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Pedagogy, Culture & Society
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Weathering the perfect policy storm: a case study of municipal responses to educational reform
surges in Sweden
Jan Grannäs & Anneli Frelin
To cite this article: Jan Grannäs & Anneli Frelin (2021) Weathering the perfect policy storm: a case study of municipal responses to educational reform surges in Sweden, Pedagogy, Culture &
Society, 29:2, 281-297, DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2020.1732448
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2020.1732448
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Published online: 17 Mar 2020.
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Weathering the perfect policy storm: a case study of
municipal responses to educational reform surges in Sweden
Jan Grannäs and Anneli Frelin
Faculty of Education and Business Studies, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden
ABSTRACT
Global trends inspired by neo-liberal tendencies have influenced developments in the Swedish school system. Aflurry of educational reforms over the last decades have rapidly transformed the muni- cipal school arena into a market in which independent, for-profit schools have expanded and school segregation has increased. This article examines municipal responses to these reforms using the theoretical framework of policy enactment. More specifically, the genesis of Maple Grove secondary school in a Swedish municipality is analysed by taking contextual factors into account. These include reform and results pressure, inspections, teacher shortages and unexpected factors such as a large influx of refugees. These factors are traced to gain insights into how municipalities weather what can be described as a perfect policy storm.
KEYWORDS
Accountability; educational reforms; independent schools; policy enactment;
school segregation
Introduction
The Nordic countries, as other parts of the world, are currently affected by global trends in which organisations such as OECD have considerable leverage. Many OECD countries have responded to these influences, for which international comparisons such as PISA constitute important forces, by paying more attention to reforms aimed at increasing testing and other control features (Martens, Niemann, and Teltemann2016; Ozga and Lingard2007; Pettersson, Prøitz, and Forsberg2017). In recent decades, Swedish schools have been more affected by far-reaching reforms than any other Nordic country (Beach 2017; Grek2017; Hardy, Rönnerman, and Beach2019; Lundahl et al.2013). These reforms include municipalisation (Lundahl 2002), a new teacher education programme (Utbildningsdepartementet [Ministry of Education and Research]2010a), the introduction of publicly funded yet privately run independent schools or‘free-schools’ (SOU2014:5;
Utbildningsdepartementet [Ministry of Education and Research] 2010a) and Teacher Registration Reform (SOU 2008:52), all of which are to some degree inspired by New Public Management philosophies. According to the OECD,‘the highest performing edu- cation systems across countries are those that combine excellence with equity’ (OECD 2012). However, as Sellar and Lingaard note, statements about insufficient equity tend to be used to explain the reasons for bad results in different countries (Sellar and Lingard 2013).
CONTACTJan Grannäs jan.grannas@hig.se Faculty of Education and Business Studies, University of Gävle, Kungsbäcksvägen 47, Gävle SE-801 76, Sweden
2021, VOL. 29, NO. 2, 281–297
https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2020.1732448
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med- ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
This article examines policy responses at the municipal level regarding the pressure to raise merit scores, counteract segregation and achieve equity in what we describe as a policy storm.
Specifically, the genesis of ‘Maple Grove’ a secondary school situated in a municipality with a population of 100 000, is traced and analysed as a response to, and enactment of a series of educational policies following critique from authorities concerning segregated schools and lower student merit scores. The overall research question has been: How are recent key policy reforms enacted at the local municipality level in Sweden, including at the school level?
We use the concept of policy enactment as a lens through which the different policy reforms, and the municipal enactments of these, are studied. Management, market and performativity are policy technologies that aim to ensure that constant measurable perfor- mances are encoded in legislation and policy documents (Ball, Maguire, and Braun2012).
However, putting ‘policies into practice is a creative, sophisticated and complex but also constrained process’ (Braun et al.2011, 586). This article departs from a view of policies as texts that have to be interpreted and translated into practice in relation to local circumstances, meaning that policy is something to be enacted rather than implemented (Ball, Maguire, and Braun2012; Qoyyimah et al.2019). This creative and complex process can produce disrup- tions, but also the containment of policies, such as when an already existing practice is renamed in order tofit the language in the policy in question. However, policies can some- times produce unexpected and unintended consequences, especially when they interact with other contextual and dynamic factors.
