National-authority-endorsed privatisation of teachers’ continuing professional development in Sweden

ABSTRACT

This article reveals national-authority-endorsed privatisation of teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) in the wake of a shift towards more centralised national interventions in Swedish schools. Drawing on data from the Collaboration for Best School (CBS) initiative, the context of the article is a recent state programme that encourages underperforming schools to collaborate with the Swedish National Agency for Education (SNAE) to raise students’ achievement standards and thereby increase equality within and between schools. Guided by meta-governance theory, our analysis revealed that SNAE operates as a meta-governor on behalf of the state to replace university researchers as CPD providers with specific private-sector actors. The results provide evidence of SNAE-enabled substitution processes through three network governance strategies: 1) hidden and authorised substitution, 2) trust building and hybrid participation, and 3) collective reproduction and solutionism. Taken together, these governance strategies reflect national-authority-endorsed privatisation in action, suggesting that SNAE primarily operates as an ideology-driven conduit for private economic interests. The article concludes with a call for new collaborative and autonomous implementation strategies for teachers’ CPD that can further the interests of the teaching profession.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher development
• privatisation
• meta-governance
• Collaboration for Best School initiative
• Sweden

Introduction

Continuing professional development (CPD) refers to the organised professional learning and development of teachers following the completion of their initial teacher training (Postholm 2012). Its aim is to enhance teachers’ professionalism, and it requires teachers to engage in collaborative learning towards the goal of developing teaching and, by extension, improving students’ learning (Collinson et al. 2009). However, as Ellis et al. (2021, p. 606) noted, referencing Miettinen (2013), CPD provision has historically been moulded by the type of state, ‘with significant variations between the US, UK and Nordic models, for example’.

In Sweden, the government established an organisation for teachers’ CPD in the 1960s to support the new comprehensive school system that was gradually being introduced during the Swedish Folk-Home Reform period (SOU 2014). The organisation followed an explicit professionalisation agenda led by teachers whom the government recruited as development leaders for their colleagues, and it provided opportunities for teachers to expand their professional knowledge through university-based programmes and courses. In the 1980s, a couple of years before decentralisation and market reforms transformed the Swedish education system, the state organisation for teachers’ CPD was discontinued and moved partly under the aegis of local education authorities (LEAs).

In recent decades, neoliberal policies have increasingly shaped state aspirations for education system reforms generally and teacher education specifically, although the intensity, pace, and impact of neoliberal reform processes have varied across countries (Sleeter 2008, Zeichner 2010, Ball 2016). International developments in teachers’ CPD have followed similar trends. An intensified private-sector involvement has occurred as part of a shift towards more market-based CPD procurement in many countries (Burch 2006, Ball 2009, Ellis et al. 2021, Mockler 2022). For example, Mockler (2022) revealed that over 600 for-profit organisations, ranging from individual consultants to transnational companies, were authorised by the state government of New South Wales in Australia to deliver programmes and courses specifically to support the state’s professional standards and accreditation requirements. Ellis et al. (2021) described a parallel process of ‘contracting out’ in England, where the government launched the Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund (TLIF) to address social mobility in designated opportunity areas through the professional development of teachers. None of the applying universities or LEAs received funding. Instead, a diverse set of enterprises won the first TLIF competition, reflecting three different ‘kinds of shadow state structure – autonomous, intermediate, and co-created – in relation to CPD provision’ (Ellis et al. 2021, p. 605).

A key element of this trend towards the state-encouraged privatisation of teachers’ CPD is, as Ball (2010, p. 4) noted, a process of substitution – ‘a process which replaces traditional public sector actors with others’. According to Ball (2009), state policies and reforms can provide opportunities for replacement in the following two ways:

First, policies that announce ‘zero tolerance of underperformance’ and intervention in under-performing schools … provide opportunities for replacement and/or remediation of ‘failing’ or ‘weak’ public sector institutions. The education businesses can sell school improvement … Second, taking up spaces ‘vacated’ by local education authorities (LEAs) and other state organisations, education businesses mediate between policy and institutions by offering (at a price) to make policy manageable and sensible to schools and to teachers.

(pp. 85–86)

The role of the state in these types of substitution processes has also been discussed in relation to other enabling mechanisms, such as the development and expanded use of public–private partnerships, as well as the increased emphasis on competition and outsourcing of teachers’ CPD (Burch 2006, Ball 2009, Ellis et al. 2021, Mockler 2022). However, few studies have examined the repertoire of governance strategies employed by state organisations and authorities when sanctioning private-sector actors as CPD providers. The aim of the present article is to fill this gap by investigating recent tendencies of state-endorsed privatisation of teachers’ CPD in the wake of a shift towards more centralised national interventions in Swedish schools (Kirsten and Wermke 2017, Hardy et al. 2018). Drawing on data from the Collaboration for Best School (CBS) initiative (Swedish: Samverkan för Bästa Skola), the context of this paper is a recent state programme that engages underperforming schools in collaboration with the Swedish National Agency for Education (SNAE) to raise students’ achievement standards and thereby increase equality within and between schools. Based on meta-governance theory (Gjaltema et al. 2020, Ek Österberg and Qvist 2022), the aim of this article is to investigate how SNAE operates as a meta-governor on behalf of the state. The particular focus is on the network governance strategies employed by SNAE that sanction private-sector businesses as providers for the government’s CBS initiative. This article pursues the following research questions:

• What network design strategies does SNAE use to establish private-sector actors and rearrange actors’ positions in the CBS governance network?

