Principals’ Enactment of Policy on Research-based Education: Interpreting and Facilitating Policy in Local School Settings in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Increased international attention paid to research-based education has resulted in various national initiatives to exploit research in education. However, this poses challenges for school professionals. Based on an ethnographic single case study in a Swedish educational setting, this article investigates how national policy on research-based education is realized at local school level from the perspective of principals. Theoretically, the study applies a policy enactment understanding, arguing that policy is put into action in original ways in various local settings. Through thematic analysis four interrelated main strategies deployed by the principals were identified: strategies facilitating durable structures, developing learning cultures, developing teachers’ competencies, and strengthening leadership. The strategies demonstrate the complexities in policy enactment as it involves multiple embedded local processes and settings. Additionally, the study contributes to an understanding of how different interrelated national policies and initiatives intersect when enacted at school level.

KEYWORDS:

• Principal
• policy enactment
• research-based education
• educational policy
• case study

Introduction

In recent decades educational practices based on research have been increasingly embraced world-wide. Research-based education is thus a global phenomenon supported by supranational organisations (Caena, 2014; Levin et al., 2013; Mausethagen & Raaen, 2017; OECD, 2007; Tripney et al., 2014; Wiseman, 2010). The OECD is strengthening its own use of research while encouraging and assisting member countries to do so by gathering international research and expertise, as well as identifying effective practices (OECD, 2007; OECD/CERI, 2019). On a European level, the importance of optimizing the dissemination of, access to, and transfer of scientific knowledge is emphasized in educational policy (European Commission, 2013).

The increased attention paid to research-based education illustrates how nation states adapt to global trends and reformative efforts to develop education through transnational processes of policy borrowing and lending (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012). The transnational influences are adjusted nationally (and locally) due to variations in prevailing political, socio-economic, and cultural conditions (Ball & Junemann, 2012; Hall, 2018; Moos, 2013; Steiner-Khamsi, 2012), resulting in various national initiatives to exploit research in education, new policies, and the establishment of organizations for this purpose (Levin, 2013; OECD, 2007). For example, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have similar approaches to the establishment of national knowledge brokering organizations and their major objective to strengthen links between research-based knowledge, policy, and practice (Adolfsson et al., 2018; Wollscheid & Opheim, 2016). When policy is enacted on a micro-level, such trends then become subject to local interpretations and negotiations as they are actualized in practice (Ball et al., 2012; Maguire et al., 2020), a process that iteratively feeds into further global reforms.

Despite increased international interest in research-based education, opinions on how policy can influence educational practice are divided. Studies addressing how research-based education is put into practice have detected diverse concepts of school development or improvement, and diverse views regarding school practitioners’ participation, resulting in different approaches to facilitate it (Biesta, 2010; Cain, 2015; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Levin, 2013; Mausethagen & Raaen, 2017). Research has found that delivering research-based education poses great challenges for school practitioners and school leaders, as well as revealing substantial variations in engagement in practice (Bryan & Burstow, 2017; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Schenke, 2015; Schenke et al., 2016).

In Sweden, the Education Act (SFS, 2010:800) explicitly states that all education and aspects of teaching, including their organization and content, “should rest on scientific foundation and proven experience”. The Act is a framework law, which does not specify the exact meaning of the policy based on scientific foundations and proven experience nor how it can be put into practice (SNAE, 2019). Thus, the policy’s superficially strict, but vague, requirements mean local schools must interpret them in practice (Bergmark & Hansson, 2020). Research on how the policy is put into practice at school level in Sweden has revealed different interpretations of a complex assignment. As pedagogical leaders, principals in Sweden have overall responsibility to ensure that all education is based on relevant research and proven experience. However, both principals and teachers find it difficult to fully define and interpret the key concepts and emphasize the connections between a scientific approach, school development, and the organization’s systematic quality work (Bergmark & Hansson, 2020). Principals also apply varying interpretations of the requirements for leading a school built on a scientific foundation, and their strategies are based to varying degrees on implementing research results, following the curriculum or relying on teachers’ professional knowledge, i.e., proven experience (Ståhle & Eriksson, 2018).

Based on an ethnographic single case study in a Swedish educational setting, this article investigates how national policy on research-based education is realized at local school level. More specifically, the case study explores principals’ enactment of the policy of building education on a scientific foundation and proven experience, as they participated in a three-year local principal program that was a key element of the municipality’s attempts to realize the policy at local level.

Rather than understanding policy realization as a uni-directional process of implementation, we adopt the understanding of policy enactment presented by Ball et al. (2012) and Maguire et al. (2020) as a dynamic, multi-layered process that is subject to actors’ interpretations as it is recontextualized and put into action in original ways in various local settings. The policy enactment focus, on policy actors’ creative processes of sense-making and interpretation and on the situated and contextualized character of these processes, guided the formulation of two research questions:

• How do principals interpret, translate and locally engage with the policy that education should be built on a scientific foundation and proven experience?

• How do principals describe the support they build and provide to facilitate enactment of the policy in their organization, in relation to various contextual dimensions?

Adoption of an enactment approach in analysis of policy work (Maguire et al., 2015) provides tools to understand and handle its “messiness”. For example, it can help to illuminate how policies can cluster and merge into new policy combinations and formulations with unintended effects and unexpected long-term school-level consequences. We argue that adoption of such a policy enactment perspective in the theoretical framework aids analysis of the complexity of school organizations’ practice and higher demands principals face in Sweden and many other countries.

In recent decades educational policies have been influenced by economic imperatives, neoliberalism, and market ideologies, which have contributed to a diminishment of professionals’ influence on policy and school practice (Ball, 2003; Gewirtz et al., 2009). At the same time, principles of school leadership have shifted towards new managerialism, with policy dispositions and practices intended to strengthen education’s contributions to economic productivity (Gewirtz, 2002). This is reflected in the strengthening of Swedish principals’ tasks related to leadership, budgetary responsibilities, and administration from the 1990s onwards (Jarl, 2013). Principals are key actors in local realization of policy and associated school practices (Ball & Maroy, 2009; Coburn, 2005; Spillane et al., 2002). They play key mediating roles between external regulations and internal culture and organization through policy reinterpretation, and hence the promotion (or hindrance) of the adaptation of policy to internal modes of functioning that is crucial for change.