Policies create material consequences; a pressure that has to be managed at different levels in the educational system (Ball, Maguire, and Braun2012). Braun et al. (2011) argue that the context of policy enactment needs to be given serious consideration and includes material elements such as infrastructure, resources and buildings. In addition, social and discursive aspects such as history and sense-making are of interest (Braun et al. 2011;
Mulcahy, Cleveland, and Aberton2015; Priestley et al.2012). The contextual dimensions that are pertinent to the research presented are:
Situated contexts (such as locale, school histories, intakes and settings).
● Professional contexts (such as values, teacher commitments and experiences, and policy management in schools).
● Material contexts (e.g., staffing, budgets, buildings, technology and infrastructure).
● External contexts (e.g., degree and quality of local authority support, pressures and expectations from broader policy context, such as Ofsted ratings, league ratings, league table positions, legal requirements and responsibilities) (Braun et al.2011, 588).
Policy pressure is not equally distributed and is always permeated by power; some actors have more autonomy in policy initiatives than others (Ball, Maguire, and Braun2012). In addition, different actors (e.g., those in schools) have different circumstances and capacities that either enable or constrain their ability to cope with and respond to policies (cf. Braun et al.2011).
Thefirst part of the article presents the Swedish school system. This is followed by an overview of the major Swedish educational reforms of the last decades, including a brief description of how four major reforms have influenced Swedish municipalities. The results are presented in two sections. First, the municipality and its enactments of the reforms are presented. Second, the genesis of the Maple Grove secondary school is presented as a material result of these enactments.
The Swedish school system
As one of the Nordic countries known for its high living standards and developed welfare systems, Sweden has a tradition of high-achieving, tax-funded, comprehensive municipal education (Antikainen2010; Esping-Andersen1996). The right to operate schools is regulated by the Swedish National Agency for Education and the politically elected and appointed education committee in each municipality. The roots of municipal education go back to 1842.
Until the beginning of the 1990s, state funded, municipally run schools were the norm, with very few exceptions, and pupils attended the school closest to their home. However, as a result of recent neo-liberal trends, the Swedish school system has undergone a number of changes (Lundahl et al.2013). Two specific trends can be discerned. The first is that economic austerity measures inspired by New Public Management (Blomqvist and Rothstein 2008) were part of reforms of decentralisation and the introduction of publiclyfinanced yet privately run independent schools or ‘free schools’ (similar to charter schools), framed as‘school choice’, and a school voucher system. The second trend is that a goal-steered governing system was introduced; this increased the focus on account- ability and merit scores (Andersson2005; Bunar2008; Englund1994,2010). According to Beach and Sernhede:
This tendency is also clearly recognizable in the educational systems in these countries, such as in Sweden, where educational consumerism and individualism have replaced comprehen- siveness and inclusion as capstones of recent developments. A number of elements have been involved. They include the introduction of open enrolment, per capita funding and deregulated admission procedures that encourage schools to compete for student enrol- ments and parents and students to act as consumers of education with the possibilities of free choice. (Beach and Sernhede2011, 8)
Uniquely, the Swedish school choice reform included the opportunity to start private for- profit schools that made their gains from tax money, thereby opening up a ‘quasi-market’
(cf. Wilkins 2012; Windle 2009). The number of private or independent schools has increased over time and today they cater for by some 15% of students, including 26%
at upper secondary school level (Friskolornas Riksförbund [Swedish Association of Independent Schools]2017).
Although many appreciated this reform, evidence has shown that it contributed to increased segregation in society and particularly in schools (Beach and Sernhede2011;
Bunar 2008; Bunar and Ambrose 2016; Skolverket [Swedish National Agency for Education]2012). Those who benefited most from the school choice reforms were middle- class students with better school results and higher credit scores, rather than those with a lower SES background, a different ethnicity where a lack of language skills can be an obstacle and those with complex learning needs (Beach and Sernhede 2011; see also Frelin, Gershon, and Grannäs2014).
The Swedish Schools Inspectorate (SSI) has criticised municipalities for their inability to counteract the negative effects of segregation, meaning that most municipalities fail to use already available measures, such as differentiated funding and the zoning of school uptake areas (Andersson, Östh, and Malmberg2010).
