En skola för alla – gäller det alla?: Statliga styrdokuments betydelse i skolans verksamhet

A School for Everyone. Does it Apply to Everyone?: The Importance of National Steering Documents for Schools.

The thesis aim is to visualize and understand what happens to intentions formulated in national steering documents to be interpreted and implemented in schools to give every pupil without exception access to an equivalent education. The principal starting point is that the individual official, or street bureaucrat , working inside school is the key person in interpreting steering document content. A theory-based analysis model was constructed from the different levels of national school steering systems, including knowledge appropriation and knowledge transfer as theoretical concepts. In the model, state, municipality, school and pupil constitute separate institutional concepts forming four frames, with three levels, macro, meso and micro, with school and pupil on the latter level. Following the process involving national steering documents, the actual steering of schools and the interpretation and implementation of the mission at different system levels highlights these documents importance. The empirical material comprises five studies: Study 1, a literature study focusing on the expression A school for everyone; Study 2, a document study on the steering of schools in two systems; Studies 3 and 4, two mutually independent questionnaire studies about national steering documents involving school leaders undergoing school leadership education and special needs teachers-to-be during their education and Study 5, a document study of pupil assistants role as officials in the two steering systems. The conclusion of the thesis may be that the pedagogical significance of the steering documents depends on how administrative and school officials, individually and collectively, interpret and implement the mission among the pupils. Claiming that A school for everyone applies to everyone requires routines in whichever system which ensure that all steering process officials absorb the steering document content and agree on a common pedagogical foundation about who are all pupils, which ones need special support and what measures will give all pupils access to an equivalent education.