Despite principals’ key position, policy enactment theory is not interested in leadership or individual principals’ leadership role per se but takes a broader approach to a professional context to create an understanding of how it is constructed. Thus, our attention here is focused on how principals give meaning to their practice, address problems, and analyze ways forward (cf. Gunter, 2013).

National background

As already mentioned, the Swedish Education Act (SFS, (2010:800) stipulates that “all education should rest on scientific foundation and proven experience”, which raises questions regarding the distinction and relationship between two types of knowledge. To rest on a scientific foundation, schools’ work must be rooted in scientific studies and methodology, while proven experience consists of practical knowledge that has been systematically tested, documented, and generated over a long period of time by many professionals¹ (SNAE, 2013, 2019).

Theory derived from research and proven, practice-based experience are different forms of knowledge that are not easily relatable or commensurable, according to Saugstad (2002; cf. Penuel et al., 2015). There is also tension between these forms of knowledge, partly because historically the teaching profession’s knowledge has emerged from practice and been largely experience-based (Åman & Kroksmark, 2018; Larsson & Sjöberg, 2021). Despite early and repeated attempts to strengthen the teaching profession’s research base (cf. SOU, 1948:27), teachers lack a strong epistemic culture founded in research (Carlgren, 2010, 2015) and there are few clear organized structures for local development of research-based practice (Åman & Kroksmark, 2018; Bergmark & Hansson, 2020). Therefore, there are clear needs to bridge the dichotomy between research and practice and to integrate scientific knowledge and professional knowledge in pedagogical practice; however, these are challenging tasks involving complex interactions between everyday knowledge, research and local context (Hultman, 2015; Larsson & Sjöberg, 2021; Mausethagen & Raaen, 2017; Nuthall, 2004).

Taking this potential tension into account, the Swedish National Agency for Education (SNAE) underlines that scientific studies and professionals’ experiences are equally important, complementary sources of knowledge and that a scientific approach is essential to meet the Act’s stipulations. Further, SNAE emphasizes the importance of a scientific approach, i.e., critical reflection on teaching based on research and one’s own and others’ experiences, for efforts to ensure that education rests on a scientific foundation and proven experience. The concept of research-based education, used here, is commonly applied in enactment of policy related to scientific foundation and proven experience. The concept thus encompasses both scientific foundation, as in theory, and proven experience, as in practice (Alvunger & Wahlström, 2018; Bergmark & Hansson, 2020; Larsson & Sjöberg, 2021).

In Sweden, principals have extensive overall responsibility for education and are often described as being positioned in a “field of tensions”, where conflicting pressures are at play (Berg, 2018; Persson et al., 2003; Rönnström, 2018). Moreover, principals in Sweden and other Nordic countries have faced rising, and often inconsistent, expectations in recent decades (Moos et al., 2004; Møller, 2009). Due to these increasing demands, principals are continuously expected to strive to enhance their schools’ overall quality and address specific areas of improvement while handling more complex educational assignments and changing conditions regarding work tasks, personnel categories, and increasing numbers of stakeholders that influence school activities (Rönnström, 2018). The changes have inevitably led to shifts in principals’ roles and positions, with strong and complex “cross pressures” (Berg, 2018; Jarl, 2012; Persson et al., 2003).

The current Swedish Education Act extended and clarified principals’ responsibilities, authority, and decision-making powers and provided them with new instruments to continuously shape and develop their schools’ activities and teachers’ professional development (Swedish School Inspectorate, 2012). As pedagogical leaders, they must strive to ensure that teachers’ choices of content and methods used in classrooms are based on relevant research and proven experience (SNAE, 2013). This might be challenging because what a research-based education means in practice, and how it should be recontextualized and put into practice, is far less clear.

There have, however, been several national efforts to strengthen the Swedish school system’s access to research and proven experience (SOU, 2018:19; Swedish Institute for Educational Research, 2016; ULF Agreement, 2017) and SNAE has continuously striven to initiate, strengthen, and disseminate research findings as well as offer practical developmental support for schools. Despite these national efforts, the work of school organizers and leaders to implement education built on a scientific foundation and proven experience still requires development (Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2019).

Theoretical framework

Our study is situated within the extensive field of research on policies associated with national educational reforms (Ball & Junemann, 2012; Gustafsson, 2017; Hall, 2018; Lundahl, 2005). In efforts to understand the complexity of principals’ engagement in facilitating research-based education, our theoretical starting point is inspired by research underlining the importance of contextual aspects to fully understand policy processes. Spillane et al. (2002, p. 755) argue that school leaders’ sense-making of policy is a situated activity “influenced by the multiple overlapping contexts in which their work is nested”. Accordingly, this contextualization problematizes the idea of policy implementation. Following Ball et al. (2012; cf. Maguire et al., 2020), we recognize a need to study policy as a process of doing, and how policy is enacted (“put into action”), rather than implemented, in original ways within various local settings. The main element of our theoretical framework is thus policy enactment theory, which concerns policy actors’ creative processes of interpretation, translation, and negotiation. Interpretation refers to initial reading and sense-making of policy, based on each actor’s previous experiences, acceptance, or scepticism, which is followed by translation as a process of re-enactment and reordering (Ball et al., 2011; Braun et al., 2011).

In more detail, interpretations are elaborated, articulated in policy actors’ discussions and meetings, and include peopling policy, i.e., identification of people who can take responsibility for enactment (Ball et al., 2011). Translation is defined by Ball et al. as a more realistic process involving the meeting and merging of policy with the language of practice. This adds symbolic value and involves the interaction of policy texts and actions with contexts and subject cultures, with consequent shifts in orientations, concepts, and procedures (ibid.). Although interpretation and translation have different characteristics, they are often closely interwoven in the policy process.

Knowledge of contextual factors is crucial for understanding principals’ enactment of policy due to the localized nature of policy enactment. Here, the ways in which policies are put into action are intimately shaped by school-specific factors and require close attention (Braun et al., 2011; Maguire et al., 2020). Therefore, the following text provides a brief description of how the local school organizer and central school administration try to use the national policy as important contextual information for consideration of the principals’ enactment roles, views, and actions.