• What network participation strategies does SNAE employ to facilitate sustained partnerships with private-sector actors in the CBS governance network?

• What network framing strategies does SNAE use to define the joint mission of the private-sector actors in the CBS governance network?

Changing the governance system: SNAE as a meta-governor

The conditions surrounding teachers’ CPD in Sweden changed significantly in the early 1990s, when the Swedish parliament issued a series of government proposals for reforming two key elements of education governance (Prop 1988/89:4, 1989/90:41, 1990/91:18, 85, 1990/91:85, 95, 1992/93:230). The first was decentralisation, which gave significant power to LEAs and school principals to, among other things, make decisions on teachers’ CPD that would best support national priorities. The second was privatisation, which allowed private businesses to act as education suppliers on a quasi-market education delivery basis, which included both public schools and private independent ‘free schools’ financed through public choice and a school voucher system. The government presented the reforms as a means to enhance local influence over school governance and development, provide more locally sensitive financial management, and improve overall education quality through the competitive exclusion of underperforming schools. However, few of these promises materialised, at least not according to Dahlstedt and Fejes (2019), Beach and Dyson (2016), Blossing et al. (2014), and Börjesson (2016). Instead, the reforms led to:

• A parallel public/private track of state-financed schools glossed over by a policy fiction of public choice that allowed only very limited choices, particularly in rural areas and for low socioeconomic groups and migrant communities (Dovemark 2004, Fjellman 2019).

• Extended possibilities for systematic exploitation of the embedded labour power invested in system infrastructure and the living labour power of teachers for private interests, coupled with the undervaluing of teachers’ labour (Beach 2010).

• A decline in general student performance standards and increasing differences in performance among schools following the de-buffering of schools, as socialised sites of welfare production, from direct private exploitation (SOU 2017, Beach 2022).

• An uneven distribution of qualified and experienced leaders and teachers across schools, as well as large differences in professional development opportunities due to variations in local and regional conditions (SOU 2016, Parding et al. 2017).

• A broader scope of teachers’ professional development, prompted by increased employer interest and accompanied by a growing CPD market open to diverse providers competing for public funding (SOU 2014, Levinsson et al. 2022).

Following reports on some of these developments, the Swedish government has made substantial efforts to re-establish control through centralised national interventions, reflecting international trends (Ellis et al. 2021) that directly target teachers and the quality of teaching (Kirsten and Wermke 2017, Hardy et al. 2018). The government introduced programmes for teachers’ CPD, such as the Maths Initiative (Swedish: Matematiklyftet) and the Reading Initiative (Swedish: Läslyftet), and SNAE was assigned responsibility for organising and implementing these programmes in collaboration with universities, LEAs, and schools. From 2010 onwards, state programmes for teachers’ CPD have been introduced within several areas that attracted the government’s attention (Kirsten and Wermke 2017).

The direct control of teachers’ CPD by the Swedish government was reduced, but not entirely removed, by the decentralisation reform. SNAE was established shortly after the reform as an ‘arm’s length’ – from the ministry, LEAs, and schools – management intermediary to act on behalf of the government (Rönnberg 2011). Through SNAE, the government has retained some control over the education sector, including teachers’ CPD, via a limited steering role in hierarchically structured state programmes that give SNAE decision-making power and control over budgets relating to government priorities. This is a deliberate strategy (Prøitz 2021, Kronqvist Håård 2023). The government has created SNAE as an intermediary meta-governor and controller of the networks and procedures that enable different organisations to operate within the education field (cf. Gjaltema et al. 2020, Ek Österberg and Qvist 2022).

However, from a critical meta-governance perspective (Jessop 1997), there is a risk that such arrangements – and the formulation and application of associated values, norms, and principles – may become caught up in and reproduce the dominant ideology. Ball and Youdell (2008) claimed that forms of privatisation are being introduced by stealth into public education systems worldwide as a result of deliberate policy disguised as ‘educational reform’, having profound impacts on education quality and equality. The present article considers these possibilities. A previous study (Levinsson et al. 2022) indicated that private-sector services account for as much as 85% of the total costs of teachers’ CPD in Sweden, and, moreover, that schools procure services from private companies as part of the CBS initiative, suggesting that SNAE has sanctioned these services.

