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Different transitions are built into all school systems, either between or within school forms. These transitions entail different changes and challenges for both students and teachers. This ongoing doctoral project aims to contribute with knowledge on how the transition between stages within compulsory school is constructed in policy, and by teachers, in a school system where compulsory school is cohesive. Although the Swedish compulsory school consist of only one school form, it bears traces from the pre-1960’s divide between primary and secondary schools, as well as several following school reforms. For a long time, these reforms aimed to tighten the cultural gap between primary and secondary school, resulting in a compulsory school without stage divisions in 1994. This lasted until the 2010’s when stage divisions were reinstated as a way of making each stage more specialised. Those traces imply that the cohesive compulsory school in Sweden can be organised in a variety of ways, with the consequence that transitions between stages can encompass many different aspects and practices. In many cases those practices are similar to transitions between school forms. The object of study in this project is the transition between stages equivalent to the transition between primary and secondary school (from year 6 to 7).

In an international, and European, context there is a large variety of aspects on transitions between primary and secondary school that have been researched – academic (e.g. Prendergast et.al. 2019), social (e.g. van Rens et.al. 2018) and comparative/organisational (e.g. Nielsen et.al. 2017). Research on transitions within compulsory school in a Nordic context, similar to the Swedish, is scarce but there are some studies about the student perspective (e.g.Virtanen et.al., 2019). In the Swedish context research mainly concern transitions between school forms: from preschool to compulsory school (e.g. Ackesjö, 2014; Kallberg, 2018) and from compulsory school to upper secondary school (e.g Sundelin and Lundahl, 2022). Most of the research on transitions shares some relation to the concept of continuity, sometimes differentiated between various types e.g. social or pedagogical. Continuity is mostly assumed to be desirable but lacking, affecting students’ well-being as well as their learning results. Criticism against the focus on transition in research include that this focus may exaggerate the problems with transitions (Bru et.al., 2010) or that this focus places blame on the transitions when there might be other structural problems that cause difficulties associated with transitions (Downes, 2019).

Focus in this paper is on policy. By using Bacchi’s (2009) “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach I am investigating how transitions within the Swedish compulsory school are understood in policy. The WPR approach is a poststructural tool for policy analysis that departs from the statement that governing takes place through problematisations and that these problematisations needs to be scrutinized. The “problem” refers to the thing that needs to change through the studied policy and these representations are thought to be constructed within the policy process, not problems existing “in the real”. Representations are part of discourses but do also impact discourses. The impact of the representations also may concern how those governed view themselves and others as well as possibly having material influence. Research questions for this part of the project are:

• What is included and excluded in the discourse on transitions in Swedish school policy?
• What may be possible effects from this way of problematising transitions?

MethodIn Sweden there are school policies on different levels. The national level contains for example the Education Act (SFS 2010:800), the National Curriculum for the compulsory school (SNAE, 2022) and other texts from the Swedish National Agency for Education. Local level policies could be either municipal or school specific. National policy documents mostly regulate transitions between school forms and never mentions transitions between stages within compulsory school specifically. Therefore, the national policy documents included in this study are those that in some way describes transitions related to compulsory school. In addition, local policy documents have been collected. Given that school organisations in Sweden vary, and that the WPR approach sees policies as cultural products affected by context (Bacchi, 2009), policies are collected from different kinds of municipalities and schools. The municipalities have been randomly selected within three categories – big cities, smaller cities and rural – one from each category. Within these municipalities schools were selected to get a variation of different organisations (year 1-9, year 1-6 and year 7-9) and different socioeconomic areas (measured by percentage of the parents having academic education). The collected local policy documents consist of both more general descriptions as well as different forms used for working with transitions. In total the policy study includes 15 documents, 4 on national level and 9 on local levels. For analysis of the policy documents Bacchi’s (2009) WPR approach will be used. The approach consists of six questions to apply to policies to examine the problematisations (how the problem is understood as a specific kind of problem). This includes investigating underlying assumptions and context that enable this problematisation, and the possible effects of the problematisation – both from what is represented to be the problem and what is left out in this representation. The last question concerns how the problematisation is defended or contested. All six questions will be applied to the policy documents included in the study.

Expected OutcomesTentative results show different problem representations but the dominant one is transfer/submission of information between school forms, or in some cases between schools or within the same school. The problem of transferring information seems twofold – first a problem of organizing how to transfer information between school units and second a problem with transferring the “right” information. What is considered the right information seems to be related to individual student “short-comings” or deviations from the norm, in order for the new school to ease the transitions for these students. The continuity in focus is that of individual support and by that make sure that these students progress in their learning. This problematisation is in line with Swedish school discourse that since the introduction of the cohesive and undifferentiated compulsory school advocated for individualizing the teaching within the class. However, this representation does not include continuity in content or pedagogy in whole classes. The content of each subject, for each stage, is regulated by the national curriculum, but the teachers’ freedom to interpret and prioritize may make pedagogical or content continuity based on only what is said in the curriculum difficult. This aspect of transitions is included in policy aimed at transitions in lower years but not of later transitions, even though it could be argued that it is as important in all transitions. According to WPR (Bacchi, 2009), this large focus on individual students, deviating from the norm, in need of something more, or different, has subjectification effects – meaning it effects how the students are thought of, both by themselves and others, in this case not assumed in a positive way.