There are marked variations in Swedish schools’ progress in enacting the policy to build schools on a scientific foundation and proven experience (Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2019). The focal municipality in this study is regarded as being at the forefront nationally in realization of the policy. To this end, the municipality has formulated a local policy (Xx Municipality, 2014) that provides starting points for adaptation of educational activities and development within the municipality to meet requirements of the Swedish Education Act. The overall goal is to strengthen the teaching profession and the policy emphasizes the importance of teachers’ knowledge position and experience. Accordingly, the official document setting out the local policy stresses the importance of a local organization that drives research and development work within the schools, and the necessity of establishing conditions and allocating resources that promote realization of the objectives.

After the local policy was approved in 2014, a scientific leader was assigned to direct the work. In the following years several efforts were made at both administrative and school levels to encourage teachers to apply scientific foundations to developing their activities (Xx Municipality, 2015b, 2017). The local policy stated that the municipality must establish structures that promote teachers’ opportunities to collaborate and participate in research on pedagogical work in the municipality’s schools. Accordingly, a master’s program (Xx Municipality, 2015a) for teachers, focusing on research and school development, was launched in 2016 as a joint venture between the municipality and a university. Subsequently, in 2017, the local principal program addressed in this article was introduced (Xx Municipality, 2018b).

Braun et al. (2011) and Maguire et al. (2020) argue that educational policies are intimately shaped by school-specific factors and recognize four contextual dimensions (external, situated, material, and professional). The external context encompasses factors such as the extent of national authority support and external pressure exerted through expectations from a broader policy context. The situated context (Braun et al., 2011) encompasses historical and locational contextual elements, for example a school’s setting and intake, while the material context refers to “physical” aspects, such as budget, staffing level, technological equipment, and infrastructure. Important aspects of both the situated and material contexts are the socio-geographical settings and the different forms of school. Accordingly, the analysis focuses on potential variations in strategies deployed by principals within each school stage in relation to the contextual elements.

The professional context refers to teachers’ and principals’ values, commitments, and experiences, which strongly influence whether and how principals engage with policy (Braun et al., 2011). To understand variety within local contexts it is important to understand policy actors as positioned. This refers to the collective and individual stances that determine the policy activities they facilitate and engage in, and how they understand and give meaning to both policies and associated activities (Maguire et al., 2015). Further, the positioning fosters not only specific local and individual strategies but also idiosyncratic challenges and dilemmas.

Methodology and research design

To capture the multifaceted and messy ways in which policy is recontextualized in practice, we conducted an ethnographic case study (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Merriam, 1988), focusing on how principals in the selected Swedish municipality enacted the research-based education policy at their local level.

The ethnographic approach is inductive, and the interpretation follows continuously from the reflexive research process over time. This approach, we argue, is well suited to studies of principals’ policy work, as policy is not enacted at a specific point in time but is an ongoing process (Maguire, 2015). The ethnographic single case study enabled us to acquire deeper understanding (Gustavsson, 2017) of principals’ perceptions of the assignment in the specific setting of the local municipal school context, and to explore their strategies and practices at the intersection between policy enactment and local embeddedness. Following Maguire et al. (2020, p. 488), we aimed to adopt “a contextually sensitive approach towards policy making and policy enactment that takes account of some of the more nuanced distinctions among schools’ contextual positionings”. Ethnographical data provide fine-grained details on policy enactment. Although one limitation of ethnographic single case studies is that the material provides little basis for generalization of results, their strength is that ethnographic material can provide “powerful human-scale data on macropolitical decision making, fusing theory and practice” (Cohen et al., 2007, p. 255).

Principals (54 in total) of all pre-, primary, secondary and upper secondary schools in the municipality engaged in the mandatory local principal program, for four days in each of the program’s three years. The intention of the program was to provide a deeper understanding of a scientific approach, enhance the principals’ professional practice and strengthen their leadership in integrating practice-based research in schools together with teachers. Throughout the program, the principals were empowered to consolidate and value their own professional knowledge. The program meetings, led by the local scientific leader and an in-house researcher, involved lectures, literature studies, exchanges of experience, and various tasks. Program meetings involved all principals but for some activities they were organized in smaller working groups.

Ethnographic data were collected through fieldwork at program meetings during the three years of the principal program. Rich and descriptive data were acquired from participatory observations and recordings of the principals’ group discussions. However, this article is based on analysis of empirical data collected mainly in two meetings of the program (see Table 1, Meetings 6 and 7), in which small groups of principals were asked to reflect on: their roles in leading a school on a scientific foundation; their future goals and desired position for the organization (Meeting 6) and their leadership; the organizational conditions required to lead a pre-school or school on a scientific foundation; and both the structures and available resources (current and desirable) (Meeting 7). In total, the data consist of transcripts of 12 hours of group discussion, recorded during the two meetings.

Table 1. Overview of meetings in the principal program.

Principal program year 1 2017/2018	Principal program year 2 2018/2019		Principal program year 3 2019/2020
Theme 1: To include and understand research in school	Theme 2: To handle and stage a research assignment in the school’s practice		Theme 3: To communicate and problematize knowledge and lessons learned
Program meetings 1–4	Program meetings 5–8 The study is mainly based on empirical data from meetings 6 and 7.		Program meetings 9 and 10
	Meeting 6 2018-11-22 Discussion theme: Principals’ pedagogical leadership/goals and purpose/desired situation	Meeting 7 2019-02-21 Discussion theme: Prerequisites for leading a preschool/school on a scientific foundation

In an effort to understand the local context and conditions for the principals, as the program was a central element of the municipality’s local school policy, we additionally considered local policy documents and documents describing previous and ongoing activities from 2014–2018 as they related to this assignment (see Xx Municipality, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2017, 2018a, 2018b). These documents were used to acquire illustrative background information regarding the local municipality and central school administration initiatives underpinning the local embeddedness of the principals’ interpretations and engagement in relation to their assignment.

Ethical guidelines issued by the Swedish Research Council (2017) have been followed throughout the study. The local municipality is therefore anonymized. All participating principals provided informed consent to participate in the study.