The CBS initiative

The Swedish government launched the CBS initiative in June 2015, specifically targeting schools ‘with low knowledge results or a high proportion of students that did not complete their education, and that are considered to have difficult conditions for improving their results on their own’ (Ministry of Education 2015, p. 1). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2015) report Improving Schools in Sweden, as well as national reports pointing towards increased segregation and performance gaps within and between schools, have influenced the government’s approach to the CBS implementation (Håkansson and Rönnström 2021). According to the OECD (2015), underperforming schools in Sweden have been left to manage challenges on their own, although researchers have stressed the need for long-term external support to ensure effective development. The OECD report recommended that Sweden consider school improvement a shared national undertaking.

The Swedish government made SNAE responsible for the CBS initiative, but predefined it as one based on sustained collaboration with designated LEAs and schools to identify and carry out interventions aimed at raising standards of student achievement and thereby increase equality within and between schools. Swedish LEAs and schools were selected based on evaluations by the Swedish Schools Inspectorate, which, among other things, examines individual schools’ goal achievement and results. Initially, the CBS initiative targeted compulsory, upper secondary, and special needs schools, but it was later expanded to include preschools, preschool classes, and leisure centres (Ministry of Education 2017, 2019). In autumn 2021, 105 LEAs, 416 schools, and 124 preschools had agreed to participate in the CBS initiative (SNAE 2022b), and at the time of this article’s writing, the programme was still running. Hence, it is considered one of the largest school development investments ever made in Sweden (Kronqvist Håård 2021).

CBS implementation follows three main phases (Kronqvist Håård 2021, SNAE 2023). The first phase engages representatives of selected LEAs and schools in current-situation analyses supported by SNAE’s process leaders to adapt the initiative to local conditions. The aim is to identify the potential causes of the problems affecting students’ goal achievement and results and to use them to create action plans that address key development areas. The second phase comprises a so-called ‘three-part meeting’ arranged by SNAE, at which university representatives are invited to discuss the situation analyses and action plans. The aim of this phase is to specify the improvement activities and expected outcomes in each development area covered by the action plans. The researchers’ role is to ensure that action plans are based on scientific results and proven experience. The third phase involves the realisation of action plans. Improvement activities are mainly provided by universities, but LEAs and schools may also participate in activities under the umbrella of other SNAE-directed state programmes. Regular supportive follow-up meetings with process leaders and activity providers are arranged during this phase. LEAs are obliged to continually evaluate the implementation process via partial reports to SNAE and a final CBS report after completion of the CBS implementation.

Although the expressed aim of the CBS initiative is to increase equality within and between schools, the CPD offered to teachers does not seem to aspire to the kind of democratic professionalism that Kennedy (2014) connects to the growth of professional autonomy and that positions teachers as change agents. The improvement activities are externally imposed (i.e. they are provided mainly by researchers and not driven by teachers) to improve student achievement and ultimately equalise performance gaps. As such, CPD under the CBS initiative seems to be rather ‘transmissive’ and embedded within a managerial professionalism aligned with the global ‘meta-narrative, which focuses on CPD as a means of enhancing teacher quality to improve pupil attainment, and ultimately, to increase nation states’ economic competitiveness’ (Kennedy 2014, p. 694). However, an important point to stress is that SNAE’s (2022b) evaluation of CBS shows that implementation varies between different LEAs and schools.

Studying SNAE and CBS: meta-governance theory

We used meta-governance theory (Jessop 1997, Klijn and Koppenjan 2000, Kooiman and Jentoft 2009, Sørensen and Torfing 2009, Gjaltema et al. 2020, Hooge et al. 2021) as an analytical framework for examining SNAE’s role in sanctioning private-sector services as part of CBS provision, identifying the agency’s governance strategies, and exploring the state’s role in a networked society (Gjaltema et al. 2020, Hooge et al. 2021). Ek Österberg and Qvist (2022, p. 1) claimed that this role has become increasingly challenging, as the public sector is ‘characterized by dispersed power, “wicked” problems, uncertainty, and complex interdependencies’. Meta-governance theory attempts to grasp such developments and theorise how governance actors can retain control in a transformed society and economy. It is, in other words, a theory of the ‘governance of governance’ (Jessop 1997) and reflects an attempt to address the ‘from government to governance’ debate by recognising the altered but continuing role of the state (Gjaltema et al. 2020, Hooge et al. 2021, Ek Österberg and Qvist 2022).

Gjaltema et al. (2020, p. 1771) defined meta-governance as ‘a practice by (mainly) public authorities that entails the coordination of one or more governance models by using different instruments, methods, and strategies to overcome governance failures’. Network governance is the most common meta-governance model (Gjaltema et al. 2020, Hooge et al. 2021, Ek Österberg and Qvist 2022). It follows from one or more meta-governors steering one or more governance networks that comprise actors from different domains in a particular realm (Gjaltema et al. 2020). The literature has mainly identified central governments as meta-governors (Hooge et al. 2021), but studies have also revealed meta-governors at the international, national, regional, and local levels (Gjaltema et al. 2020). In this article, we identify SNAE as an intermediary meta-governor that directs state programmes for teachers’ CPD, mainly through network governance.