Another contemporary issue in the Swedish school debate has been Sweden’s down- ward trend in international comparisons, such as PISA, which now appears to be on the upward turn. For example, the refugee crisis in Syria and other countries led to a sharp rise
in student numbers in Swedish schools and the demand for language teaching capacities.
According to Swedish National Agency for Education, approximately 40,000 young peo- ple between the ages of 13–18 arrived in Sweden during 2015 (Skolverket [Swedish National Agency for Education]2015). Yet another factor is that the Swedish teaching corps is ageing, teacher shortages are increasing, and the number of students in years 4–9 is expected to increase by 23% by 2021 (SCB2015). It is in this‘crowded policy space’
(Lindgren, Hanberger, and Lundström2016) that municipalities are left to deal with the consequences of educational reforms.
In the following, an overview is provided of the major Swedish educational reforms of the last decades, including a brief description of how four of these reforms have influ- enced Swedish municipalities. The overview forms a backdrop against which the descrip- tions of the studied municipality’s policy enactments and the genesis of Maple Grove secondary school are interpreted.
The municipalisation reform
Sweden’s cohesive and state-controlled, nine-year compulsory education system was fully implemented in the early 1970s. However, considerable efforts were required to align regulated state policy frameworks with local conditions and needs. Unlike the previous school system, the nine-year compulsory school was open to all children and young people in Sweden. During the 1970s and 1980s criticism was directed towards the implementation of a nine-year compulsory education and the adjustments that were made in order to accommodate students with varying backgrounds, meaning that the implementation was made at the expense of overall student performance. Three parlia- mentary bills pointing to the need to increase the efficiency and quality of Swedish schools preceded the municipalisation reform in 1991. The government at that time stressed that Swedish students’ performances in international comparisons were among the best in the world and were characterised by a high degree of equality. However, there were challenges in that the school system in its present form was unable to deal with aspects such as individualisation in order to meet students’ needs, poor discipline, poor civic influence and detailed regulation (SOU2014:5).
In 1991 the Swedish Parliament voted to introduce the so-called ‘municipalisation reform’. The stated purpose of this transfer of governance from state to municipality was to achieve a more expedient, rational and efficient institution when municipalities were given responsibility for governing their schools. In line with other public services, the decentralised municipal school was subjected to New Public Management. At the time of its introduction, the state had to guarantee that national equality in schools would be achieved partly through national and local educational outcomes and partly through accountability measures.
The implementation of decentralised responsibility for schools has proved to be largely unsuccessful for several reasons. For example, there was lack of competency in many municipalities amongst teachers, principals, administration and politicians and the state (via Swedish National Agency for Education) was unable to offer adequate or efficient support to municipalities during the implementation phase. According to Swedish National Agency for Education, even 20 years later, some municipalities are failing to govern schools in accordance with the state mandated directive. An additional political
decision that severely altered the conditions for municipalities, and that was implemented shortly after thefirst, was the Swedish school choice reform (SOU2014:5).
The Swedish school choice reform
In 1991 the Swedish Parliament voted to introduce the so-called school choice reform (SOU2014:5; Utbildningsdepartementet [Ministry of Education and Research]2010a). At the time Sweden had a centre-right government and the purpose of the reform was to offer students and parents, as well as teachers and other school staff, the opportunity to freely choose schools. Moreover, there was an idea that reform would contribute to greater educational diversity and the emergence of schools that were better adapted to local conditions. Here, the primary argument was to give parent cooperatives and non- profit players a chance.
