Privatisation of public education? The emergence of independent upper secondary schools in Sweden

Abstract

This article explores the upper secondary (or post‐16) school market. The study on which it is based, funded by the Swedish Research Council, was entitled ‘Upper‐secondary education as a market’. Empirical data include official statistics, policy documents, school publications, company reports and school visits. Printed and other news media were also scrutinised to identify how the marketisation of education is represented in public discourse. A number of themes emerged from the study which included mapping the expansion of the school market, chains of ownership and influence, marketing strategies, choice and the school market and issues raised in the media. These imply that there is a new market discourse which represents a clear break with previous social democratic education policies primarily aimed at enhancing citizenship and wider democratic values within an inclusive public school. However, critiques have also emerged including a call for strengthened regulations of and control over independent schools and concern about an education market equated more with shares and profits rather than pedagogy and student citizenship.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 123 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.