Meta-governors can adopt a wide range of strategies to steer governance networks (Klijn and Koppenjan 2000, Sørensen and Torfing 2009, Gjaltema et al. 2020, Hooge et al. 2021). Based on the work of Kickert et al. (1997), Sørensen and Torfing (2009), and Hooge et al. (2021), who presented classifications of governance strategies, we aimed to investigate how SNAE operates as a meta-governor on behalf of the state in relation to three types of strategies: 1) network design strategies – focusing on the composition of the network, including the establishment of new actors and the rearrangement of actors’ positions; 2) network participation strategies – aimed at participation in the governance network, including interactions and relationships with actors to gain and build trust, as well as to facilitate sustained partnerships; and 3) network framing strategies – focusing on the construction of objectives and outcomes to be pursued, including the discursive ‘storytelling’ that defines the joint mission of the concerned actors. Since this article considers the endorsement of privatisation, we primarily use the above classification to identify and describe the repertoire of strategies that SNAE applies to private actors. Other actors potentially involved in CBS provision therefore fall outside the scope of this article.

Data and analysis

For the analysis presented in this article, we drew on data collected from several sources between November 2020 and February 2023 regarding SNAE’s formally designated tasks (collected from agency and government websites) and the CBS provision that SNAE has actually facilitated according to final CBS reports, school-principal interviews, and company descriptions of CBS-related services. We aimed to conduct empirically based analyses of the agency’s governance strategies based on the following:

1. Descriptions of the CBS initiative developed by and for SNAE that were available as web pages and in PDF documents and PowerPoint files on the agency’s official CBS website and the government’s website, including the formal government assignment and SNAE’s implementation plan and evaluation of CBS.

2. Final CBS reports produced for SNAE by all 20 participating municipalities that completed implementation in 2018 and 2019.

3. Descriptions of delivered CBS services, as well as other services for SNAE, provided by the identified businesses and made available on company webpages and social media.

4. Interviews with four school principals who headed schools that participated in the CBS initiative in 2018 and 2019.

We obtained the final CBS reports via an email request to SNAE’s registration service. We restricted the selection of reports to municipalities that completed CBS implementation in 2018–2019 to obtain manageable and representative material. In total, 20 final CBS reports were sent as PDF email attachments to one of the authors. We conducted an initial screening of the reports to identify private services in line with the aim of the study, excluding 11 reports that did not provide a detailed account of the development work and/or for which we were unable to identify the providers. The initial screening was followed by in-depth reading and closer analysis of the 9 included reports, focusing on SNAE’s strategies for endorsing private-sector services as part of CBS provision, which resulted in 11 businesses being identified. We conducted internet searches on each of their websites and investigated their respective activities on social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, to identify descriptions of CBS-related services, as well as the businesses’ interactions and engagement with SNAE. Because some of the businesses highlighted their involvement in other SNAE work, we also searched SNAE’s website to further investigate these activities. Data from the internet searches enabled us to map all identified relationships between SNAE and the private actors in the governance network.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with four school principals selected according to municipal CPD invoices referred to in a previous study (Levinsson et al. 2022), which revealed that some schools purchased private CPD services as part of CBS provision for over SEK 210,000 (approximately 20,000 euros). The dialogues focused on practical CBS implementation in the schools, how providers were selected, and the role of SNAE in these processes. The interviews supplemented the information provided by the other sources and provided insight into school principals’ reasons for engaging private-sector providers. However, the timeframe of the data obtained from the interviews, as well as from the final CBS reports, constitutes a potential limitation of the study. This is because the CBS initiative was still running at the time of this article’s writing. Hence, the identified tendencies towards national-authority-endorsed privatisation might have changed over the last couple of years.

Following Hooge et al. (2021), we broke down each governance strategy into components to guide the analysis of the characteristics of CBS implementation according to the aim of the study (see Table 1). We developed three themes that reflected the key elements of each governance strategy: hidden and authorised substitution, trust building and hybrid participation, and collective reproduction and solutionism. These themes structure the presentation of the results herein.

Table 1. Analytical framework.

Meta-governance strategy	Focus area	Main data source
Network design strategies	Establish private actors Shift positions of actors	Interviews Final CBS reports
Network participation strategies	Interactions and relations with private actors to gain and build trust Activities within governance network	Company websites and social media SNAE-descriptions of CBS, as well as other SNAE-directed work
Network framing strategies	Influence actors’ perception and sensemaking of CBS: content urgency purpose objective	SNAE-descriptions of CBS Company websites and social media

Hidden and authorised substitution

SNAE’s (2016a, p. 23) CBS implementation plan, produced for the government in the initial phase of the initiative, stated the possibility of ‘hiring consultants’ (italics added by the authors) to support LEAs’ and schools’ through tailored improvement activities. However, for some reason, this possibility is not suggested on SNAE’s (2023) official CBS website, which instead emphasises collaboration with universities and researchers as key to school improvement:

Based on identified needs, [SNAE] and researchers collaborate in the provision of improvement support for school development. The improvement support is designed on a scientific basis and proven experience … Researchers contribute with a scientific perspective and implement the improvement support according to agreements.