We analysed the ethnographic data regarding the two meetings following a procedure based on thematic analysis sensu Braun and Clarke (2006), searching for repeated patterns of meaning regarding “latent or interpretative” themes. In the conceptualization of policy processes espoused by Ball et al. (2011), interpretations and translations of policy are different elements of the processes, with different connections to practice, but they also overlap and intersect. Interpretations may concern strategies, while translations are more about tactics, but they work in common and both involve institutional text production, professional development, changes in structures and positions, and, importantly, allocation of responsibility. Thus, no distinction is made here between interpretation and translation of the policy.

Our thematic analysis resulted in categorization of four interrelated strategies employed by the principals when enacting the policy. To deepen understanding of possible tensions in the enactment of the assignment in relation to local conditions, a second analytical step was conducted with the support of concepts described by Braun et al. (2011) on contextual dimensions. The analysis, results, and subsequent discussion illuminate how such dimensions restrict or enable and differentiate policy enactment at local and school unit levels.

Further, the study presented here was part of a local research and development (R&D) effort in which researchers and school practitioners in the municipality (in this case, principals) collaborated in practice-based research targeting local school development and research-based education. This involved the authors’ active participation, as researchers, in the principal program’s meetings following a practice-engaged research approach (Schenke, 2015) that provided important methodological foundations for studying developments in the principal program as practice. Our dual role as researchers and collaborators in the R&D project should be recognized when considering our analysis and results, as it can be seen as both a limitation and a strength of the study (cf. Gunnulfsen & Colbjørnsen, 2015). On the one hand, the principals’ responses may have been influenced by their perceptions of what researchers such as us wanted or expected to hear, in line with local policy. On the other hand, the principals were keenly aware of the mandatory nature of clauses in school law, the complexity of their obligations, and hence their need for the sort of guidance that such a program could provide. ²

The R&D approach advocated by the local municipality can be described as a process in which diverse school professionals and researchers collaborated cross-professionally to promote school development and particularly research-based education, while simultaneously studying the practice and development that occurred (cf. Schenke, 2015). The municipalities’ local policy clearly promotes cross-professional collaboration in the organization, encouraging researchers and principals, among others, to meet the complex challenges that research-based education presents in practice and contribute to changes in practices and strengthening of the teaching profession’s knowledge base. Following Ball (in Gunter, 2013, p. 220), our approach as researchers was not to study principals as objects; rather, we strove to “work with them to collect accounts” of certain aspects of professional practice in a situation of change.

Results

Here, we first summarize how the participating principals interpreted, translated, and engaged with the policy. Then we illustrate how the principals described the support they built and provided to facilitate enactment of the policy in their organization, including descriptions of four sets of interrelated strategies they deployed. Finally, we problematize the strategies in relation to various contextual dimensions.

Principals’ interpretation of policy

The policy and activities arranged by the local school administration clearly show an intention to rely heavily on professional teachers’ experiences and knowledge production in efforts to organize a knowledge system within schools. When principals entered the principal program in 2017, they joined an ongoing development process within the school organization. The locally defined direction raises questions about how principals themselves interpreted their assignment to lead a school built on a scientific foundation and proven experience.

At first glance, the collected data indicate clear agreement and consensus among the principals that their assignment was to facilitate permeation of a scientific approach throughout all school activities. They all aspired to promote and facilitate a scientific approach as a natural element of normal routines, not something “on the side” or a short-lived phenomenon. A group of principals from primary schools emphasized the long-term nature of the work:

We should not rush into this process because I do not want it to be a mayfly. We must change our mindset and we need a critical approach, to think critically, but also to understand what our norm is and what we take for granted. (20181122)

The group pinpointed crucial aspects of a scientific approach: the ability to focus on their actions and reflect on their own presuppositions and acknowledgement that thinking, planning, and evaluating on the basis of a scientific foundation is everyone’s assignment and must be “natural and spontaneous”. Thus, it was important for everyone concerned to participate—the entire teaching staff, principals, and school leaders—and develop the required competences through collegial learning. An upper secondary school principal emphasized that:

I would like the scientific foundation and proven experience to function, not as a marginal activity, but as a fine-mesh net throughout the entire school organization. Everyone, then, must be given the opportunity to develop skills. (20181122)

A group of pre-school principals similarly emphasized the importance of self-reflection and basing it on scientific theories: “It is necessary to read and go deeper into scientific theories, but also dare to look at our profession. You must have the courage to start looking at yourself” (20181122).

The principals’ initial consensual interpretation of policy and emphasis on “scientific approach” significantly reflected the general approaches advocated in the local principal program³ and local policy. It was also consistent with SNAE’s emphasis on the importance of a scientific approach, as in the willingness to reconsider and question established working methods and critically reflect on teaching based on research and their own and others’ experiences (SNAE, 2013). By emphasizing a scientific approach in the language of practice (Ball et al., 2011), the principals avoided speaking in terms of concepts’ scientific basis and/or proven experience.

The principals explicitly discussed proven experience least extensively. However, they appeared to be well aware that teachers’ professional practice is substantially experience-based and claimed to have a lot of proven experience, although they found it “hard to define” (20190221). Moreover, although their experience provided a starting point when they considered the meaning of a scientific basis and a scientific approach, as the program proceeded they recognized its limitations. As one primary school principal stated:

Proven experience, you had it from the beginning, and you looked a lot at your own. But now, you have begun to understand that it [proven experience] is much greater/more extensive. (20190221)

Thus, they recognized a need to share proven experience as widely (spatially and temporally) as possible, and subsequently stressed the importance of collegial learning and a culture of sharing. As this requires a scientific approach, the principals increasingly acknowledged the importance of integrating scientific foundations and proven experience. By emphasizing the scientific approach, the principals, intentionally or unintentionally, bridged the gap and potential tension between educational research and practice (cf. Penuel et al., 2015).

Our analysis also shows how the principals’ initial consensual interpretation of policy was affected by strong collective sense-making (Coburn, 2005). National standpoints, as well as the local school administration and orientation of content in the principal program, inevitably influenced the principals’ enactment by “shaping access to policy ideas” (ibid., p. 476). Following Maguire et al. (2015, p. 486), with reference to Rizvi and Kemmis (1987), “policy enactment involves creative processes of interpretation and recontextualisation—and this process sometimes involves ‘interpretations of interpretations’”. Hence, the analysis presented hereafter deals with such “interpretations of interpretations”.