The move was also intended to provide a better match between individual needs and the education and teaching that each school could offer (Vlachos2011). The school choice reform was part of the pervasive, ongoing, neoliberal transition that Swedish society underwent from late 1980s onwards (Lundahl et al.2013). The rapid change in Swedish education policy from government unified municipal schools to the establishment of a significant number of independent or free schools makes Swedish educational policy unique compared to other Nordic countries (Parding2011). However, today most inde- pendent schools are profit-driven. According to The Swedish Trade Union Confederation in 2016, 75% of the school voucher system went to profit-sharing companies, compared to 50% 15 years earlier. Over time, there has been a concentration of increased ownership and a few large corporate groups have been established, primarily through mergers and acquisitions (LO2018). The school choice reform has given free-schools access to public funding and enabled parents to freely choose schools, which substantially affects munici- palities’ opportunities to plan and implement school activities. This part of the reform has been successful in the sense that user influence has significantly increased, meaning that families can choose to send their children to schools that are not geographically close to home (SOU2014:5). According to the committee report, the Swedish National Agency for Education stresses that:
[. . .] segregation has increased due to the Independent school reform in the beginning of the 1990s, and also due to increased housing segregation. It has become more common for students with similar backgrounds to cumulate at the same school. As a result, the variation in results among schools and groups of students has increased. The Swedish National Agency for Education holds increases in segregation as one of the factors responsible for the negative development in merit scores. The positive influence of classmates, which is particularly important for low achieving students, is being lost and the teachers’ expecta- tions on student achievement is being adjusted to previous ones, according to the Swedish National Agency for Education. (Utbildningsdepartementet [Ministry of Education and Research]2014, 287)
For municipalities, the directive to equalise opportunities in schools became more difficult to accomplish due to the increase in student mobility and the aggregation of students with fewer resources in some schools. This put considerable strain on the municipal organisation and made planning and governance more complex. Accordingly, municipalities had to create contingency plans and tie up resources, because unlike independent schools they were
obliged to accept more students. On the other hand, the reforms meant that teachers had more employers to choose from, which especially in large metropolitan areas, led to an increase in salaries and mobility amongst teachers (SOU2014:5).
The teacher registration reform
Another reform, the Swedish Teacher Registration Reform, came into effect in July 2011 and was aimed at strengthening the teaching profession by introducing a - probationary year with mentoring provision and aptitude assessments for newly qualified teachers carried out by school principals. From 1 December 2013, only registered teachers were eligible for permanent employment and had the right to independently assign grades. Registration was restricted to the subjects/age groups that the teacher had been trained for (SOU 2008; Utbildningsdepartementet [Ministry of Education and Research] 2010b). The reform can be viewed in the light of decade-long criticisms of the school system and teacher training (Fransson2015). A policy retreat in 2014 withdrew the assessment part of Teacher Registration Reform, meaning that teachers could receive their teacher registration when graduating from teacher education. Implementation issues with probation placements, in combination with concerns from research and the teacher unions about the attractiveness of the teaching profession, were some of the motives (cf. Fransson, Gallant, and Shanks2018; Utbildningsdepartementet [Ministry of Education and Research]2013).
For municipalities, the restrictions following the Teacher Registration Reform exacer- bated the teacher shortages that were already evident. One estimate was of a shortage of 52,000 teachers in 2019 in a country with around 1.5 million students (Skolverket [Swedish National Agency for Education]2017:370).
In 2008, the Department of Education has already received a directive to establish a clearer and more effective governance structure, in which the state’s responsibility for the goal- and performance-based school system was to be clarified, with an increased focus on core activities. Still, the main responsibility for quality development lay with each municipality and at school level, the schools’ principals. For Swedish National Agency for Education, it meant that the division of responsibilities and tasks changed (SOU2014:5) and it was at this stage that the Swedish Schools Inspectorate was established.
The Swedish Schools Inspectorate
In early 2008 the acting centre-right government proposed a clarification of the goal- and results steering in the school system in order to uphold national equality and high achievement in educational outcomes (Utbildningsdepartementet [Ministry of Education and Research] 2014). As Grek (2017) points out, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate was established as a result of the‘PISA-shock’ in order to improve students’
academic results. The implemented changes also stressed national inspection as a way of increasing equality (Gustafsson, Lander, and Myrberg2014; Lindgren et al.2012). Over the last two decades Swedish schools have become more transparent, in the sense that students’ results have become publicly available online. The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKL) publishes annual statistics ranking schools.
According to (SOU2014:5).
The publication of the Swedish Schools Inspectorate inspection reports and the perceived media interest has, according to the research report, facilitated the creation of an education market. Given the school choice option it should be considered that the inspection reports constitute an important source of information for students, parents and taxpayers in order to have insight and knowledge about the offered alternatives (Utbildningsdepartementet [Ministry of Education and Research]2014, 92).