The importance of collaboration with universities and researchers was further emphasised in the success stories posted on the CBS website, illustrating positive outcomes for schools that had completed the initiative, as well as in SNAE’s partial assignment reports (SNAE 2016b, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022a) and the CBS evaluation report (SNAE 2022b), which revealed no evidence of private-sector involvement. But our interviews with school principals showed that some participating schools purchased services from education companies as part of CBS implementation, and, moreover, that SNAE agents played a leading role in sanctioning these services through a network design strategy reflecting what Ball (2010, p. 4) called ‘substitution’:

I said to [the SNAE representatives], ‘We need to start now’, because our application had been approved and we already had the money. However, no university was available. Then they said, ‘Well, then we have Public Partner, and we have Castell Consulting – contact them and request a quote!’ Normally, I would have asked the manager at the education administration, and the answer would have been ‘no’. But in this case, with [SNAE], there was money. I had freedom!

(School Principal A)

Another school principal had a similar experience of SNAE-endorsed substitution:

Actually, we wanted an activity provided by the National Centre for Second Language, but at the time, they were overloaded. However, I was stubborn. I knew which model I wanted, and which would best suit my teachers. Then, the representatives from [SNAE] said, ‘There is a consultant that can offer exactly the same services as the National Centre for Second Language. Castell Consulting is one of them’.

(School Principal B)

Our internet searches on company webpages and social media revealed that Public Partner and Castell Consulting offered CBS-related services for municipalities and schools other than the ones represented in our interview data. According to Castell Consulting’s (2022b) Facebook site, the company has been engaged in CBS implementation and other SNAE-directed programmes in approximately 70 of the 290 Swedish municipalities.

Our examination of final CBS reports, produced for SNAE by all 20 municipalities that completed implementation in 2018–2019, revealed a similar pattern of SNAE-initiated replacement of actors, involving the following businesses: Edfelt Consulting (Swedish: Edfelt Consulting AB), The School Coaches (Skolcoacherna Sweden AB), Teacher Competence Development (Lärarfortbildning AB), Teamconcept (Teamkoncept AB), Systematic School Development (Systematisk Skolutveckling AB), Me University (Me University Utveckling AB), The School Developers (Skolutvecklarna Sverige AB), Well-being Leaders (Trivselledare i Sverige AB), and The Company’s Company (BolagsBolaget Sverige AB). For example, SNAE agents invited The School Coaches to conduct coaching education as a replacement for a similar activity that one of the school principals was disappointed with. A self-employed consultant for The Company’s Company was engaged to provide an alternative to a university-led seminar on systematic quality work and assessment:

Mid-Sweden University offered two out of the three seminars planned for all personnel in the compulsory school. The second seminar was not believed to align with the analysis and action plan for the development work. Therefore, [SNAE] decided, in consultation with the school management [in the municipality], that Mid-Sweden University should not deliver the third seminar. Instead, [a consultant] delivered a seminar/lecture for all personnel in the compulsory school.

(Final CBS report)

However, the final CBS reports did not always provide detailed accounts of SNAE’s role in the replacement processes, and our interviews suggested that SNAE allowed the participants in the governance network to take the lead. For example, one school principal claimed that even though formal SNAE authorisation was required in each case, they were granted ‘control over the budget and had the freedom to involve external providers based on their own preferences’ (School Principal C). SNAE’s (2016a, p. 36) implementation plan suggested the possibility of such arrangements: ‘[SNAE] coordinates and finances development work in different ways’, including ‘activities organised by the school’. Moreover, our interview data suggested that even researchers tied to CBS via their university’s agreement with SNAE initiated substitution processes:

- Have universities also helped you find external providers? (Author 1)

- Yes, for example, when we had supervision led by representatives from the university, one of them said, ‘I know someone who is connected to the same network’. We would never have found that person by ourselves! (School Principal D)

- Was that a private company? (Author 1)

- Yes. They invoiced us directly, but if [SNAE] had already contracted them, [SNAE] would have paid. (School Principal D)

The above excerpts indicate the intervention of a meta-governor that delegated the decision-making regarding the replacement of actors to the participants in the governance network. The substitution of private for public CPD suppliers was performed not only by SNAE agents but also by school principals and researchers, sometimes in collaboration. This network design strategy involved hidden processes (Ball and Youdell 2008) – privatisation by stealth – camouflaged by language through which SNAE emphasised a research-based approach and collaboration with universities and researchers as key to school improvement.

Trust building and hybrid participation

Our analysis of company webpages and activities on social media, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, revealed SNAE’s history of using the aforementioned businesses to provide different kinds of SNAE-related services, including but not restricted to state programmes for teachers’ CPD (see Figure 1):

Figure 1. Overview of the services provided by the businesses.

The School Coaches (2022) provided coaching education for the participating schools under two state programmes:

The School Coaches were responsible for the coaching education within the [SNAE] Supervision for Learning initiative … You can read more in the [SNAE] report ‘Assignment to support compulsory schools in areas of social exclusion’ … Right now, we are conducting coaching education for … the New Arrivals’ Learning initiative, for which [SNAE] offers activities and support to improve the quality of selected schools.

