The Problem of “Problematic School Absenteeism” – On the Logics of Institutional Work with Absent Students’ Well-Being and Knowledge Development

Abstract

This article uses neoinstitutional theory to comparatively analyze different actors’ institutional work with “problematic school absenteeism”. Data was generated around four cases, each consisting of absent students and actors who work with absenteeism. The results describe how a dichotomous view of students’ well-being and knowledge development is established among actors, fueled by bureaucratic and professional logics that challenge the idea of integrating a concern for students’ knowledge development and a care for their well-being.

Introduction

The phenomenon of “problematic school absenteeism” has received increased attention and is regularly put forward as a growing problem in the media, among decision makers and in research throughout Europe (Claes et al., 2009; Reid, 2012; SOU, 2016: 94; Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2016). The task for schools to work with absent students is intricate and contains both structural and individual challenges (De Witte et al., 2013). Problematic absenteeism is particularly difficult to handle because it so clearly challenges the school’s mission to contribute to both students’ knowledge development and students’ well-being. This means that schools’ work to support absent students not only has to consider the problems and consequences associated with missing out on a large part of schooling, but also how students’ well-being affects their ability to come to and/or stay in school, and, conversely, how schooling affect students’ well-being. In other words, work with problematic school absenteeism cannot avoid either a concern for students’ knowledge development, or a concern for their well-being.

The school’s expansion and evolution in modern and late modern times have institutionalized and increasingly integrated a concern for students’ knowledge development with a care for students’ well-being in western welfare states. That is, knowledge development and well-being have been assumed to presuppose one another: well-being is commonly assumed to be a prerequisite for knowledge development and positive knowledge development is commonly assumed to be a prerequisite for well-being, both during and after schooling (Graham et al., 2011; Landahl, 2006; Lindqvist, 2020). However, the integration of a concern for absent students’ knowledge development and their well-being poses great challenges since problematic absenteeism often is an expression of a complex combination of various issues which take distinctive forms for separate students, such as truancy, school refusal or school withdrawal (Ekstrand, 2015; Reid, 2012). This multifacetedness of absenteeism means that different actors from different professions, both within and outside the school, tend to be involved when students’ absence increase, including e.g., teachers, principals, special needs educators, counselors, school nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists. In Sweden, which is the national context of this study, this is in line with established approaches to issues on student health, which often emphasize joint collaboration in multi-professional teams to support students’ well-being (Guvo & Hylander, 2012). The underlying reasoning in such approaches is that the competencies of different actors and professions should complement each other in relation to students’ individual problems. However, the boundaries between different jurisdictions, professions and knowledge domains are never given, and involved actors tend to act on the basis of different assumptions and more or less pronounced norms, traditions, habits, routines and explanatory models, which influence how specific problems are understood (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996; Hjörne & Säljö, 2019). For example, Isaksson and Larsson (2017) highlights how teachers perceive that ‘school social workers’ overlook organizational requirements, whilst ‘school social workers’ suppose teachers fail to attend to individual students’ needs. Ek et al. (2017) similarly point out how child- and adolescent psychiatry’s long-term perspective on strengthening individual students’ mental health can be in conflict with schools’ and teachers’ broader responsibility for all students and a focus on quickly getting absent students back (see also Blomqvist, 2012). Moreover, differences in status are evident in the degree of influence that various actors have in this type of work, where Hjörne (2016), for example, demonstrates how psychiatric explanations for school failure oftentimes are given more weight than e.g., social or pedagogical explanatory models.

Given the emphasis often placed on the need for different actors to collaborate in the work with absent students (SOU, 2016: 94; Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2016), relatively few comparative studies have been conducted on different actors and their work within the school as an institution, (Ekstrand, 2015). This article aims to somewhat fill that gap in research by assuming that different actors’ way of acting and relating to each other are decisive for getting absent students back, for their well-being, knowledge development and future life opportunities. As suggested by the research above, it is important to study what actors that become involved in the work with absenteeism, as well as comparing how different routines, norms, organizational structures and professional roles make certain explanatory models, actions and solutions feasible in this work. The article’s purpose is therefore to comparatively analyze the institutional arrangements that enable and/or constrain different actors’ involvement in a local school’s work with problematic absenteeism

