against Bullying and Degrading Treatment: Experiences from an Action Learning Project.

Abstract This article deals with experiences from an action learning project against bullying and degrading treatment among nine Swedish preschools. Even though definitions of bullying and degrading treatment tend to lead to thoughts of school-age children rather than preschoolers, previous research shows that bullying occurs in preschool as well. Our data consist of documentation of improvement work carried out in the preschools that were analysed from both a peer culture perspective and a school improvement perspective. Our main results show that the preschools, by identifying challenges and actions anchored in the local context, ‘hit the target’ in their work against bullying and degrading treatment in the preschools. However, the children and their perspectives were rarely taken into account in the improvement work, which we consider as ‘missing the point’. Didactic implications for further preschool action learning projects are discussed.

Organisational Perspectives on Schools and Change

The chapter builds on institutional theory and how it explains stability and change in organisations. Loose coupling is described as a common phenomenon to uphold a harmonious relationship between the demands of the external environment and the inner life of the organisation. Organisational development (OD) is presented as a framework to understand the work processes in school organisation when school leaders and teachers do improvement work. The concept of improvement capacity is defined in a socio-structural perspective, encompassing the infrastructure of the school organisation, the improvement processes, the improvement roles and the improvement history of the organisation. Finally, this is framed in a practice and sensemaking perspective. The organisational perspective is contrasted with the need to focus on the teaching situation. The concepts of means and goal-situated strategies are introduced, and four common means-situated strategies are described. We argue for the need for goal-situated strategies and underpin this with a social learning perspective.

Six School Types

Six types of school organisations are presented, in which different drivers for improvement capacity can be identified. These are the idea-driven school, the plan-driven school, the model-driven school, the problem-driven school, the profession-driven school and the team-driven school. A short typological description of each type is given. There follows an illustration from a school in our study that represents each type, in which the school’s background is presented, as well as its infrastructure and improvement history. Improvement processes and roles are described. Every type ends with a section on how to understand the empirical example on the basis of the typological description and on possible ways in which this understanding could be transformed into actions that could strengthen the school’s improvement capacity. The relative lengthy descriptions are intended for school leaders and practising teachers. This is so as to increase the possibility for them to recognise themselves in the practice of their improvement capacity. For readers who are more interested in methodological concerns, we recommend them to read the overview at the opening of the chapter, continue with the typological descriptions and then move on to the concluding reflections in Chap. 5.