Further analysis of principals’ enactment of policy reveals several dimensions that problematize the initial perception of apparent consensus. The principals’ more detailed descriptions of their various planned or realized strategies reveal diverse interpretations and translations of the policy as well as their contextual considerations.

Strategies—realized and planned

During the meetings, the principals discussed objectives and current or desired goals for their organization and their own leadership in relation to research-based education. Focusing on current conditions, structures, and resources available to manage the development of research-based education, the principals described multiple strategies they deployed or planned to deploy. We thematized the strategies into four interrelated categories, addressed in the following sub-sections: strategies facilitating durable structures, developing learning cultures, developing teachers’ competencies, and strengthening leadership.

Strategies for facilitating durable structures

There was a clear consensus among the principals regarding the necessity to integrate a scientific foundation in everyday activities and “hold the line”. This meant creation of practice in which a scientific approach permeates all school activities, and protection of the assignment from other competing or conflicting centrally dictated initiatives. One principal reflected on her/his own strategies in this respect as follows: “What I see as a challenge is sustaining the initiative. There are always new ideas and new demands from the top and from within the organization, as leaders you have to … persevere” (20181122). Another believed that “a scientific approach being regarded as a sidetrack” can be avoided by building on efforts to address currently relevant issues for the organization (20190221). Following the ambition to “hold the line”, a clear strategy voiced by all principals was to invest in durable structures.

For this purpose, the principals recognized current systematic quality work as having clear potential for integration of a scientific approach in available structured activities and work procedures. As one principal said, they saw opportunities to “direct teachers’ structures to create some kind of scientific approach, set theses, goals and create methods, and then follow results, analyze and, if necessary, change the teaching” (20190221). Integrating a scientific approach in the systematic quality work, principals argued, would strengthen teachers’ analytical ability and competence in relating results to current research and motivating and systematically substantiating their choice of actions.

Further strategies stressed by all principals were to strengthen existing organizations for teachers’ work meetings and seminars to facilitate collegial learning. One pre-school principal explained her strategies as follows:

In my leadership, I must enable meeting places for them and communicate that I find it important. We must set aside time for this. (20181122)

Several principals positioned themselves as facilitators of organizational structures, underlining the amount of expertise in their organizations they had to cherish and develop, and as leaders prepared to prioritize and push processes forward. Principals with teachers participating in the Master’s program or ongoing action research projects emphasized the importance of such actors as strategic resources and potential foundations for building further structures for a learning organization, in which additional teachers could be involved. Principals who lacked such resources in their organization regarded this as a shortcoming, but identified other important teacher positions upon which to build structures, such as special educators, especially qualified teachers and pedagogistas in the pre-schools.⁴

Strategies for developing learning cultures

In the policy enactment narratives, strategies for fostering appropriate organizational structures and a specific culture clearly go hand in hand. The principals wanted to develop a reflexive learning culture, in which a scientific approach is nurtured as natural and obviously superior to other approaches, within which the professionals are ready to accept complexity and varying perspectives. This requires acceptance of uncertainty safely and comfortably, open-mindedness, and readiness to reconsider views in a reflexive culture of sharing and collegial learning:

I want a culture of sharing to be realized and to exploit the possibilities of digitalization to share ideas and material. To have a culture of sharing with high professionality, and a collegiate learning approach that permeates everything we do, as an obvious form for development. (20181122)

The principals recognized a need for a reflexive culture of sharing and collegial learning that fosters abilities such as courage to engage in self-reflection and change perspectives. They regarded such a culture as being closely related to, and an important requirement for, developing proven experience: “A culture of sharing, that is to try out our ways of working and the content, what we work with” (20190221). Other strategies mentioned to enhance principals’ and teachers’ competences are based on a need, recognized by principals, to increase capabilities in terms of analysis, critical self-reflection, and in-depth theoretical knowledge. However, development of the courage and reflective capability needed to establish the culture they aspired to create, requires the involvement of both teachers and principals. One pre-school principal stated that “a work team that dares to start looking at themselves and to question their own assumptions. That, I think, is to prove their own experiences” (20190221). A primary school principal provided further clarification as follows: “Even I as a leader must be exploratory, curious and value the collegiate learning in dialogue form” (20181122). The culture required for conducting education on a scientific foundation and proven experience was thus strategically facilitated by the principals but established in collegiate fashion.

The study’s results also show that socio-geographical factors affect the ability to apply strategies such as promotion of learning cultures, collegial learning, and organizational flexibility. Several principals provided illuminating reflections on differences in conditions among the school forms, and even within local school units, that affected possibilities to enact the policy. For example, relevant factors (such as staffing levels) differ substantially between schools in the central densely populated area of the municipality and smaller schools in the less populated villages. A group of primary school principals argued that:

A major reason for our problems is that we are organized in different ways, including the physical premises, we don’t have space to meet between the small school units. It’s difficult to get professional conversations going on in small units. (20181122)

Principals in the smaller school units underlined how this undermined their strategies to improve collegial learning and foster a more “reflective learning culture”. Several leaders of the smaller school units noted difficulties in providing conditions that promote collegial learning because their schools have small groups of teachers, sometimes accompanied by a homogeneous culture and experiences with marginal input from others. This makes organizing the required cooperation with other school units difficult (cf. Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2019).

In addition, analysis of the narrative accounts reveals how diverse conditions concerning professional dimensions within the different school forms apparently affect how successfully the principals may nourish such learning cultures.

A group of pre-school principals described this in harsh terms:

In preschool we’re stuck in a “doing everything together” mode. The collective culture is so strong but must change—if it’s not possible for everyone to join in you do nothing, and blame the inaction on the inability of someone to participate. (20190221)

The pre-school leaders described a collective culture among their staff that complicated their efforts to enhance competences and the individuals’ responsibility to reflect on their learning and actions. In contrast, the secondary and upper secondary school principals described an individualized culture among their staff that can challenge common and collegial efforts to strengthen the scientific base.

Strategies for developing teachers’ competencies

The aims of fostering structures and learning cultures, such as those described above, are to strengthen certain teacher competencies. In this respect, besides acquisition of the knowledge embedded in research results, participating principals particularly mentioned the teachers’ general capacities for analysis, reflection, and flexibility, manifested in the ability to take different perspectives. They also desired to foster abilities to systematically approach different problem areas and “create structured documentation that follows some form of scientific enrichment or influence” (20190221).