Theory

Since this article focuses on comparing different actors’ institutional work, we ground our analyses on neoinstitutional theory, which can explain relatively stable patterns of social actions in institutions, based on norms in groups and in society (March & Olsen, 2006). We use neoinstitutionalism to give plausible explanations that go beyond the (good) intentions of different actors, by analyzing the institutional work with absent students in relation to the structural conditions which frame the actors’ work. We investigate how absenteeism is conditioned, perceived and handled within the school as an institution, e.g., the rules (formal and non-formal), routines and expectations that influence what is, and is not, possible to do - that is, how institutional logics (structuring principles) condition different plausible actions (Freidson, 2001)

We approach the actors’ work with absenteeism via abductive reasoning (Peirce, 1998 [1903]), an interactive analytical process that includes the relation between existing theory-dependent knowledge and empirical data. Hence, we have oscillated between inductive, empirically-informed attempts to construct wider sets of institutional logics which constrain and enable particular practices, and attempts to “trace” logics and particular structuring principles deductively. More concretely, we approach our object of study via questions about how the actors involved (e.g., teachers, the school, social services and student health care) “translate” (Czarniawska and Jorges, 1996; Alasuutari, 2015), negotiate and give meaning to problematic school absenteeism in relation to each other.

Two institutional logics were distinguished during the analytical process, both of which are based on the work of Freidson (2001): a bureaucratic logic which emphasizes rules, standardization, predictability and monitoring; and a professional logic which emphasizes demarcations between different domains of specialized knowledge. The logics are best understood as Weberian “ideal-types”, i.e., analytical condensations of certain institutional responses, action repertoires and practices that are perceived as reasonable and rational by the actors within our study. These logics are thus tools by which we explain discrepancies between formal structures/rules and what is happening in the concrete practices that we investigate. While our use of the theoretically informed concept logic includes both general and specific, local dimensions, practices are locally situated and obtained from our empirical data. That is, “institutional logics” and “practices” are derived from different parts of our abductive analytical process.

The analysis is unpacked in two steps, first with a focus on structured practices and action repertoires, and second, in our discussion, with a focus on how practices condition different actors’ work with absent students in terms of institutional logics.

Design and Method

The study on which this article builds on is designed as an ethnographically inspired case study of a school that has identified increased school absenteeism as a major challenge (Atkinson, 2007). The school is a medium-sized school, with approximately 300 students attending grades 7 to 9 (14 to 16 years old). Student health work (the area in which problematic school absenteeism is typically handled) is overseen by a student health team comprised of a school nurse, counselor and teachers with special education training. If needed, the school can request assistance from the municipality’s centralized school physician, school psychologist, and career and study guidance counselors.

Data collection for the study centered on four cases focusing on students with a history of problematic absenteeism. Through these four students, the actors involved in the working with absenteeism at the school were identified. Having identified the actors, the neoinstitutional theoretical framework was used to compare the actions and perceptions that became possible and/or problematic in the various actors’ work, i.e., how different action repertoires and perceptions were conditioned by different institutional logics (Alasuutari, 2015; Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996). This was done in two primary ways: First, to identify and conceptualize similarities and differences between actors by focusing on how different institutional logics enabled and/or constrained different modes of understanding and acting on the phenomena of absenteeism. Second, to focus on the interfaces between actors, i.e., what these institutional logics implied for the overall work when different understandings and ways of acting were communicated, translated, and negotiated between practices. This comparative mode of analysis means that the focus has been on the actors and not on the individual pupils. Hence, while the students have been significant for the empirical results, no quotes from student interviews have been included.

Students were selected in cooperation with the school principal, with the aim of achieving a variation between genders, socioeconomic backgrounds, and identified causes of absenteeism. Half of the students in our cases were boys, and the others were girls. All of the participants had been diagnosed with a neuropsychiatric disorder or were undergoing assessment. The students also varied in terms of their pathway to increased absence, such as social factors (including peers and other student relationships), challenging domestic circumstances, bullying, and learning difficulties. All of the students had a history of problematic school absenteeism, ranging from 50 to 100% at the time of data collection. When present at school, the students rarely participated in typical instruction alongside their classmates in ordinary classrooms. Rather, the school’s resources were primarily used in ways that encouraged the students to attend smaller special needs units. The long history of absenteeism among the students had enabled the principals to develop a trusting relationship with both students and their parents, allowing them to make initial contact before passing along their contact information to the researchers.

