Teachers’ work in complex times: the ‘fast policy’ of Swedish school reform

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses recent educational reforms on teachers’ work in Sweden following the 2010 Education Act, and up to the School Commission Report released in April 2017. We draw upon key policy texts and associated documents from the Ministry of Education, and the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket). We consider the background to the reforms, their relations with one another and how they have played out in the Swedish educational policy context. We argue that these reforms exhibit features of ‘fast policy’ in terms of how they have taken on an increasingly centralised and neoliberal character, and the rapid-fire way they have been directed at teachers as individuals, rather than broader schooling structures. We show how the fast policy reforms have recentralised schooling and teachers’ work—effectively de-professionalising educators.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational policy
• teachers’ work
• educational governance
• teacher professional learning
• Sweden

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use the term ‘global’ cautiously, fully in the knowledge that purportedly global influences are always necessarily inflected at the ‘local’ level, in all its manifestations (including at national, regional/provincial, municipal scales).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant No. FT140100018.

Notes on contributors

Ian Hardy

Ian Hardy is Senior Lecturer and Australia Research Council Future Fellow at the School of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Dr Hardy researches and teaches educational policy and practice, with a particular focus upon teachers’ learning under current policy conditions. He is the author of The politics of teacher professional development: Policy, research and practice (New York: Routledge, 2012). He is currently researching the nature of teachers’ learning in relation to curricula policy practices, and globalised educational reform practices more generally, in Australia, Canada, Finland, Sweden, and the United States.

Karin Rönnerman

Karin Rönnerman is Professor of Education in the Department of Education and Special Education, The University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. Professor Rönnerman researches and teaches at masters and doctoral level, primarily on professional learning through action research. She is co-author of a chapter ‘Action research within the Nordic countries tradition’ in The Palgrave international handbook of action research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is currently researching the nature of middle leading-for-learning amongst colleagues. Professor Rönnerman is also the Swedish coordinator for the Nordic Network for Action Research, as well as for the international Pedagogy, Education, Praxis (PEP) network.

Dennis Beach

Dennis Beach is Professor of Education in the Department of Education and Special Education, The University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. His main specialisations are in the ethnography and sociology of education and teacher education. He has published extensively in these fields and in the politics of education and higher education.