When competition and an increasing level of marketisation characterises school life, the number of evaluations and the level of control has grown out of proportion. Through comparisons, assessments and ranking systems, also called ‘the terrors of performativity’ according to Ball (2003) commercial agents have gained influence over practices of assessment and documentation within the education system. Increased demands on pupils’ and parents’ participation and a belief that written documentation will lead to better results has caused an extensive use of different web based tools like Unikum. With the point of departure in a collected material of more than a hundred Individual Educations Plans (IEP) where commercial web based tools have been used, we make an analysis with Basil Bernstein’s (1996, 2000) concepts Pedagogic Identity, and Instructional and Regulative discourse in relation to expectations and constructions manifest in the plans. The results show that all four identities are expressed in the plans however, with an emphasis on a neo-liberal identity. We discuss the results in relation to the instructional and regulative discourses. The conclusion is that the tools both shape and determine possible identities and possible discourses in the web based interaction between children, parents and teachers.

During the period of 1994-2011 all programmes in Swedish upper secondary school comprised a set of core subjects with the aim to entail equity on the policy level. However, a division between programmes still prevailed on the school level, particularly in the core subject L1 Swedish. The main purpose of this study has been to explore how the teaching of writing in two academic and two vocational programmes differs, which writing repertoires are developed and how writing is assessed. The study is part of a long-term ethnography of writing in upper secondary school (Andersson Varga, 2014). The data produced during the two-year field study contain field notes from writing lessons, lesson observations and talks with four teachers, as well as recorded and transcribed, semi-structured teacher and student interviews, instructions on writing tasks, student texts and teachers’ responses to student texts. This article focus-ses on the preparation for the National Test, the afforded assignments, the realisations of the student texts and the assessment. The teachers in the four programmes handle the national syllabus in relation to the students, resulting in four different curricula in the classroom. Thus, issues of inequity, disparities in curricula as well as different expectations on students, depending on programme, became obvious. To understand the processes of social reproduction, we use Bernstein’s sociology of education (1996, 2000) and the concept of the pedagogic device and pedagogic identity. However, we also show one example of interruption (Singh, 2013) in one of the four classrooms. Thus, the main results demonstrate how one particular teacher brings about change to a group of working class girls. © 2015 International Association for the Improvement of Mother tongue Education.

The documentation of pupils in Swedish schools is extensive and  a documentation culture has come to characterize the schools in recent years. In the context of decentralization and changing governance, focus has increasingly been directed towards assessment, follow-up and evaluation of pupils’ learning and social development. This article examines the Individual Educational Plans (hereafter IEP) used for pupils with special educational needs in Swedish compulsory schools from the perspective of text analyses based on discourse theory. The aim of this study is to shed light on how pupils are constructed in the school’s documentation. The study examines how these IEPs are used as a pedagogical technique for new ways of governing in order to impose self-regulation, individual responsibility and social control.The documents, which comprise the empirical material in this article, are gathered from 14 different schools and consist of documents for a total of 136 pupils with special educational needs

Few studies have been carried out on children’s literature from a post-colonial perspective. In this article, we look closer at four picture books recently published in Sweden with the purpose of giving children from urban areas patterns of identification. The aim of our study is to see how the ‘suburb’ is articulated as a multi-accented sign. Three themes are elaborated in our analysis, i.e. loneliness and alienation, drug abuse and misery as well as small business occurrence. We also discuss the consequences for children in early years of an encounter with a distorted or alienated view of suburban culture.

Our aim in this paper is to analyse the impact of the standardised test on classroom practices in grade 5 in a compulsory school in western Sweden. In our analysis, the use of the concept of pedagogic device provides a framework for understanding hos high-stakes, standardised testing regulates classroom discourse and teachers' and students' classroom behaviours. The study was conducted during 2006-2007 as part of a larger ethnographic inquiry. The results reveal how the demands of the test impact upon the daily work in the classroom. In the neo-liberal apporach to governance, stnadardised tests have become an important measure of quality. School practices run the risk of being viewed as valuable, only relative to the performance of teachers and students at the individueal level. This view shifts the focus from a discussion about a societal responsibility to ensure that all children have equitable access to education, to a debate centred on the individualäs responsibility to perform. The analysis reveals that the test was not carried out as intended. However, both teacher and the students respond to the test situation and the results as if it had been and as if the test really mattered.