The Swedish Schools Inspectorate’s regular supervision takes place on a municipal basis, which means that the authority inspects all schools in a municipality over a limited period of time. Independent schools are usually inspected separately. Supervision means that the Swedish Schools Inspectorate ensures that the municipality or the independent school follows the compulsory number of school days, school forms, curricula and other regula- tions that are binding for schools and their activities. It also assesses a number of areas– points of assessment – based on these regulations and other provisions. The Swedish Schools Inspectorate’s regular supervision reports are only on anomalies. Therefore, supervision focuses on areas where schoolsfind it difficult to achieve the set goals and requirements of the steering documents. The supervision report may include orders to correct mistakes and remedy shortcomings. The report can be used by the school as a starting point for improving the quality of school- and other activities (The Swedish Schools Inspectorate2010).
It is argued that legal guardians who are equipped with the knowledge and opportu- nities to access this information are able to make informed decisions for their children.
A likely consequence is that affluent parent groups take advantage of the chance to make strategic school choices that could create mobility between schools depending on their results and reputation regarding status, e.g., resulting from the focus on student merit scores (cf. Beach and Sernhede 2011). The Swedish Schools Inspectorate has criticised Swedish municipalities for being too passive in their work to counteract the negative effects of segregation in schools (Skolinspektionen [The Swedish School Inspectorate]2014). One of the successful measures it points to is the re-zoning of schools’ uptake/catchment areas.
As the reforms presented above have begun to take effect and change the school landscape in several municipalities, criticisms have arisen from several directions. Variance in school/pupil performance has increased, especially in urban areas that have been more affected by immigration and where municipalities have had to take the blame for these developments (Andersson, Östh, and Malmberg2010), even though it was the reform itself that made their compensatory task harder and the planning more challenging (SOU 2014:5). Taken together, it can be said that, through the large number of comprehensive education policy reforms,‘the state has sought to reinsert itself into schooling practices in a much more active way, and to target the work of teachers in much more prescriptive detail’ (Hardy, Rönnerman, and Beach2019, 359).
The case study of a Swedish municipality– enacting policy reforms
This article is based on a case study in which the primary object was municipal decisions regarding the school organisation in a medium-sized Swedish municipality, i.e., municipal policy enactments. The case study method (Creswell and Plano Clark 2011; Yin 2009) works well for in-depth studies of policy enactment at municipal school level.
Furthermore, as an in-depth illustration of one of the responses, part of the case study
is the municipal process of the conception and opening of a new secondary school (years 7–9 for pupils aged 13–15 years) that was centrally placed in the city in the autumn of 2015. The period studied includes the process leading up to the opening of this school.
The municipality consists of a city with a population 100,000 and its surroundings.
There are 27 municipal and 15 independent primary- and secondary schools in the municipality, some of which are rather small (a normal sized secondary school has around 4–500 students). However, the largest school is an independent one with an international profile and over 1,000 students. The case school, Maple Grove, is centrally located in the municipality and has around 500 students. When it opened as a secondary school, four other schools were closed and the uptake areas of the municipal schools were partly re- zoned.
Data collection and analysis
The data from this study was collected during the 2015–16 school year and includes national statistics and municipal documentation and statistics, and interviews with the chief officer for comprehensive schools in the municipality. In addition, news media articles collected online were used to validate interview accounts regarding the citizen dialogue process described in the results.
The official national statistical material used in the article were gathered from the Swedish National Agency for Education databases.1The municipal results were compiled from official statistics (Kommunblad). This type of municipal data has been produced and reported annually since 1999. For this reason, the time span for the statistics used in this article is 1999–2015, the end year being the year when Maple Grove school opened. The official Swedish National Agency for Education statistics provide a summary of data from the preschool, educational care, leisure centre, school and adult education based on a selection of the most recently published statistics. A comparison is also made between public and independent schools and the nation as a whole.
A secondary analysis was conducted on the collected official statistics (Payne and Payne 2004). This consisted of compiling the annual Swedish National Agency for Education statistics from 1999–2015 in a way that visualised the changes over time.
Furthermore, different statistics were grouped for comparisons between the municipal and national levels, as well as between public and independent schools.
Two semi-structured interviews were conducted at the beginning and end of the project with the chief officer for comprehensive schools. The questions used focused on processes and organisation over time, with a particular focus on the process leading to the opening of Maple Grove secondary school and the arguments and reasoning at the different levels in the municipal organisation.