Systematic School Development (2023) participated in SNAE’s efforts to systematically improve schools’ quality work: ‘Under the guidance of SNAE, twelve municipalities engaged in developing the LEA’s quality work. As part of this, Systematic School Development arranged a seminar in April 2015 on the LEA’s responsibility and the municipal steering chain’. The School Developers (2022) produced educational materials for a module related to the Special Education for Learning initiative: ‘During the summer, SNAE introduced the Special Education for Learning initiative for upper secondary school and adult education. I am happy to have contributed to the Strategies for Teaching and Learning module’.

On behalf of SNAE, the businesses acted as CPD suppliers, advisors, experts, and authors of reports and educational materials (see Figure 1). Hence, the CBS governance network not only has a history of mediating and delivering policy but also of producing policy – a privatisation trend that Ball (2009, p. 84) theorised as the ‘colonisation of the infrastructures of policy’.

The many relationships and responsibilities shared between SNAE and private businesses have emerged over time and reflect a sustained partnership that builds on and generates trust. SNAE has repeatedly granted businesses access to state programmes for teachers’ CPD, as well as other SNAE-related work, creating opportunities for the companies to realise and develop their business ideas. In exchange, SNAE has obtained a network of ‘reliable partners’ (Ellis et al. 2021, p. 618) that can deliver services for the agency’s many government assignments. Moreover, as reflected in the preceding excerpts, the businesses use their SNAE-related services for self-presentation and marketing activities on company websites and social media, enabling them to appear trustworthy relative to other participants in the governance network. Consequently, private actors have emerged as natural and perhaps unavoidable partners for LEAs and schools participating in the CBS initiative.

Our investigation of company websites and activities on social media also revealed a movement of personnel between some of the concerned businesses and SNAE. For example, a consultant at Public Partner, who offered CBS-related services in 2018–2019, was later employed as a teaching advisor at SNAE, but movements also occurred in the opposite direction. The owner of Castell Consulting was, prior to the company’s involvement in CBS, hired as an expert on the New Arrivals’ Learning initiative, and personnel at Systematic School Development (2023) were previously employed as teaching advisors and experts at SNAE: ‘Systematic School Development has deep, experience-based competence in municipal governance. This is based on the employees’ longstanding experience as teaching advisors and experts at [SNAE]’. This means that former SNAE agents, who now run their own companies, are part of the governance network involved in CBS provision.

This tendency reflects Bernstein’s (1990, p. 157) notion of ‘hybrid agents’ – agents operating within and across the fields of symbolic control and cultural production (Singh 2015) – and, consequently, we suggest a form of hybrid participation, enacted informally by individuals in the governance network. Moreover, our investigation revealed social and personal relationships between SNAE and the businesses run by former SNAE employees. SNAE agents and personnel at the concerned businesses followed each other on social media and occasionally liked each other’s posts, not least the ones concerning SNAE-related work.

Collective reproduction and solutionism

Our analysis of SNAE’s communication of CBS content showed that the agency repeatedly framed the initiative as a joint mission. The overall message on the CBS website is that ‘increased student results and equality’ require collective efforts by SNAE process leaders, researchers, LEA officers, school principals, and teachers, aligned with their respective accountabilities as prescribed by the agency (SNAE 2023). This is communicated by SNAE through a mantra of ‘collaboration’ and ‘support’, with the terms appearing 64 and 32 times, respectively, on the CBS website (linked pages excluded). However, as Kronqvist Håård (2021) noted, SNAE only vaguely defines ‘collaboration’, and the agency’s description of the collaboration process reflects a tension between a ‘bottom-up’ approach, which gives LEAs and schools a leading role in identifying development areas and improvements, and a ‘top-down’ approach, which constructs LEAs and schools as recipients of ready-made improvements developed for other state programmes. The latter was prominent in SNAE’s (2016a, p. 5) implementation plan, which emphasised the ‘added value’ of coordinating CBS with a number of different state programmes, such as the ones addressed in the previous section (see Figure 1).

The urgency of the policy is reflected in the overall CBS aim, for which SNAE (2023) defined the target group as ‘schools that have low knowledge results, and that are considered to have difficult conditions for improving students’ results on their own’. Phrases such as ‘low knowledge results’ and ‘difficult conditions’ underscore the importance of the CBS initiative, together with statements that construct the designated LEAs and schools as unable to improve students’ results on their own.

The fact that LEAs and schools are perceived as needing considerable support to enhance development has also been reflected in SNAE’s communication of the initiative’s purpose. Over a period of approximately three years, the agency offered LEA officers, school principals, and teachers support to develop their knowledge and procedures in ‘systematic quality work’: ‘The model for the current situation analysis that we use also represents a systematic approach to quality work. The aim is for the analysis work, by extension, to increase the results and equality’ (SNAE 2023). SNAE constructs systematic quality work as key to long-term, successful improvement, and LEAs and schools are encouraged to continue ‘planning, following-up, and developing education’ in line with the offered model after completing CBS implementation. This was further emphasised in SNAE’s (2016a, p. 16) implementation plan, which positioned such systematic quality work as a foundation for LEAs’ and schools’ ‘self-renewal capability’.