Interviews were conducted with all of the parents and two of the students at the end of 2020 and in the beginning of 2021 and documents were collected in order to map the actors involved, as well as their actions and perceptions in relation to the students’ absenteeism. Documents included e.g., local policy; school journals on students with formal decisions, notes and protocols from meetings; student health conference protocols; and action plans. The mapping of actors triggered further interviews, which included a principal; a full-time mentor with overall responsibility for several of the school’s classes, including issues of attendance/absence; two interviews with a special education teacher; and four teachers. Three additional interviews were conducted at the end of the project period (fall 2022) with two of the parents and one of the students in order to follow up on how the work had developed. Whereas the student interviews were relatively brief (approximately 20-30 minutes), the interviews with parents and other actors lasted between 45 and 90 minutes.

Data on actors was also collected through observations and recordings of student health conferences. These types of conferences are often employed in Swedish schools to structure the work surrounding students who face problems or challenges related to their schooling. Typically, a principal and the parents were present at these meetings, alongside other actors pertinent to the problem, including special needs educators, counselors and school nurses from within the school organization and school psychologists and psychiatrists from external organizations. During our observations, teachers were present in only one of the cases, and students never participated. The bulk of the meetings were devoted to determining the students’ difficulties, documenting progress and/or hindrances, and discussing and organizing interventions concerning the student.

All in all, the data for this article includes documents, field notes, 17 interviews and 8 observed student health conferences.

The interviews and observations were conducted from November 2020 (first interview) to August 2022 (final follow-up interview), which means that the data production has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. All observations and interviews were thus conducted digitally via video calls, however, only audio was recorded and transcribed in order to enable coding and analysis. One of the student health conferences took place at the school while we participated via video call. There are some obvious disadvantages to conducting observations and interviews digitally since it affects what becomes possible to capture in data, e.g., spatiality or body language (Adams-Hutcheson & Longhurst, 2017). Since the observations were conducted within a strongly framed context (student health conferences), such risks could be minimized. Additionally, Howlett (2022) suggests that digital collection methods can be suitable when researching potentially sensitive or personal topics. As such, based on the sensitivity of the issues in question, digital interviews and observations were regarded as a less intrusive form of data collection, and responded to positively by the participants. Hence, even though the pandemic was declassified as a socially dangerous disease in Sweden by April 2022, the follow-up interviews were still conducted digitally.

The need for careful and well-thought-out research ethics in a project like this cannot be overestimated, not least due to the fact that it involved young, potentially vulnerable people and handled highly sensitive personal data. Hence, a formal ethical review of the project was carried out by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority in the spring of 2020, and we have ensured that the research ethics in the project follow established principles of good research practice (Swedish Research Council, 2020). We obtained written consent from all respondents and informed them (orally as well as in writing) about the purpose of the project, its implementation, and that participation was voluntary, and we have tried to ensure that this information was perceived correctly. Furthermore, all respondents, as well as the school, including the names of particular rooms have been anonymized in the study results.

However, despite our preparations, we faced ethical dilemmas during both the data production and analytical phases of our project that were difficult to foresee. These dilemmas called for instantaneous decisions and reconsiderations during the process. For instance, during an interview with one of our student cases, who openly described difficult situations in many areas of life, we understood the level of precariousness in his/her situation and decided not to push further, to avoid the risk of increased harm. Although we wanted salient empirical data on the situations and experiences of the student cases and their parents, we were also aware that they had been in numerous meetings sharing sensitive information on their lives, so we tried to keep our interviews short and concise. We also kept reminding ourselves of our study object: the institutional work on and responses to school absenteeism, and to a lesser degree, the lived experiences of our student cases.

Results

All in all, around 40 actors were involved in the four cases. These include individuals from different professions (e.g., teachers, mentors, special educators, principals, school nurses, psychiatrists); special needs units; external institutions and organizations (e.g., social services, child and adolescent psychiatry, primary care); and networks (which bring together actors in various forms of meetings and collaborations). What actors were involved in each case varied, depending on a range of factors. From a neoinstitutional perspective, however, it was of particular interest to study this in relation to how possible causes and solutions were articulated and communicated between actors. This was a cumulative process where actors’ identification of causes of and solutions to absenteeism tended to generate a need for additional expert knowledge and/or resources, and thus additional actors.

Three Types of Institutional Practices

In our initial analysis of the actors’ work, we found that a dichotomous view of students’ well-being and knowledge development was established in the actors’ understandings and communication of causes of and solutions to absenteeism. As will be shown below, the dichotomy was fueled by action repertoires that enabled/constrained actors in three different practices. The practices differed in several ways, for example in terms of what professional actors dominated the practices, the relation between the practices and the work with absent students, but also in how either well-being or knowledge development was the primary objective for action in the practices. Based on these differences, the practices were categorized as defining, regular, and mediating.

