Linda Rönnberg

Exploring the Intersection of Marketisation and Central State Control through Swedish National School Inspection

This article focuses on the role of the state in the context of an increasing market orientation in Swedish education policy. It asks if and how a market orientation and privatisation can be reconciled with attempts to reestablish central output control. The controlling function of the state is emphasised in the form of efforts to inspect both public and private schools. Drawing on the literature on governance, dealing with the “hollowing-out” and “filling-in” of the state, two scenarios are distinguished asserting that a market orientation in the case of education policy could either reduce or intensify the need for stateled control. It is concluded that the characteristics of Swedish education policy conform to the “fillingin” line of argument, namely that central state control is strengthened at a point in time when a market orientation and greater choice and privatisation are gaining ground.

Mediating school inspection - Key dimensions and keywords in agency text production 2003-2010

This paper reports on an analysis of how school inspection in Sweden – its aims, directions and procedures – is portrayed in texts produced by the responsible national authorities. The study involves a textual analysis of official annual accounts and plans (texts directed to the government, municipalities, schools and the public) produced by the National Agency for Education and the Swedish Schools Inspectorate. The analysis concentrates on key concepts conveying the dominant ideas of inspection and education. The analysis is structured around four dimensions that are based on an understanding of inspection as education governance and on the characteristics of the Swedish education system. The results suggest that the rhetoric and dominant ideas of schools inspection changed when the responsibility for inspection was transferred to the Swedish School Inspectorate in the autumn of 2008. Key concepts before that time are more supportive of schools and municipalities, recognising local conditions. Later, a language with the intention of detecting shortcomings and supporting an ideology of individual rights and juridification is apparent.

In the Public Eye: Swedish School Inspection and Local Newspapers: Exploring the Audit-Media Relationship.

This paper focuses on the dual dependencies apparent at the intersection of the media society and the audit society by empirically exploring and discussing the relationship between Swedish local newspaper coverage and school inspection activities. The research questions pertain to the Inspectorate’s media strategy, how inspection is represented and conveyed, the messages sent, and who gets to speak. Literature on governance, and the role and function of the media in the wider audit society is applied theoretically. Four municipalities were selected to represent different demographical and economical structures and previous inspection experiences. The empirical material includes interviews with leading inspection officers and newspaper articles. The local newspapers portray the Inspectorate as a legitimate institution acting on behalf of and protecting the public, and even more so, the educational consumer. The current format used by the Inspectorate – a succinct reporting only on deviations – links with a favored format of the media, reinforcing the tight media–inspection relationship and leading to implications for education governance and policy.

Marketization on export: Representations of the Swedish free school model in English media

This paper explores how ‘social democratic’ Sweden initiated and implemented choice reforms that attracted the interest of ‘liberal’ England. By studying how English media framed and portrayed the Swedish free school ‘export’ from 2008 to 2014, this paper aims to describe and discuss how a market-oriented policy idea, the Swedish system of free schools, is represented as it travels across national contexts. Initially, the Swedish free school model was portrayed as an inspiration for both the English political left and, in particular, the right. However, the national stereotypical representation of Sweden as a legitimate ‘reference society’ was significantly toned down after the 2010 election—often accompanied by references to Sweden’s poor performances in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The study shows how Swedish policy ‘retailers’, such as school chain representatives, use the media for further display and reach. In summary, such educational policy retailing, along with media–policy interaction that (re)interprets national stereotypes linked to political legitimation, are important sources for understanding and further exploring international flows and interpretations of market-oriented reform ideas.

The Swedish Experiment with Localised Control of Time Schedules: Policy problem representations

Swedish compulsory schools are the most autonomous in Europe regarding time allocation and time management. Still, the Swedish state decided to take this even further, when introducing an experiment that permits some compulsory schools to abandon the regulations of the national time schedule. The aim of this study is to explore and analyse the representations of the policy problem that the experiment with local time schedules is designed to solve. Taking a post‐positivist approach to policy analysis and drawing on official documents, the task is to uncover and contextualise these representations and to ask what remains untouched. The four representations of the problem which the experiment addressed all have the common denominator of the experiment producing a particular effect: to break through stagnation, to strengthen management by objectives, to remove an obsolete means of steering education, or to increase individualisation. Roughly, the effect‐assumption takes into account either that a change will take place in schools or that changes that already have taken place will be legitimised.