SNAE (2016a, 2023) frames the CBS objective by setting targets for a narrow range of potential improvement activities, following from systematic quality work, that aim to strengthen ‘the school principals’ educational leadership, and to develop the teachers’ ability to develop the quality of teaching with a focus on students’ knowledge results’ (2016a, p. 1).

Our analysis of company webpages and activities on social media showed that SNAE influences the perceptions and sense-making of governance network actors in several ways. The businesses repeat SNAE’s buzzwords ‘collaboration’ and ‘support’ in relation to the CBS services they offer, and they also tend to stress the urgency of the initiative:

Low and varying school results are seen as a major problem in municipalities and schools. Our experience is that a focus on the results (e.g. what has already happened) is not the solution. Instead, it is a focus on the factors in the process that cause the low results that will improve the results.

(Systematic School Development 2023)

The businesses also participate in discursive storytelling regarding the importance of improved systematic quality work and leadership, claiming that LEAs and schools need considerable support to make changes along these lines. For example, Me University (2023) provides a programme for ‘proactive and reactive quality work’ that it claims has a ‘direct impact in the classroom’:

The content of this programme has emerged over a long time and is being implemented in hundreds of schools. The principles have, among other things, been used in the CBS initiative with a clear development in results, as well as improved management and steering.

Castell Consulting (2022a) offers support that includes ‘systematic quality work’, ‘leading for change’, and ‘organising development work’, and Systematic School Development (2023) states that LEAs have ‘complicated follow-up systems’ and that the company provides services that can improve LEA managers’ ability to:

Lead processes regarding systematic quality work in theory and practice so that school principals are able to carry out the task of systematically and continuously planning, following up, and developing education based on their responsibility as educational leaders, and the national goals can be achieved by every child and student.

SNAE’s framing of the benefits of combining CBS with other programmes and narrow objectives calls for improvements that target the quality of teaching more directly, as reflected in the services provided by the businesses. ‘Coaching’ (The School Coaches), ‘formative assessment’ (The Company’s Company), ‘language and knowledge development approaches’ and ‘second-language learning’ (Castell Consulting), ‘leadership in the classroom’ (Public Partner, Teacher Competence Development, The School Coaches), ‘break activities’ and ‘classroom management’ (Well-being Leaders), a ‘low arousal approach’ (Edfeldt Consulting), ‘brain brakes’, and ‘pulse training’ (Teamconcept) represent rather narrowly focused interventions, which have been reproduced within SNAE’s many government assignments to improve students’ ‘goal attainment’ and ‘results’.

Our analyses revealed that the private actors in the governance network not only participated in, but also took advantage of, this discursive storytelling. The businesses use, as Ball (2009, p. 85) noted, ‘the challenges of specific bits of policy’ as retailing solutions and improvements specifically tailored for CBS. However, the ensuing result is that they collaboratively reproduce the dominant discourses about the nature of problems, and, subsequently, what count as appropriate solutions. This means that SNAE and the businesses mainly address performance gaps and inequalities through rather simplistic but, perhaps, attractive solutions primarily targeting the organisational aspects of LEA officers’, school principals’, and teachers’ work. This is a tendency that Ideland et al. (2020, p. 13) conceptualised as ‘solutionism’. Hence, as Kronqvist Håård (2021) stressed, the framing of CBS seems to marginalise interventions that address structural injustices and neglect drivers of inequality that involve political, economic, and ideological factors at a system level.

Discussion

The present article has shown that during the period of our study, SNAE operated as an intermediary meta-governor on behalf of the state to endorse the involvement of specific private-sector actors in a large-scale national intervention based on a set of network governance strategies: 1) hidden and authorised substitution, 2) trust building and hybrid participation, and 3) collective reproduction and solutionism. These strategies operated in different but related ways to enable university researchers to be replaced by private CPD suppliers under SNAE’s CBS coordination. In practice, as discussed in Hooge et al. (2021), network governance strategies may feed into and mutually support each other with respect to a particular goal. For example, SNAE’s framing of the ‘added value’ of reusing improvements from other state programmes thus paved the way for the agency to engage the same businesses that facilitated those improvements for the CBS initiative. However, the fact that SNAE has established a network of reliable partners in recent years by repeatedly granting certain businesses access to public funding may have prompted the promotion of the benefits of combining CBS with other programmes. Our point here is not to make claims about causality but to stress that the identified governance strategies are interrelated in complex ways, and by revealing governance in action, we add to the existing literature on state-encouraged privatisation of teachers’ CPD (Burch 2006, Ball 2009, Ellis et al. 2021, Mockler 2022).

