Twelve years of upper-secondary education in Sweden: the beginnings of a neo-liberal policy hegemony?

Employers placing orders and students as commodities: Swedish post-secondary vocational education and training policy

“…Avis 2012;Ball 1998;Pettersson, Prøitz, and Forsberg 2017;Trumberg 2019). In the case of VET, these policies today rest on competence-based approaches to system formation and on concepts of employability, adaptability and lifelong learning (Beach and Dovemark 2011;Brockmann, Clarke, and Winch 2008). Twentieth-century Swedish educational policies were and continue to be convergent with those of the supranational organisations.…”

“…Twentieth-century Swedish educational policies were and continue to be convergent with those of the supranational organisations. The permeation of the transnational neoliberal discourse of this paradigm into a national context is, however, reflected in a particular way in the Swedish case (Beach and Dovemark 2011;Englund 2005;Lundahl 2016;Lundahl et al 2010). This particularity is due to the speed at which transformations occurred during the late 1980s and 1990s, and to how the Swedish Social Democratic Party pushed through policies and reforms in line with ideas that they had opposed only a few years earlier, in the process discarding strong traditional egalitarian values of educational equality.…”

“…The changes to the Swedish national education system which were in line with neoliberal discourse persisted into the twenty-first century and accelerated following a shift in political rule in 2006 when a Conservative-Liberal coalition government came to power (Beach and Dovemark 2011;Lundahl et al 2010;Nylund, Rosvall, and Ledman 2017;Virolainen and Persson Thunqvist 2017). This new government initiated reforms in both initial and post-secondary VET.…”

Deregulation, privatisation and marketisation of Nordic comprehensive education: social changes reflected in schooling

“…The second wave focused on privatisation and marketisation during the 2000s, when there was an attempt to create a school market by profiling schools, using privatisation and creating intensified school choice (e.g. Beach & Dovemark, 2011;Lundahl, Erixon Arreman, Holm, & Lundström, 2013). The overall trend in both developments is a movement by the state from being mainly a provider of education to mainly being a regulator (Beach, 2010).…”

The vocational–academic divide in neoliberal upper secondary curricula: the Swedish case

“…To address the latter the European Commission has, since the 1990s, emphasised the need for life-long learning (Pépin 2007), and across Europe there are both examples of reforms in line with the Commission's promotion including general knowledge in vocational education, and reforms narrowing the education towards more specific skills (Avis and Orr 2016). This article takes as its departure point a critical research tradition that focuses on how education systems and educational reforms impact on class relations (Apple 2004;Beach and Dovemark 2011;Bernstein 2000). Previous studies encompassing all parts of the education system from kindergarten through to higher education have shown that students' social class has a strong impact on factors ranging from teachers' expectations (Avis and Orr 2016) and assessment (Marcenaro-Gutierrez and Vignoles 2015) to students' educational choices (Alexiadou et al 2016) and results (Gustafsson, Katz and Österberg 2016).…”