During the discussions on organizational conditions and available resources, the principals pinpointed certain groups of teachers with useful ascribed competences, and thus responsibilities, in their organizations. This is consistent with an idea proposed by Ball et al. (2011, p. 619): that giving someone a particular responsibility may be an important element of “enactment of policy” and its “embodiment”. The principals recognized teachers participating in the Master’s program, career teachers,⁵ and teachers engaged in action research as important resources for disseminating knowledge and promoting the mission by enthusing colleagues “from below” in a way that is not legitimate for principals or principals cannot always master. One, for example, identified a need for teachers with certain competencies to “take a leading position in the organizational forefront. Me as a manager saying ‘Now we’re going to work like this.’ I don’t believe in that. It should rather come from below to have an effect” (20190221). To some extent, pre-school principals lacked these kinds of certain knowledge-actors, since the career teacher reform does not cover pre-schools and pre-school teachers did not have the same opportunities to participate in the Master’s program. Instead, the pre-school leaders highlighted the importance of the “pedagogistas” for facilitating developmental processes among the staff and supporting them as leaders with research input.

In addition to differences in the availability of certain groups of teachers with useful ascribed competencies among schools at different educational stages, the analysis illuminates differences in the rationale of strategies to develop teachers’ competencies articulated by principals of pre-, primary, and upper secondary schools. For example, strategies to develop teachers’ competencies voiced by the pre-school principals emanated from an understanding that research-based education is important to strengthen the pre-school teacher profession. This derived, in turn, from their interpretation of the revised curriculum and its clarification of the pre-school’s teaching assignment.⁶ At the time of the study there was a strong focus on the concept of teaching in pre-schools in the local and national media, statements, and activities of national school authorities (Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2019) and relevant research communities (Eidevald & Engdahl, 2018; Sheridan & Williams, 2018). This was also reflected in the collegiate discussions of the participating pre-school principals. Several were concerned that the revised pre-school curriculum was not yet sufficiently rooted in their organizations, which both reflected and contributed to continued ambiguity about the profession. One strategy raised by the principals to strengthen both the teaching assignment and the pre-school professionality was to facilitate a scientific approach, primarily by providing research results and tools for reflection on teachers’ own practice.

Strategies for strengthening leadership

It should be noted that principals’ leadership strategies are closely linked to structure, culture, and knowledge. Concerning their leadership, in terms of strategy the principals strove to create and promote the kind of space in which it is legitimate to engage in reflection and necessary distancing from operative tasks. One upper secondary school principal described this kind of leading strategy as acting like a conductor, motivating and guiding an orchestra who “stresses what’s necessary to stress and wipes away what does not have to be done here” (20190221). To realize and enact the policy of building education on a scientific foundation, another strategy several principals adopted was to enter this kind of space for reflection themselves, thereby acting as a role model for the staff and strategically following the motto “live as one learns”. As one primary school principal explained, the principal sets an example, “It is not unimportant for the employees what you do” (20190221), and this motivated the principals to take a lead in the scientific assignment.

Another prominent leading strategy principals adopted was to constantly “remind, support, provoke and challenge” teachers to promote the learning required to develop research-based education. As one stated:

My role is to support the teachers but also to provoke them in a positive way, to have the courage to challenge and contribute alternative pictures and questions, to communicate expectations and follow-up on their work. (20181122)

They also recognized the need to critically appraise their own leading strategies and increase their own scientific competence in order to maintain credibility:

My work as an educational leader should be perceived as being knowledgeable and they should feel that they can lean on me. Firstly, I must increase my own scientific and theoretical knowledge. (20181122)

Consequently, a clear strategy embraced by the leaders was to enhance their own knowledge and act as both sources of knowledge and supporters of its acquisition and dissemination. Another prominent leading strategy was to develop and maintain organizational clarity, with well-defined roles and expectations for the staff, and to recognize the need to follow up the policy work. Generally, the principals expressed a wish to employ a distributed leadership to a greater extent, and engage strategically important categories of teachers (career teachers, special educators, or teachers involved in the Master’s program or action research projects) as middle leaders in their units. This would enable them to exploit not only the expertise and scientific competence possessed by several types of intermediate leader but also their intermediary position. Stressing the importance of listening to teachers when enacting the policy, the principals also described the value of intermediate leaders’ closeness to colleagues and awareness of teachers’ reactions. However, such leadership must be earned, and requires trust from the teachers’ colleagues as well as scientific knowledge. As one secondary principal claimed, “The mandate and competence are the alpha and omega here” (20190221).

Enabling and constraining contextual factors

In realizing the identified strategies there are, however, challenges to manage, and the principals’ expressed tensions between high ambitions (self-set as well as imposed by policy and the local administration) and limited scope to carry out desired activities. One group of principals concluded that the focal principal program was empowering and provided important skills, but the steps required to transform it into practice in their organizations were challenging. A member of this group expressed the problems as follows:

Everyday life is everyday life. I don’t yet have time to apply these new thoughts at school in the way I would have liked. If you move from here [the principal program] into reality, it becomes a crash, a collision. I would like to create this space at school as well. (20181122)

Well aware of the clash between intentions of research-based education and their everyday life, the principals still highlighted (and stuck to) the necessity to create a similar “space” for discussions as in the principal’s program for their teachers. Pre-school principals also consistently raised these concerns, describing their schools as having “tight organization”, with little scope for network meetings or other forms of collegial learning, and multiple issues to address in the available time, leaving even more limited time for in-depth reflections.

The principals’ experiences of constantly lacking time are reinforced by descriptions of constant pressure to follow new directives and initiatives, which inevitably undermines long-term work aimed at embedding a scientific approach in their school’s practical work. A group of principals from primary school concluded that, “as a principal, you don’t own your school’s processes” (20111122). Another principal exemplified the problems posed by a constant stream of national initiatives that had to be implemented as follows:

First, we had the “Math Lift”, then the “Reading Lift” and then the “Digital Lift” and so on  …  I don’t get any quality in what I do, because I’m always doing something new the following year. Now, I need to go back and redo the “Math Lift”. (20190221)

Clearly, there is pressure to simultaneously enact multiple, interrelated policies and nationally dictated initiatives at the local level. This can either facilitate or complicate application of strategies aimed at establishing research-based education.

