I spänningsfältet mellan kontroll och utveckling. En policystudie av systematiskt kvalitetsarbete i kommunen, förskolan och fritidshemmet.

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to explore how Systematic quality development work (Sqdw) is enacted in municipalities, preschools and leisure-time centres. In Sweden Sqdw comes within the statutory obligations of preschools and leisure- time centres and constitutes a significant part of teachers’ work. The thesis explores how local policy-makers, a principal and two teachers enact Sqdw policy and transform it into practice. The thesis consists of two parts. The first is the licentiate thesis Organizing Quality: Assessment Practices in Municipalities and Pre-Schools (Lager, 2010) in which new institutional tools are used to explore how Sqdw is organised by key people in municipalities (Czarniawska, 2005). The second part, which contains the papers Systematic quality development work in a Swedish leisure-time centre (Lager, Sheridan & Gustafsson, 2015), and ‘Learning to play with new friends’: Systematic quality development work in a leisure-time centre (Lager, 2015), explores how, through the use of policy enactment tools, Sqdw is recontextualised in the practice of a leisure-time centre (Ball, Maguire & Braun, 2012). By combining these two approaches both structure and actor are focused on in the analysis of a policy process. In both studies, policy texts, interviews and observations function as data sources and are analysed holistically. Additionally, a metainterpretation (Weed, 2008) of the three included texts has been carried out and constitutes the concluding findings of the thesis in a synthesis. The findings are discussed as recontextualised discourses, norms and traditions in the various actors’ enactment of Sqdw in discursive practices. An educational discourse is recontextualised in the municipalities in focus, highlighting the norms according to routines and models of Sqdw in compulsory schools. When Sqdw is recontextualised in the leisure-time centre a social pedagogical discourse which highlights children’s social and relational learning is reproduced. When quality discourses are combined with the educational discourse, this contributes to the creation of policy technologies and tools that function to unify Sqdw both in municipalities as well as in the leisure-time centre in focus. Policy gaps in the enactment of different discourses create tensions in Sqdw in terms of diverse objectives in the curriculums governing the different school forms. The objectives appear as important in terms of how, in the municipalities, documentation is carried out in a manner that differs from pedagogical practices. Overall, the three main findings of the thesis can be summarised as follows: First, different formulations of objectives are important for the documentation of achievement in Sqdw. Second, different discourses are recontextualised in the Sqdw phases. Third, while in the municipal preschool Sqdw is reproduced in an individual educational tradition, in the leisure-time centre it is reproduced as traditional, social pedagogical content in the form of a new way of working.