Defining Practices

In the defining practices, understandings of absenteeism are characterized by a relatively narrow focus on the inner lives of individual students, predominantly on psychiatric diagnoses and/or students’ dispositions. Both the well-being and knowledge development of students are monitored through notes in school journals and student health conference protocols. These notes describe the students in our cases in terms like lacking “a motor” (Linus), “energy” (Moa), or “impulse control” (Ludvig), and connect these terms with certain behaviors (e.g., aggression) and conditions (e.g., depression) that explain absenteeism.

The discourses of the defining practices are primarily based on expert knowledge from professional groups outside the regular, everyday work in school (e.g., pediatric psychiatry) and have, as such, not only a great impact on defining the causes of absenteeism, but also on suggesting solutions. The institutional roles of these actors are, in a formal sense, well-defined and based on rules and regulations regarding their responsibilities, such as the psychiatrist, special-needs teacher, or counselor. An excerpt from a student health conference with Ludvig can illustrate how absenteeism is understood and formulated within these types of defining practices. In the transcript below, Erika, a psychiatrist, speaks from a position where she, and other psychiatrists, have met Ludvig in several individual conversations and investigations.

He has a very small [stress] buffer right now, I think that when he signals and it does not lead to a change – and I think he is very, very sensitive – then I think it can quickly lead to him getting very angry./…/there is something that grows in him, you can absolutely understand that if you go to class with other children, that it will be disturbing… but… when he is under high stress, I think he can react and that is probably what you need to… try by all means to prevent this from happening, for everyone’s sake. (Erika, psychiatrist, observed and recorded student health conference)

The conference resulted in an understanding of Ludvig’s absenteeism that laid the foundation for later decisions. As seen in the excerpt, terms like limited “stress buffer” and “something that grows in him” are used to explain absenteeism with reference to Ludvig’s inner being. These are explanations based on knowledge primarily produced within a psychiatric discourse with a focus on Ludvig’s well-being. It is a discourse whose explanatory authority is external to the educational system (e.g., medical expertise), in which, therefore, Ludvig’s knowledge development is not prioritized, or rather, in which well-being is, or can be, considered to be an overriding concern and a prerequisite for future knowledge acquisition. We find similar explanatory models for absenteeism in all of our cases, for example in notes in the school journal about Moa from year 6 (the year before starting at the school in our case study) which states that:

there are concerns about Moa’s well-being and about her continued schooling. In order to reduce the demands on Moa, we focus on her well-being while her goal fulfilment is postponed to year 9. (Journal entry about Moa, written by a former principal)

As illustrated by the entry, and also by the quote below taken from an interview with Ludvig’s father, well-being (e.g., mental health) and knowledge development (institutionalized requirements to cope with schoolwork, assignments, homework) tended to be established as dichotomies when actors communicated about the students’ situation:

It was the student health team that we met. And it was decided that we should try to lower the requirements a bit, in consultation with pediatric psychiatry,/…/and that pediatric psychiatry made the student health team aware, that it might be that the demands were a bit too high./…/he got a lot of stuff to take home, because he was falling behind so he got, like, a whole school week of work with him, more or less/…/so they said that home needs to be a relaxing place, where you are allowed to rest from the hard work that he thought going to school was. (Interview, Ludvig’s father)

This dichotomy brings with it a perceived contradiction between on the one hand the aim to increase the student’s attendance and performance in accordance with various requirements, and on the other hand, how the same requirements (e.g., homework) are considered to be a cause of absenteeism, or at least a hindrance to increasing attendance. What we see in the defining practices is thus how an institutional logic based on external (medical) expertise operates, and how that same logic reinforces a dichotomization between a care for the students’ well-being and a concern for students’ knowledge development via processes that prioritize the former at the expense of the latter.

Regular Practices

The regular practices of teachers’ everyday work in many ways form a contrast to the defining practices. Here, the dichotomization between the care for students’ well-being and the concern for students’ knowledge development appears to be reinforced by, on the one hand, structural conditions for teaching and, on the other hand, refined professional identities.

