(Un)doing Equity in the Provision of Educational Support

Abstract in English

This dissertation builds on a study of provision of educational support in the Swedish education system, with a particular focus on lower secondary schools. The aim is to explore processes involved in the provision of educational support beyond pedagogical and didactical considerations. To this end, an initial analysis of the local use of a large-scale equity funding programme in nine Swedish municipalities was followed by a field study in lower secondary schools in two of them. Adopting an ethnographic approach over three semesters, classes and other domains of everyday life in the schools were observed. The study includes interviews with pupils, parents, teachers, special educators, and other school personnel, as well as administrators at local education agencies.

Theoretically informed by Foucault, the concepts of problematisations, power, discourse, knowledge, and truths have been central to the inquiry. Adopting a critical approach aims to make visible the unseen and unexamined ways of thinking and the practices they render, in order to expand the limits of our thinking.

The findings of the present study are contingent on historical processes in the Swedish education system and its relation to special education, within a continuum of categorising groups of pupils as responsible for their own school failure and rationalising the provision of educational support through medical diagnoses and moralising judgements. The findings are also understood in light of the Swedish welfare state’s striving for equity and its historical ambiguities. As this study shows, the provision of educational support is conditioned by far more than pupils’ educational needs, compromising educational equity.

The concept of equity has been left open to interpretation in policy, practice, and thinking about educational support. Given this, and in a context in which school personnel experience time poverty and pressure to act within dynamics of accountability and against their professional judgement, the understanding of school failure is simplified. This enables the deferral of responsibility to pupils and their families and thwarts efforts to reverse school failure. While actors such as school personnel often act unintentionally or without awareness in the observed processes, these processes ultimately operate in ways that compromise equity in the education system. In the practical doing of equity through the organisation and provision of educational support, professionals in the education system are also undoing equity.