While parents' role in schools has attracted growing attention in educational research, very few researchers have directed any interest to the role of parents in special education. In this paper, we focus upon the concept of partnership, relating our analyses of interviews with classroom teachers and parents to the notion of partnership as described and explored by different researchers. Our main focus is on how teachers describe and perceive their relation to parents, and how parents experience their relation to the school. Our analysis shows that the relationship between teachers and parents seems to contain some other features than those reflected in the existing literature on parents' role in education. To extract some of these features based on our data, we construct two roles: parents as 'implementers' and parents as 'clients', which we believe better captures the distinctive feature of the role of parents in special education. 'Implementer' implies parents being given responsibility for following up aims and measures set by the school, with very little possibility to influence how things are being done. 'Clients' occur when teachers see parents as part of their child's problem. Both roles place parents in a subordinate and powerless relationship with the school, as a result of a strong inequality of power between parents and schools. This inequality is caused, among other factors, by the socially defined power relationship between laypersons and professionals, and the stigma attached to special education which restrains parents from forming any collective resistance.

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Being traditionally a correcting and repairing practice, anchored in the modernistic visions of the European welfare states, rehabilitation is today subject to substantial revisions. The concept and practices of rehabilitation are under pressure from multiple directions. Traditional rehabilitation is challenged from above by way of pressure from political institutions demanding more and better rehabilitation services with less resources. It is challenged from inside where an increasing number of professions fight each other for a (fair) share of the increasing rehabilitation market It is challenged from outside where its orderly modernistic vision is met by disorderliness and diversity, and from below, by a growing and stronger disability movement eager to free itself from the chains of oppressing categories and labels imposed by paternalistic professionals. As a respond to this, the purpose and goals of rehabilitation is substantially extended to include also societal participation and equal opportunities for disabled people. The question asked in this paper is whether the concept of rehabilitation will survive the challenges and shift in perspective that we are now witnessing?

Collaboration and networking are ubiquitous, versatile features of social service provision in most Western countries. However, it is an open question whether networking means and entails the same across countries. Comparing regulatory frameworks in three jurisdictions representing distinctive ‘worlds of welfare services’ – Germany, Norway and Quebec – this article aims at eliciting the normative rationales that underpin and inform local service networks in child welfare and protection (CWP) systems. In Norway, where services are little diversified and largely insular, networking appears as a way of opening up for greater organizational plurality, within and beyond the public sector realm. In Germany in contrast, where services are highly pluralized and fragmented, networks are seen as an instrument for streamlining complexity. As for Quebec – an intermediate case in some respects – networking is envisioned as a catalyst for aligning two co‐existing service streams and mitigating the child protection–family support divide. Interestingly, in all three places, networking is now being enforced through similar highly formalized, top‐down regulatory provisions, even though the intended directions of change differ markedly. This has implications for CWP policy as well as research on networks at large.

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