The Structural Preconditions for Teaching

As shown above, the external expert-based defining practices enabled actors to focus on the individual absent students’ well-being. In teachers’ everyday work, however, such an individualized focus on the absent student is constrained by material and discursive preconditions. Linus, another of our cases, is a student with multiple diagnoses, with a large number of external experts (e.g., psychiatry, student health teams and other support networks) who are involved in trying to understand and solve the problems behind his absenteeism. Linus’s journal repeatedly mentions how teachers and other staff find it difficult to motivate Linus to stay in school, and recurrently identify a need for structure and clarity in instructions, schedules and tasks to explain/solve his problems from year 4 and on (he was in year 8 at the time of data collection). Hence, there is what can be referred to as an “institutionalized perception” about Linus’s situation and needs, i.e. a documented understanding about Linus’ absenteeism, based on knowledge that has been produced and communicated from various defining practices (psychiatric investigations, student health conferences etc.). The discourse integrates a care for Linus’s well-being with his knowledge development since it identifies needs that Linus has that require teaching to be adapted in certain ways. However, such adaptions are highly resource-intensive to implement within the framework of the school’s regular practices, not least in terms of the time teachers need to spend during regular lessons. Also, a discursive, more general “default” apprehension of teachers’ work at our case school encompasses standardized teaching consisting of one teacher and one class working with similar content in similar pace. During one of our interviews with Linus’s mother, the struggle over time resources became apparent:

it was/…/said that he [Linus] should be told, like, exactly what tasks he needs to do, all teachers should have been informed about that, but then one of the teachers said that he knows that Linus needs extra support, but that he has twenty other students as well, so he does not always have time… (Linus’s mother, interview)

Hence, as distinct from Erika’s strict focus on the student’s diagnoses and disposition in the defining practices above, the structural conditions for teaching – here expressed in the teacher’s concern for, and obligations to, “other students” – in the regular practices, constrain the teachers’ action repertoires to cope with the vast heterogenous needs of all students in the class. However, this is not a question of school staff not seeing these needs. On the contrary, we find many expressions of frustration among the actors in our data that are the result of them being aware of almost endless needs and constrained action repertoires. The principal, for example describe feelings of inadequacy and shame since she wants to do much more for these students, but resigns herself to “all in all, the resources are far too scarce” (Agneta, principal, interview).

Refined Professional Identities

The dichotomization between well-being and knowledge development is also reinforced by an institutional logic that constrains teachers’ action repertoires to issues that are primarily related to goal fulfillment and subject teaching. At a macro level, we see structural pressures on performances in the regular practices that are inherent in general school policy and discourses on knowledge economy and measurable results. Locally, the logic plays out in the teachers’ action repertoires in two interconnected ways: through a dominant didactic doctrine and in efforts to delimit teachers’ work to subject teaching.

The majority of school development efforts in our case school are focused on developing subject teaching, using a model called Subject Didactic Community (SDC)¹, i.e. structured collegial discussions for organizing and developing teaching. The initiative, which was initiated by the municipality and is managed by head teachers and lecturers, takes up most of the time available for collegial discussions. The model is based on variation theory and stresses the importance of identifying critical aspects in students’ understanding of a particular subject content (see for example Mårtensson, 2021 or Lundahl, 2021). Hence, as the teacher Louise explains below, the model presupposes high levels of student participation and activity in the regular classroom work:

Interviewer: How can the absent students be involved in that work?

Louise: Yes … they are not there … I think.

Interviewer: So, it is hard?

Louise: It’s difficult, because when I think of an absent student coming to a lesson./…/That student has an escape behavior, I think. Of course, he has no charged computer. No material. He does not want to start working, he may just sit and write a little, he just wants to sit and kill time, I cannot reach that student, either. So, it’s very difficult. (Louise, teacher, interview)

It is clear in our data that many teachers at the school are dedicated to the SDC-model and experience a deepening of professional conversations about their subjects and subject teaching. At the same time, it is also clear that the model is based on the premise that teaching is enacted in classrooms where all students are actively participating. Since the teachers are still responsible for teaching and assessing students who are not present in the classroom, or are taught in special needs groups (called The Oasis and The Room), these students tend not to be given SDC-assignments but alternative assignments that are “scaled down” since they “might end up sitting by themselves” (Louise, teacher, interview). The SDC-model is thus part of an institutional logic that governs the distribution of school development resources, which underpins a relatively refined subject-teacher identity directed toward students’ knowledge development. This logic does not exclude a care for student’s well-being, but presupposes a certain type of presence that reduces the opportunities to adapt teaching to students who are unable to be present.