The interview transcripts were analysed with attention to policy enactment in rela- tion to the genesis of the new school, especially in response to the three reforms and the integration directive to schools and with a focus on the four contextual dimensions of Braun et al. (2011). We examined the gathered data through a policy enactment lens developed by Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012). The analysis was based on thematic analyses of each interview transcript, which involved repeated readings of the material from beginning to end (vertically), followed by comparisons of each question in relation to other interviews carried out in the research study (horizontally). The data was coded
by two researchers for reasons of reliability and was labelled, separated, collected and organised to show the explicit and implicit phenomena of value in relation to the research questions (Boyatzis1998; Braun and Clarke 2006). The actual work of proces- sing, analysing and interpreting was done by coding, linkages and memos using the NVivo software.
Results
The results are presented in two sections:first the municipality and its responses to the reforms and second the genesis of the Maple Grove secondary school as a material result of the responses. Concerning the municipal responses, these are divided into four phases of policy enactment, which, although they overlap and intersect, are connected to a particular policy initiative at the national level.
Responses to reforms from the municipality
The consequences of thefirst phase of municipalisation, in which the state handed over the responsibility and operation of schools to the municipalities, have been identified in the introductory sections of this article. This phase of policy enactment is still pervasive with regard to the development and outcomes for Swedish society and the education sector. A few years later, the second phase began with the implementation of the school choice reform at a time when municipalities were acting in a material context of strug- gling with a poor economy, austerity measures and significant structural changes. Over the lastfifteen years, school choice reform has resulted in an increase of independent secondary schools in the municipality, with one in five students now attending an independent school.
The expansion of independent secondary schools resulted in a reduction in the number of students in municipal schools and contributed to closures and other austerity measures. According to the chief school officer for comprehensive schools, Ms Larsson, it also created increased mobility among teachers, school leaders and students. This made planning more demanding for the central office: ‘You have no idea, a single tiny thing [. . .]
and the choices go a totally different way’ (Ms Larsson). From the point of view of the external context, the school choice reform turned Swedish schooling into a competitive market in which families could choose schools based on their own preferences and the possibility of changing their children’s school, for example, in the event of dissatisfaction with the quality of teaching or the school’s treatment of their offspring.
As shown in Figure 1, in the situated context, a relatively large proportion of the families in the investigated municipality have chosen independent schools for their children. Compared to the national average, twice the number of students in the municipality attend independent schools. This puts the municipality in a difficult position in terms of the material contexts of budgeting, planning and the enactment of policy reforms. Already under pressure due to this reform, the challenge to uphold high quality teaching by competent teachers increased with the next major policy reform.
The third phase started with the teacher registration reform that required all schools to employ registered teachers in all subjects. Swedish schools have since struggled to employ teachers in some subjects, which has also been the case in this municipality.
One economic challenge is connected to the fact that having registered teachers in all subjects is now a requirement that municipalities must meet, despite unfavourable external aspects such as teacher attrition, shortages and high long-term sickness absen- teeism. Also, different subjects require different teaching hours. For instance, subjects like mathematics and Swedish have 4–5 times more teaching hours per year than music. An effect of the requirement for registered teachers in subjects like music makes these teachers and their teaching very expensive in smaller schools unless they are also certified to teach more than one subject or can work in several schools, which is part of the material context.
Sweden currently has a shortage of teachers, which, from a 15-year perspective, seems set to significantly increase further. According to a forecast from one teacher union, in 2025 the shortage will consist of 65 000 full-time teachers. The region in which the investigated municipality is located will need to employ approximately 2,000 additional teachers in its elementary schools (Skolverket [Swedish National Agency for Education]2017). AsFigure 2 shows, the number of teaching positions held by those with a teaching certificate dimin- ished significantly around 2013. Two major external factors that contribute to the reduction are retirement and the introduction of the teacher registration reform.
The fourth phase begins with the introduction of Swedish Schools Inspectorate, an increased and sharpened control instrument of the state with the purpose of increasing merit scores and reducing the variations in quality between schools and municipalities, which is part of the external context.