Previous studies have reported similar conflicts, often describing principals as positioned in a “field of tensions” with different, conflicting pressures at play (Berg, 2018; Leo, 2015; Persson et al., 2003). They are expected to take responsibility for meeting new requirements within slow institutional systems, in which discrepancies between objectives, resources, and organizational frameworks lead to tensions (Berg, 2018). In line with previous research, this study revealed various tensions and solutions the principals deployed in efforts to resolve them. The principals’ ambitions to facilitate a scientific approach within their school organizations’ everyday work was constrained, for example, by limitations of both time and resources.

Maguire et al. (2015, p. 486) argue, with support from Colebatch (2006), that recognition of the multi-layered and messy nature of policy enactments may be helpful “in understanding the complicated relationship between making policy and practicing policy in complex situated contexts like schools”. The inconsistencies between the context of formulation and the context of realization (where the institutional action occurs) are addressed in several studies from different theoretical standpoints within the field of educational policy research (Fenwick & Edwards, 2011; Ozga, 2000; Skedsmo, 2011). In this study, we focused on principals’ descriptions of staged and planned support strategies as they interpreted national policy and evaluated the contextual conditions for carrying out the activities in everyday school practice. The results also indicate potential gaps in local practice, as the principals expressed ambitions to facilitate the policy at local school level, while raising concerns about political, institutional, practical, and resource constraints when taking action. Among others, Leo (2014) concludes that there is often a significant gap between principals’ norms and actions. He found, for example, that principals had high self-imposed expectations to be closer to teaching while rarely visiting classrooms. Another gap (and area in need of improvement) is between an expectation for principals to lead the systematic quality work in their schools and associated actions. Nehez (2015, p. 7) drew similar conclusions, stating that: “What becomes meaningful for principals to engage in is not formed only by the aim of planning improvement work, but also by already existing practices competing for space and by arrangements constraining principals’ possibilities to work with planned change.” In a similar manner to our findings, she found that several practices and projects were competing in an arena in which improvement work was planned.

Discussion

Strategies such as development of sustainable structures, learning cultures, and teachers’ competencies are clearly consistent with objectives of principals’ pedagogical and administrative assignments (SFS, 2010:800), and those concerning principals’ leadership and aspirations to lead the scientific work warrant particular further exploration. The principals recognized a need to raise the level of scientific knowledge and analytical ability of the teachers, themselves, and their organizations overall. For this, they also recognized a need to serve not only as administrative and pedagogical leaders but also as leading knowledge actors, “living as they learned” and leading the way. This tendency is interesting in relation to a shift that occurred during the previous decade in Sweden, in which the professional role of the principal became that of manager rather than pedagogical leader (Alexiadou & Lundahl, 2016; Moos et al., 2016). Jarl (2012) argues that since then principals have formed a professionality of their own, thereby separating their professionality from that of teachers, as their administrative tasks are prioritized at the expense of their pedagogical role. However, the changes may be less clear than they first appear. According to Alexiadou and Lundahl (2016), the managerial role of Swedish principals still accommodates both bureaucratic and collegial relations between principals and teachers. In addition, a turnaround identified by Hallinger and Ko (2015), from principals as organizational managers to leaders of learning, is clearly aligned with the position of knowledge actors that principals described in the present study. Our results confirm the ambiguity evident in principals’ overall role, and show how such professional positions and relations can be further altered in local enactment of research-based education as principals recognize a need for them to provide clear knowledge leadership.

Due to its localized nature, policy enactment involves multiple embedded local-level processes and settings (Ball et al., 2011; Braun et al., 2011), in this case both the central school administration and the various local school contexts within the municipal school organization. Our results confirm that material, situated and professional contexts (Braun et al., 2011) restrict or enable and differentiate policy enactment at local and school unit levels. Principals are also obliged to simultaneously enact multiple, interrelated policies and nationally dictated initiatives at the local level. Their narrative accounts illustrate how this can either facilitate or complicate application of strategies aimed at establishing research-based education. Following Maguire et al. (2015, p. 486), our analysis confirms how “policies can be clustered together to form new policy ensembles that can have unintended, or unexpected consequences in schools”. For example, enactment of the policy on mandatory systematic quality work was described as provision of a facilitating structure with established routines, within which a scientific approach could be integrated. In this respect, the primary and upper secondary school principals additionally benefited to some extent from working methods and structures established following other governing policies and national initiatives, such as the digital infrastructure and “culture of sharing” promoted by the digitalization policy, and collegiate learning promoted by national initiatives such as the “Reading Lift”. Pre-school principals, to a greater extent, emphasized the importance of providing research results and tools for reflection on teachers’ own practice as a strategy for strengthening the new teaching assignment in pre-schools.

Accordingly, various contextual conditions restricted principals’ everyday work. Our results also show that socio-geographical factors (Braun et al., 2011) affect the scope to apply strategies such as promotion of learning cultures, collegial learning, and organizational flexibility. Several principals provided illuminating reflections on differences in conditions among the different forms of school, and even within local school units, that affected possibilities to enact the policy. Further, the contextual conditions in terms of legal requirements, responsibilities, and budgetary frameworks vary among the forms of school. Thus, the principals have varying capacity to participate in and implement activities that are supposed to include all principals and teachers according to the central policy. For example, the principals of primary and upper secondary schools had established great confidence in the teachers’ participation in the Master’s program to disseminate knowledge, motivate colleagues, and act as intermediate leaders. In contrast, the pre-school principals lacked these teacher resources as their teachers could not participate in the Master’s program due to differences in administrative conditions.