Our investigation also provides insights into the potential contribution of the concept of meta-governance to grasp current developments within teachers’ CPD (Jessop 1997, Klijn and Koppenjan 2000, Gjaltema et al. 2020, Hooge et al. 2021, Ek Österberg and Qvist 2022). We chose this framework because, in decentralised education systems where national authorities exert control at arms-length, the government can still control tasks by deciding what to delegate, to whom, under which circumstances, and in relation to what kind of ideology. This is how neoliberal governance shapes education reform in general. In the case of teachers’ CPD in Sweden, there is a pretence of reform as a means to improve bureaucratic and administrative efficiency by apparently downsizing the state while simultaneously intensifying control and legitimating and sanctioning the use of private-sector services (Ball 2009, Ellis et al. 2021). Meta-governance is a technology of power and control (Gjaltema et al. 2020) that furthers the interests of capital by extending private ownership of the means of production (Jessop 1997, Beach 2010), as the present article has revealed. Future research could benefit from further exploration of the use of meta-governance theory in relation to recent developments in the governance of teachers’ CPD. For example, this could include, as our study indicates, research into the role that universities and researchers seem to play in the current endorsement of privatisation.

Our investigation suggests that SNAE primarily operates as a conduit for private economic interests. However, it is also clear that the agency does this in relation to CBS implementation without any empirical support or external references (Kronqvist Håård 2021). SNAE appears to promote interventions based on ideology, rather than on rational decision-making regarding the interests of the teaching profession or the needs of teachers, to support its goal of providing all young people in school with the necessary foundations for a just, democratic, fair, and equal education (Beach 2022). Public income is being converted into private capital by stealth within a state programme that expressly aims to increase equality and thus aspires to protect democratic values. However, there is no evidence from our study that such values were considered in decision-making about improvement activities and the replacement of public by private providers. SNAE agents, university researchers, and school principals appear to have fully bought into CBS logic and rhetoric – which reduces educational equality to an equalisation of performance gaps – and they seem to have adopted the ideology of neoliberal reform in relation to privatisation and a competitive market for CPD provision. In Rizvi and Lingard’s (2010) terms, CPD under the CBS initiative seems to have embraced the social imaginary of the government’s interpretation and development of global neoliberal reform (Ball and Olmedo 2013).

The CBS improvement activities offered to teachers provide further evidence of a lack of genuine interest in furthering teachers’ professionalism. ‘Systematic quality work’, ‘coaching’, ‘formative assessment’, ‘language and knowledge development approaches’, ‘second-language learning’, ‘leadership in the classroom’, ‘break activities’, ‘classroom management’, a ‘low arousal approach’, ‘brain brakes’ and ‘pulse training’ represent narrowly focused interventions that seem to be embedded within a discourse of solutionism collaboratively reproduced by SNAE and the business (Ideland et al. 2020). This type of discourse poses simplified problems for which CPD offers apparently simple solutions while neglecting genuine complex problems, such as the increasing school segregation and structural injustices in the Swedish education system (Kronqvist Håård 2021). What is needed from this perspective is critical and theoretically informed professional knowledge. Apple (2001) and Levinsson et al. (2020) have argued that such university-based professional ‘know-why’ is crucial for supporting teachers’ ability to grasp and counter the neoliberal restructuring that is occurring in Sweden’s schools and that has, in fact, fuelled the developments that CBS claims to address.

Based on the preceding analytical observations, our investigation suggests that SNAE, on behalf of the government, has tried, and will probably continue to try, to solve problems caused by privatisation through further privatisation. This tendency has emerged despite the fact that National School Commission reports (SOU 2016, 2017) and the OECD (2015) report, which prompted the government to launch the CBS initiative in the first place, identified a value-extraction problem in the transfer of public sector responsibilities to the private sector that could result in unregulated private profiteering. The reports related this problem to the decline in students’ performance and significantly increased performance differentials between top- and bottom-percentile schools on the one hand and between top- and bottom-percentile individual test-takers on the other (SOU 2017). Ball and Olmedo’s (2013) notion of deceptive government reforms is relevant here, prompting the following question: Will state programmes like the CBS initiative and similar programmes support teachers’ CPD and result in sustained improvements in teaching and learning in Swedish schools? If we follow the CBS money trail and consider the kind of transmissive CPD provided by the businesses on behalf of SNAE (cf. Kennedy 2014), improving teachers’ democratic professionalism and teaching quality seems to be more of a pretence by the government, alleging the value of involving multiple providers as a practical way to address increasingly complex problems in schools and society. The answer to this question, we argue, is obvious.

Conclusion

Our analysis of SNAE’s governance strategies suggests that a neoliberal capitalist ideology takes precedence over any genuine interest in teachers’ professional learning and development, and that private economic growth takes precedence over democratic values. The development of CPD meta-governance is profoundly political in every sense, according to our analysis, but there is no inevitability regarding the developments we have described. Our investigation suggests a need to design new collaborative implementation strategies that operate in the interests of teachers for professional learning towards development of a profession for itself rather than an occupational category in itself, dominated by a national agency that furthers government interests and ideology. Things could have been imagined and done differently, and the opportunity to reimagine them still exists.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [under grant number 2019-03828].