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Swedish school-age educare is a comprehensive practice for children in the ages 6 to 12, that is governed by the same curriculum as the compulsory school. The curriculum was revised in 2016 with a new part that focused the practice in school-age educare. This paper aims to explore which issues and areas that have beenthe subject of discussion during the formulation and referral process preceding the introduction of the revised curriculum.

The paper is part of a doctoral project and theoretically inspired by policy enactment (Ball, 2012). A policy textis not simply implemented into practice, but translated from text in to practice in a process related to the history and context of the practice including the resources available. Local actors have to navigate and reinterpret among different policies and other requirements and demands. They are not only implementers of policies, but are actively taking part in the process to put the policy into practice (Ball, 2012).

The data consist of documents created during the formulation process. In this process different interest groups (e.g., municipalities, universities, and school-age educare teachers) were invited to comment on drafts of the curriculum text. The documents comprise 320 pages. A content analysis (Graneheim & Lundman, 2004) resulted in three categories of core content; 'teaching', 'the task of school-age educare' and 'play'.

A preliminary conclusion is that the actors advocated that the curriculum text should use concepts derived from the social pedagogical tradition, where the school-age educare originates, rather than the tradition where the compulsory school derives from.

References:

Ball, S. J. (2012). How schools do policy : policy enactments in secondary schools. London: Routledge. Graneheim, & Lundman. (2004). Qualitative content analysis in nursing research: concepts, procedures andmeasures to achieve trustworthiness. Nurse Education Today, 24(2), 105–112.