The principals’ narrative accounts also illustrate what principals have to deal with when policies interact with different professional cultures and professional outlooks (cf. Braun et al., 2011). A common strategy embraced by all principals, regardless of school form, was facilitation of a reflexive learning culture, supporting proven experiences. However, diverse conditions concerning professional dimensions within the different forms of school apparently affect how successfully the principals may nourish such cultures. Braun et al. (2011, p. 591) illustrate how specific schools with distinct sets of professional outlook and attitude “make certain policy responses more or less possible”. Similarly, our analysis shows that, although institutional values may be embedded, the “professional context is not necessarily coherent and uncontested within schools” (ibid.). Variations in the experiences and commitments of teachers and, in our case, principals result in variations in policy responses, feasible strategies, and contrasting descriptions of professional cultures within the different forms of school. The pre-school leaders described a collective culture among their staff, which complicated their efforts to enhance competences and the teachers’ responsibility to reflect on their own learning and actions. In contrast, the secondary and upper secondary school principals described an individualized culture among their staff, which can challenge collegial efforts to strengthen the scientific base. This indicates a possible tension between research-based knowledge of subject content and general pedagogical teaching issues. A more individualized culture can be related to differences in the autonomy of different teacher groups (Ringarp, 2011), where groups whose knowledge base is clearly supported by research have an articulated professional autonomy. This indicates that a clearer subject focus and longer academic training among teachers may tend to result in (cultural) resistance to some principals’ strategic efforts to promote a scientific foundation for both subject content and handling more general pedagogical issues.

By applying the “interpretations of interpretations” concept (Maguire et al., 2015) to the analysis, we have highlighted how the local school administration, and specifically the principal program, to some extent inevitably influences and forms guiding principles for the principals by providing specific perspectives and (local) policy translations. The local policy was clearly critical in tone, highlighting the importance of the practitioners’ role in knowledge production and educational change with reference to research being context-dependent and never strictly transferable (Biesta, 2010; Carlgren, 2010; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). The local stance was quite distinct from national trends at the time (2015–2017) in this respect, as national policy still inexplicably favored (academic) research-based knowledge over teachers’ proven experience (cf. Hultman, 2018).

The analysis also indicates how collective sense-making (Coburn, 2005) has been constructed, strengthened by the dominant perspectives within the local principal program. However, strong collective sense-making can become normative and may hamper the expression and development of alternative perspectives on scientificity among principals. Moreover, for leaders who personally lack a consolidated view of scientificity that is consistent with local policy, there may be a risk of making “symbolic responses” (Liljenberg, 2015) to the policy. This, in turn, can create vulnerability when the assignment is to be put into practice in everyday school work, where it may be questioned or overshadowed by the “cross pressures” (Berg, 2018) of competing commitments. It is thus important to constantly win and recapture conversations about, and interpretations of, research-based education among principals and teachers to ensure consolidation in the everyday work. As Leo (2015, p. 473) states: “One way to close the gap between norms and actions could be to strengthen the communicative dimension of norm setting by forming school principal learning communities.” Strengthened by learning experiences in the principal’s program, this is echoed by our participating principals’ emphasis on the importance of creating and maintaining collegial “spaces for reflection” for themselves, and for teachers.

Conclusion

Our ethnographic case study provided rich insights into the local enactment of national policy on research-based education by principals. This concluding section summarizes findings in relation to our two guiding research questions regarding how principals interpret, translate, and locally engage with the policy concerning education built on a scientific foundation and proven experience, and how they mediate and facilitate enactment of the policy in their organization in relation to various contextual dimensions.

The results illustrate four interrelated strategies deployed by the principals as they try to facilitate enactment of the policy in their organization: strategies facilitating durable structures, developing learning cultures, developing teachers’ competencies, and strengthening leadership. Regarding the strengthening leadership strategy, the study contributes to understanding of the principals’ positions by highlighting their aspirations to serve not only as administrative and pedagogical leaders but also as leading knowledge actors in relation to the research-based education assignment. In conclusion, and with support from Hallinger and Ko (2015), the results stress the ambiguity evident in principals’ roles, and show how such professional positions and relations can be altered in local enactment of the policy as principals take on a clear knowledge leadership role. Accordingly, the results also reveal how the complexity of the assignment requires a form of professionality that allows principals and teachers to collaborate and closely interact.

Following the conceptualization of Maguire et al. (2020) and Braun et al. (2011), our results confirm that a range of situated factors influence how local school actors enact policies. Both socio-geographical factors and professional factors affect strategies intended to promote durable structures, collegial learning, and organizational flexibility. The results confirm Braun et al.’s (2011, p. 591) conclusion that specific schools with distinct sets of professional outlooks and attitudes “make certain policy responses more or less possible”.

This study contributes to understanding of how different national policies and initiatives intersect when enacted at local level (Magiure et al., 2020) and confirms previous findings highlighting principals’ positionings in a “field of tensions”, where conflicting pressures are at play (Berg, 2018; Leo, 2014; Rönnström, 2018). An important element is enhancement of knowledge regarding how enacting different policies simultaneously can either facilitate or complicate principals’ strategies in terms of establishing research-based education in school practice.

Research-based education can thus be ascribed different positions, follow different logics emanating from local school contexts, and provide models for enactment of other policies. Further, competitive policies inevitably have interactive effects on the enactment of the policy and may compromise local pervasion of a research-based approach through an entire school organization (cf. Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). Moreover, as resources are inevitably limited, although different policies may have synergistic effects there is a risk that competitive policies may dominate the marginal time and space available (cf. Nehez, 2015). Various mandatory directives and policies must therefore be coordinated in order to make them manageable and avoid constant reboots, interruptions, and restarts (Hultman, 2018) in the future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research has received funding from Umeå University, Sweden.

Notes

1 That is, ways of working based on scientific tools and methods. Cochran-Smith (2005) and Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1990) argue that practice-based experience must also be acknowledged as research-based when it involves systematic and intentional inquiry carried out by school practitioners.

2 For example, the first initiative to implement a principal program was prompted by a request for support from a group of principals.

3 “The program aims to provide an in-depth understanding of a scientific approach in schools, and strengthen principals’ leadership by integrating practice-based research in schools together with teachers” (Xx Municipality, 2018b, p. 1).

4 Pedagogistas have a supervisory function and continuously support and challenge the pedagogues in pre-schools in reflection and dialogue about the educational work with the children. Their role is influenced by Reggio Emilia pedagogy.

5 The “career step reform” was implemented by the Swedish Government in 2013 (SFS, 2013:70) to provide a clear career structure for teachers.

6 Practices in Swedish pre-schools are governed by the School Act (SFS, 2010:800) and in 2018 the concept of teaching was defined in a revised pre-school curriculum (SNAE, 2018).