The critique in SSI’s audit reports regarding school segregation has required the municipality to adopt a number of material (and situated) contextual measures, such as a concentration of resources to fewer schools, the re-zoning of school uptake areas and increased investments in immigrant pupils, paradoxically by closing the schools closest to their homes.
100 2030 4050 6070 8090 100
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 Percentage of pupils (%) in independent schools
Percentage of pupils (%) in municipal schools
Percentage of pupils (%) in independent schools in all municipalities nationally
Figure 1.Percentage of students in municipal and independent schools in the municipality (national average for comparison) over time.
The genesis of Maple Grove
In 2010 a process was initiated by the municipal education committee as a situated response to all these reforms and in response to low merit scores (Kommunledningskontoret 2011). A thorough evaluation of the different factors in the material context, such as cost per square metre, age of the teaching body and other factors, was ordered by the education committee. As a curiosity, one municipal audit report remarked that the municipal resource distribution system, in its interpretation of the Education Act, did not accommodate variations in the student population, which disadvan- taged municipal schools in relation to independent schools (Kommunrevisionen2014).
At the time, and in the situated context, due to the establishment of large independent schools and a reduction in student cohorts, there was a surplus of schools for students in years 7–9. This soon changed, although at the time of the planning there was no way of foreseeing this. The politicians argued that small schools for older students were expen- sive and difficult to run at a high quality and that this became more pronounced due to the stricter requirements for formal competence that ensued with the introduction of Teacher Registration Reform. Although in the rhetoric other arguments have been high- lighted, it would seem that the weightiest argument was quality and equity. Ms Larsson said that ‘we had had small organisations [in year 7–9 schools] which become very vulnerable to external factors, given the subject specialisations and with the incoming competence and registration requirement’. Municipal audit reports also criticised the education committee for not taking enough action to raise the merit scores in 7–9 schools (e.g., Kommunledningskontoret, (2010,2011) Annual audit report).
In the situated context the process of school closures had earlier been contested and as a result a number of citizen dialogue meetings were arranged in different parts of the city at an early stage. In these, discussions about‘high quality’ it was clear that there was considerable tension between parents’ and politicians’ views. According to Ms Larsson, parents valued close proximity to the child’s home more than teacher registration: ‘I don’t
76 78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 Percentage of teachers in the studied
municipality with a teaching certificate
Percentage of teachers in all municipalities nationally with a teaching certificate
Figure 2.Percentage of teachers in the municipality with a teaching certificate (national average for comparison) over time.
care [. . .] the most important thing is that [the school] is here, that is more of quality to me.
You say that there should be registered teachers, but that is not quality to me.’ To her, this was an impossible position to stand up for in terms of the professional context. Later, in the situated context some of the parents strategically moved their children to other schools in order to put them into the ‘right’ secondary school. There was a broad consensus amongst politicians to de-segregate schools and achieve what they termed as‘the right mix’ of students, i.e., a mix of individuals with different socioeconomic status and Swedish- and immigrant born students due to the pressures in the external context.
However, if parents moved their children some of that effect could not be achieved. For example, no student from one of the northern areas attended the Maple Grove school in thefirst year.
Even if there was opposition during the process, it should be noted that when the decision was taken in 2012 all seven parties represented on the education committee were unanimous about securing long-term stability for the measures that were taken. The political decision was made to re-zone the uptake areas in the municipality, close down four smaller and segregated secondary schools and open a new, centrally located sec- ondary school according to the vision‘An equal school with high quality’. In the material context, it was intended as an attractive alternative to independent schools and the size would allow for increased resources for student support.
The municipal challenge of predicting student cohorts can be illustrated by the fact that since the process was initiated in 2010 the situated context is now quite different, mainly due to the large influx of students in the latest refugee crisis (cf. Biasutti, Concina, and Frate 2019; Kiel, Syring, and Weiss2017). This is part of the external context, in which there is now a lack of school space and where plans are being made to build and open three new schools.
Ms Larsson stated that‘Over a period of 18 months we have received 500–550 new students within the organisation with almost no increases in space or classes, it is within the existing organisation. In the municipality’s audit reports, it appears that the large volume change could be managed within the budget framework with retained quality in operations, as strong savings were required’. Ms Larsson also feared that these rapid changes would lead to criticism from parents opposing the school closures.