From national policy-making to global edu-business: Swedish edu-preneurs on the move

Abstract This study explores the movements of some Swedish former education policy-makers that are currently active as commercial edu-business actors with the ambition to expand in the Global Education Industry (GEI). The aim is to map and analyze how a selection of Swedish edu-preneurs affiliated with a particular Swedish school chain enter the GEI and thereby market both their commercialized services and the policy ideas about so-called free schools, in its Swedish version. The study shows how these edu-preneurs move from the domestic to global arenas and how their business and policy advocacy activities are framed and represented. Mobilization and public exposure of previous and present policy advocacy networks are important assets for these edu-preneurs as they navigate the GEI. The study illustrates how these actors make use of particular forms of knowledge, from department ministerial work and party politics, which blends with work in public relations and various edu-businesses, pointing to the interrelatedness of politics, policy, business, power, and ideology. The paper concludes by raising issues in need of further exploration and debate, pertaining to our understanding of education policy-making and, ultimately, democracy.

Policies of ‘modernisation’ in European education: Enactments and consequences

The five articles in this special issue offer empirically and theoretically informed accounts from education policy research carried out in different national contexts in Europe. This special issue sheds light on how modernising approaches to educational governance and reform, grouped under the umbrella of new public management, are strongly present in European education policy, both at transnational levels and in individual countries, and points to important implications for these developments.

Inspection and the media : the media and inspection

Research on the media’s role in policy is long-established (see for example Fitzgerald & Housley 2009; Gerstl-Pepin 2007; Gewirtz et al. 2007; Wallace 2007), but there has not been so much attention to the relationship between inspectorates and media. In this chapter, we argue that inspectorates depend on the media: the capacity of the media to publicise and spread their messages about school success and failure contributes very strongly to their influence. However it also seems to be the case that as inspectorates use and exploit the media to spread their messages about school performance, and thus buttress their authority and greatly extend their reach beyond the education world, they also become vulnerable to media pressure and – to a degree – reliant on media coverage to sustain their authority. In other words, there is an interdependent relationship between inspection and the media, in which media priorities may adversely affect the image of inspection. Thus while Ofsted has become highly visible and a topic of household conversation, greatly increasing its presence in the lives of parents, pupils and teachers, this is especially the case where stories of school success and failure are presented in highly dramatic terms (as victories, defeats, struggles and disasters). There are obvious risks for Ofsted in this presentation of their work: pressure to find stories that will attract coverage undermines attention to the substantial but more mundane aspects of inspection, and creates expectations of powerful inspection effects. Indeed negative media coverage of schools ‘in crisis’ reinforces the demand for political action, and heightens the perception of inspectorates as a force for powerful, effective intervention. There is, moreover, a pre-occupation in the tabloid press with reporting ‘bad news’, so that dramatic coverage of failing schools reinforces public perception of schooling in crisis and contributes to pressure on inspectorates. Against such a background, it is apparent that the relationship with the media is complex, and that it plays a significant role in our analysis of inspection as a governing practice.

En styrning i tiden

In a short time Sweden has changed from having one of the most centralised education systems to one of far-going decentralisation and management by objectives and results. Accordingly, state regulation of teaching hours in comprehensive education has gradually become weakened. The paper addresses questions related to time governance and school development, mainly at the municipal and school level. How do local directors of education and headteachers reason about the national time table and other factors governing and constraining time allocation? What and who are defined as driving forces and obstacles in this respect?

Knowing inspectors' knowledge : forms and transformations

This chapter focuses on the governing work of Swedish school inspectors with regards to the role and function of knowledge. As professionals, inspectors are situated as relays and brokers of policy standing in contact with both the political arena and practice arenas. School inspectors use and produce knowledge and they rely on, search for, accumulate and communicate different forms of knowledge. In this chapter, we seek to understand knowledge in the inspection context as existing in three phases, namely as embodied, inscribed and enacted (Freeman and Sturdy in Knowledge in policy—embodied, inscribed, enacted, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 1–17, 2014). The aim is to identify and discuss different phases of knowledge in inspectors’ work by asking how the different forms of embodied, inscribed and enacted knowledge are manifested, incorporated and transformed in the course of inspection. The chapter illustrates how different forms of knowledge are intertwined with issues of legitimacy, accountability and control, which is argued to be important for how inspection and the work of inspectors’ are perceived and judged in different contexts and settings.