The refinement of the subject-teacher identity at the school is further institutionalized and rationalized through the establishment of other actors. An exemple of this is that a teacher in the school functions as a “full-time mentor” with no teaching to whom tasks related to students’ social issues, not least absenteeism, have been delegated. This allows for the action repertoires of different actors to be narrowed and specialized – the full-time mentor relieves teachers from social issues and allows them to focus on subject teaching, while the mentor can specialize in issues relating to students’ social problems and absenteeism. The interviewed teacher Vivianne emphasizes that, for her, it was “really relieving” when the full-time mentor was introduced, and the mentor herself explains how the professional role was established in response to stress and “quite a lot of frustration among many of the teachers, when both teaching and being a mentor” (Carina, full-time mentor, interview).

Mediating Practices

So far, we have depicted how actors’ work with absent students at the school is characterized by a division between defining practices which prioritize a care for students’ well-being and regular practices with a refined concern for students’ knowledge development. The institutional logics of these practices nurture a dichotomization between the two. The school’s formal and legal obligations to focus on both students’ well-being and knowledge development are far-reaching (cf. SFS, 2010:800). In relation to absent students, this formalized and rule-based obligation is carried out in practice by particular professional roles in particular contexts. We refer to this as a form of mediating practice, where a partly different form of institutional logic conditions the work with absent students’ well-being and knowledge development. In these practices, actors such as special needs teachers, the full-time mentor and other staff try to translate the expert explanatory models, and ideas from actors in the defining practices and teachers’ everyday work, into special needs units. The day-to-day work with absent students is primarily channeled via two special needs units called The Oasis and The Room, in which teachers, special needs teachers, the full-time mentor and teaching assistants work. Gunnel, a special needs teacher who works in The Oasis, describes how her routines are focused on keeping track of the students in need, both in the physical sense, calling and texting them to find out where they are, but also in terms of their learning development and performances. Her presence in student health conferences, where causes for and consequences from absenteeism are discussed, brings a focus on students’ well-being into the work in The Oasis, and translates expectations and assignments from the regular practices into adapted teaching methods. Translation and adaption are made possible since the mediating practices primarily unfold in smaller teaching units, separate from regular practices, and hence they are less constrained by what we referred to as structural conditions of teaching and refined professional identities above: less attention needs to be given to “other students”; the demands on performance can be decreased and postponed; and the actors embrace a professional identity that, in addition to subject teaching, to larger extent focuses on social, emotional and relational issues. Similar to the defining practices, we note that the student’s well-being is perceived to be indispensable for knowledge development, but never the other way around. As a result, the action repertoires of the mediating practices seem to be almost (but are of course not) ‘unlimited’: compulsory schooling, results, goals and attendance all appear to be negotiable, e.g., when Gunnel, during a student health conference, highlights the possibility for Moa to find meaning and motivation by working in a secondhand shop instead of attending school (observed and recorded student health conference).

The mediating practices are thus characterized by action repertoires that in a way enable a more integrated model, where knowledge, relationships and the social world of the student are considered. However, such an integration is only enabled under the premise that knowledge development (as it is defined within the regular practices) is reformulated in the smaller teaching units so that goals, contents and assignments can be paused, postponed or deprioritized. In addition, The Oasis, The Room, the full-time mentor etc. are not only responses to perceived needs from absent students; they also work performatively in the sense that their mere existence provides particular action repertoires in the work with absent students. The principal Agneta describes how the special needs units are solutions “by default”, when she prepares for a meeting with the parents of absent students.

You can come to a meeting and say “but this student gets support, two math lessons in The Room and then you know that the student would really need ten support lessons. Then you in a way feel a huge inadequacy, but you have started somewhere. And many parents are very happy about it… and so it becomes… [sigh] - yes, insufficient! (Agneta, principal, interview)

This quote, we argue, captures how the discursive boundaries of the defining and regular practices can only be negotiated outside of the latter, but often with a sense of shortcoming and insufficiency. The care for students’ well-being and the concern for students’ knowledge development are thus in a sense integrated within the mediating practices, but the students are not fully brought “back” to the regular practices, since they are doing different kinds of work with different professional groups in different settings. In short, the students’ identified needs by far exceed the school’s abilities to provide support within the regular practices. We observe how Agneta expresses this feeling of insufficiency, but comforts herself with the insight that they “have started somewhere”.