As immigrants are constantly arriving in the municipality a discontinuity is created within student groups, which Ms Larsson argues has caused fatigue amongst teachers and stu- dents. In the situated context she is also aware that the media often reports scenarios in a sensational way and reflects on ways in which the situation can be communicated without assigning blame to vulnerable students. An audit report also stated that the annual demands for a balanced budget resulted in a surge of austerity measures and difficulties in maintaining the present quality in the operations (Kommunledningskontoret2014).
Maple Grove school opened in August 2015 and has been followed in a pilot research project in which data was collected during thefirst years of operation (Grannäs and Frelin 2017). It can be added that due to changes in the external contexts, such as an increase in the population and student cohorts, in the material context new schools are being prospected in newly built areas, once again redrawing the playingfield for the municipal administration.
Policy enactment in times of profound change
The policy landscape of school organisation is complex, and the results presented here do not give a full account of the many influences leading to the opening of Maple Grove school. The results from the pilot study describe the unique situation that has arisen due to the municipal policy enactments and the policy pressure created by reforms. It has illustrated the municipal enactment of the reforms in complex conditions, taking into account external contexts such as the municipalisation reform that transferred govern- ance to municipalities without sufficient support and the Independent School Reform that created new challenges for predicting student cohorts in municipal schools. Moreover, the establishment of Swedish Schools Inspectorate which, paired with OECD, raised demands for desegregation, combined with PISA comparisons that created pressure for increased merit scores. Finally, these were paired with Teacher Registration Reform, a pressure for formal teacher competence that was difficult to meet in smaller secondary schools. Several of the policy reforms interact with each other in a way that could have unintended consequences (cf. Hardy, Rönnerman, and Beach2019; Lindgren, Hanberger, and Lundström2016).
Second, the situated contexts (cf. Braun et al.2011), such as parental and local opinion and histories, are illustrated. The complicated process of creating an attractive, central secondary school with a desegregated student body, such as Maple Grove, is based on an assumption that mixing students with different socioeconomic status creates improved conditions for individuals and the school’s positive development (cf. Grannäs and Frelin 2017). The municipal response aims to produce an equal school of high quality, in line with the vision created by the politicians. As Gustafsson, Lander, and Myrberg (2014) have pointed out, such expected effects of policy are context-dependent and have varying results among local school authorities. However, for the case municipality to succeed it needed to persuade the voters, and in particular the parents, whose interests and views of the notion of quality did not align with the demands of the Swedish Schools Inspectorate.
Third, the professional context (cf. Braun et al. 2011) was dependent on external contexts, such as teacher education and the supply of teachers, which proved challenging due to the registration reform. In areas of school closures, tensions arose when the values in the professional context clashed with those of parents. The municipality was obliged to staff its schools with properly certified teachers, whereas parents thought that sending their children to a school close by was more important.
Fourth andfinally, there is the material context (cf. Braun et al.2011), such as budget, building and zoning. Planning was challenging due to the growth and mobility of the student cohort, annual budgeting demands and austerity measures. This was combined with an unforeseen external shock related to the vast number of refugees arriving during the 2015–16 school year that put pressure on the system as a whole.
This article has aimed to bring these contexts and developments together into one collective plot in which the various reforms latch onto, interlace and influence each other.
For example, the reform that introduced Swedish Schools Inspectorate can be viewed partially as a response to an uncontrolled school market in terms of grades and national and international results (cf. Gustafsson, Lander, and Myrberg2014). However, the multi- ple reforms also had unforeseen consequences, in that municipalities are now having to
deal with an ever-changing and crowded policy environment (cf. Lindgren, Hanberger, and Lundström2016).
A main contribution of this article is to visualise the complex and compounded policy pressure generated by the combination of reforms over time at the municipality level. It extends the existing knowledge in several ways: through the descriptions of conse- quences of enactments of several reforms over an extended period of time and the analyses in terms of several different contexts in the Swedish case. Thus, we suggest that the opening of the Maple Grove secondary school can be viewed as one material result of municipal policy enactments produced in order to weather the perfect policy storm.
Note
1. The Swedish National Agency for Education.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by the University of Gävle, principal’s strategic grants, number 2014/72.
ORCID
Jan Grannäs http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0331-8482 Anneli Frelin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1871-4488
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