Discussion

A Logic of Bureaucracy…

In this article, we have explored challenges in a local school’s work with problematic school absenteeism using a comparative mode of analysis based on neoinstitutional theory. It is clear how there is an “institutionalized perception” about students with problematic absenteeism, involving: statistics and definitions of what is to be considered as problematic absenteeism (the school’s municipality defines an absenteeism rate exceeding ten percent over a 30-day time span as problematic); policies in the form of action ladders, journal entries, routines, substantial resources in the form of special needs units and experts from different areas, inside and outside of the school; and established meeting structures (not least student health conferences) where actors identify, discuss and formulate students’ problems and potential solutions (cf. Hjörne & Säljö, 2019). Described in this way, the work with absent students appears to be relatively well-functioning, and in a way it is. The type of institutionalized work between actors described above primarily functions in accordance with a bureaucratic logic, i.e., the actors’ work corresponds to routines, norms and organizational structures that are established in and surround the school’s work with problematic absenteeism (cf. Ek et al., 2017). However, the bureaucratic logic also leads to separated and disconnected practices, where established jurisdictional boundaries enable and/or constrain different work for different professional roles (cf. Freidson, 2001). When comparing the professional roles of ordinary teachers in regular classrooms with those of the special needs-teachers or other student health conference members, such as the psychiatrist, we see differences in the way they approach a concern for students’ knowledge development and care for students’ well-being. Where teachers tend to focus on the former, the other professional roles are inclined toward the latter. As each actor appears to have limited access and influence across established boundaries, a disjunction between actors, acting within particular practices, seems inevitable (cf. Ek et al., 2017; Ekstrand, 2015; Hjörne & Säljö, 2019; SOU, 2016:94).

…and a Logic of Professionalism

The disjunction between practices is reinforced by the fact that the accumulation of actors happens within areas with relatively well-defined boundaries, which is reflected in particular in the partial division of the school’s concern for students’ knowledge development and care for students’ well-being into different practices, as described in the results. We regard this as a form of professional logic that, partly underpinned by the logic of bureaucracy, “expertifies” different aspects of the work with absent students. Actors work within different practices, drawing on different expertise, and focus on different aspects of the situations and problems identified in relation to the students.

In the defining practices, the expertise consists of medical-, and to some extent special educational needs-knowledge that are used to analyze the students’ individual dispositions, mood or individual circumstances that can affect her/his ability to be in or come to school. The expertise of these practices is ascribed an interpretive precedence in defining not only what is medically justified but also pedagogically possible or desirable.

The expertise of the regular practices can be illustrated by the refined professional identities that characterize teachers’ work which entails that they are primarily experts on a form of subject teaching that presupposes certain pre-defined circumstances, for example students who are present and who actively discuss the content. This form of refined expertise reduces the demands and expectations to adapt teaching to students who fall outside of the pre-defined circumstances.

The regular practices’ refined expertise on subject teaching is dependent on the smaller contexts in which the mediating practices unfold. Here, demands, structures and expectations that are non-negotiable in the regular practices can be renegotiated – compulsory schooling, attendance, subjects, knowledge requirements, aims, assignments etc. Hence, what we see here is an expertise of “conditioned integration” of knowledge development and well-being that requires certain circumstances in separation from the regular practices.

The Discourses of Expertification

The expressions of expertification that we see among actors in each of the three identified practices are not unique to the case school but correspond to more general trends in educational policy which link the school’s local work with absent students to broader societal discourses. First, expertification in the regular practices is linked to discourses that stress “pure teaching” that enables “teachers to be teachers”. The professional role of teachers that was established in Sweden in the late 20th century/beginning of the 21st century “extended” teachers’ tasks to also include (e.g.) social and relational work with students. This role is currently under renegotiation (Lindqvist, 2020, see also Landahl, 2006). In Sweden, the Ministry of Education and Research green paper, “With teaching skills at the center - a framework for teachers’ and principals’ professional development” (SOU, 2018:17), uses the term “refinement” to describe how teachers need to be more focused on the “core tasks” of teaching, distinguishing between on the one hand teacher tasks (teaching) and school tasks (e.g., social issues) that are better handled by other professionals (see also Ackesjö, 2020). There is hence a line of reasoning that mirrors the case school’s division of well-being and knowledge development into different practices.

Second, the tendency to individualize school problems has, since the 1990s, been central in discourses on students’ well-being and performances. In particular, school difficulties are often attributed to individual deficiencies, resulting in neuropsychiatric diagnoses such as ADHD (Hjörne, 2016). The normal variation of abilities and conditions for learning have increasingly resulted in categorizations of students based on psychiatric criteria, which in turn have been deployed as frameworks for the organization of work in schools, such as classroom teaching or smaller/special teaching groups (Hjörne & Säljö, 2019). A fundamental idea here is that knowledge of the inner, biological dispositions of the child is vital to any practical and didactical response from the school (see also how this figure of thought is reflected in policy, cf. Isaksson & Lindqvist, 2015). This tendency is clearly reflected in our case school’s work with absent students in the defining practices that subsequently provides a language for didactical possibilities and limitations.

Third, the broader debate on political aspirations and policy representations of inclusion and “a school for all” that are embedded in the Swedish welfare-state relates to the professional roles and practices at the school, particularly in what we refer to as mediating practices. Several scholars suggest that an overemphasis on strict physical inclusion in the general classroom has dominated the Swedish discourse for quite some time (Magnusson et al., 2019). Furthermore, a tendency can be noted that openly challenges inclusive education, stating that “the idea of inclusion has gone too far” (This tendency might be of interest for an international readership, since Sweden’s stakes on inclusion have been high, for a critical reflection, see Magnusson, 2019). The students in our cases rarely return to regular classroom teaching since “The Oasis” and “the Room” tend to be the default solutions, which clearly reflects this trend. These special needs units work performatively and constrain possible actions in ways that seem particularly problematic in relation to the multifaceted problems that often underlie problematic absenteeism. This calls for more research on the relationship between welfare state politics and consequences for the work with school absenteeism, as stated by, for example, Fredriksson et al. (2023). However, to better understand such relationships, it appears vital to conduct similar investigations in different national contexts in order to enable comparisons.

Conclusions

As shown above, the professional and bureaucratic logics we see in our data are linked to more general, societal discourses about teachers’ professionalism, individualization and (renegotiated) inclusion. What the discourses have in common is that they challenge the idea of integrating a concern for the students’ knowledge development and a care for well-being in the school. A key finding and contribution to the field of comparative education is how this is seen in tendencies toward disjunction between actors and thus between the two forms of development. The bureaucratic logic that is at work at the local school might give the appearance of integration between knowledge development and a care for well-being, but the feelings of insufficiency shown in the results indicate that this is not enough. The results indicate that bureaucratic and professional logics consolidate and strengthen action repertoires based on the assumption that well-being is a prerequisite for knowledge development. At student health conferences and in action plans, the focus is usually on increasing the students’ well-being in order to enable them to come to school and participate in teaching. We see few or no examples in our data of action repertoires where knowledge development is assumed to be the prerequisite for students’ well-being. At the school in this study, the result of this is that absent students are moved to and managed in defining and mediating practices (where regular teachers are noticeably absent). It is within these practices that an accumulation of experts takes place, which on the one hand expands the action repertoires that are available in the work with the absent students. On the other hand, the implicit one-way causation, where well-being becomes a prerequisite for knowledge development but not the other way around, enables a space of renegotiation in the mediating practices, in which the absent students’ knowledge development can be deprioritized, paused or postponed to the future. In the regular classroom practices, we see the opposite, with material constraints and no accumulation of external experts, but instead a form of expertification that delimits teachers’ action repertoires to subject teaching in ways that risk further exclusion of the absent students. Although significant in our case study, these findings must be validated in other settings to be better understood and scrutinized.

Research results clearly show that success in education significantly improves students’ life chances and reduces the risks of future unemployment, mental illness, drug abuse or worse (see for example Tarabini et al., 2019). Seen in this way, there is a great risk that the institutionalized logics at work here will negatively affect the long-term well-being and life chances of absent students, and thus worsen rather than improve the problems of problematic school absenteeism, despite actors’ good intentions, great efforts, resources, and the downplaying of demands on school performance.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been financed by state research funds through the ELR (Swedish: ULF) initiative - Education, Learning, Research - which aims to support practice-based research projects where universities and schools cooperate.

Notes on contributors

Ola Strandler

Ola Strandler, PhD, is a senior lecturer in the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies, University of Gothenburg. His research interests concern educational policy and ethnographic studies of teachers’ and teacher educators’ institutional work and practices.

Martin Harling

Martin Harling, PhD, is a senior lecturer in the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies, University of Gothenburg. His research interests include political dimensions of pedagogy, education and teaching.

Notes

1 In Swedish: Ämnesdidaktiskt kollegium (ÄDK).