Swedish municipal adult education has many providers. The overall responsibility for this service still lies with the municipalities, entailing the enactment of national policy with respect to providers. This study puts focus on the discursive enactment of policy concerning quality in adult education. Five discourses on quality are identified through interviews with school leaders, teachers, and students, namely that quality is about formal demands and processes, that it is a matter of student focus, that it is about teachers’ competence and working conditions, that it is about teaching, and that quality depends on the student group. School leaders focus on formal and organisational aspects of quality, while teachers and students focus on actual processes in the classroom, connecting to their own work and lives. Compared to national policy, the local discourses are limited mainly to studying, teaching, organisation, and short-term outcomes, while long-term aims in national policy are less prominent.

National policy states that Swedish adult education should be flexible and individualized, based on students’ needs. However, adult education in Sweden is a municipal responsibility with a high level of decentralization. Drawing on national policies, this study focuses on how the concepts of flexibility and individualization are enacted locally and what consequences this has for teaching and learning. Starting from a teacher perspective and based on qualitative interviews with 50 teachers, the article analyses how policy requirements for offering flexible and individualized adult education are being enacted, and what the consequences of this are for teaching and learning. The findings show how flexibility and individualization are put into practice through measures such as a fast study pace, continuous admission of students, and pressure on municipalities to maintain a broad course offer, often by turning to distance education. This enactment makes it easier for adult learners to fit education into their lives, but it also has consequences for the quality of teaching and learning. It is causing fragmentation, a learning environment where interactions mainly occur on an individual basis, an instrumental view of education, and teachers experiencing high workloads and low autonomy in making pedagogical decisions. 

This article presents and discusses findings from a qualitative study of Swedish adult education, with focus on meetings between counsellors and students and how counsellors translate and enact different expectations from policies and ethical guidelines, as well as from adult students. The results show that counsellors have an important role in the marketised and complex system of adult education in Sweden, both to guide people during the encounter with adult education and to guide and support them as students. A policy enactment emerges where counsellors are in conflict between different guidelines and are forced to compromise between the ethical ideal that they, as counsellors should always start from individual needs, and policy requirements concerning e.g. skills supply and labour-market integration.

This article explores how the Swedish policy of municipal adulteducation (MAE) is interpreted, translated, and enacted instudy and career counselling. The data consists of semistructured interviews with adult education leaders and studyand career counsellors. Swedish MAE is characterised by extensive marketisation, with many different providers, whichmakes the education system complex. The findings showthat a study and career counsellor is characterised as a keyperson for both the students and the organisation, with a roleas a marketer and ‘map reader’ for applicants, in addition toresponsibilities in admissions, the validation and mapping ofstudents’ knowledge, and quality work. The counsellorbecomes a hub in a system that applicants and students finddifficult to navigate and fulfils a vital function in the marketingof adult education and quality work. Thus, this complex systemrequires more resources for counselling to function to thebenefit of the individual student. However, there is no clearregulation for how counselling should be organised, whichmeans that counselling is organised in different ways in different municipalities with different providers. This in turn meansthat the availability of adequate counselling may depend onthe municipality in which you live.

Today’s society is characterized by high unemployment, a prevailing trust in and demands for an academic degree, and an emphasis on the individual’s own responsibility for their educational choices. This study aims to examine adults’ vocational education choices, their intentions in connection with municipal adult education (MAE) studies, and how this relates to identity formation. The study is based on 18 interviews and compares students from two vocational MAE training programmes in assistant nursing and floor laying. The analysis has identified different pathways concerning adult students’ decisions to enrol in municipal adult education and a specific vocational education and training (VET) programme. We see educational choices and paths in terms of underlying causes or as forward-looking rationalities. The results show that the process of identity formation is larger than simply one of vocational becoming within a vocational community of practice, since MAE studies involve a student’s whole being, including both their personal identity trajectories and their vocational identity formation. With this article we hope to provide a foundation for a pedagogical discussion about student intentions, focusing on how different subjectivities affect students with regard to their future vocational becoming.

The aim of this study is to describe and analyse how municipal adult education (MAE) in Sweden is enacted at the intersection of course organisation, student selection and course content. For this analysis, the data consist of a nationwide survey sent to Swedish municipalities, interviews with school leaders from 20 municipalities and in-depth interviews with school leaders from six municipalities. The findings show that the supply of MAE courses is clearly governed by policies concerning what municipalities are obliged to offer according to the Education Act, but in many other ways, MAE policies offer a high degree of freedom for interpretation and translation. On a general level, MAE is organised in three different ways: school-based education, apprenticeships and distance education. However, the courses included are enacted in different ways in different municipalities. How the courses are enacted is governed by factors such as using external education companies, resources, the number of students and collaboration with working life. The selection of MAE courses has a clear labour market focus, where employers? needs for labour are set higher than students? wishes and needs. A central aspect of this focus is labour market integration of migrants.

The aim of this article is to discuss how mathematics teaching with a closer connectionto students’ vocational orientation can increase their motivation to learn mathematics.This article uses a motivation theory called self-determination theory to analyse interviews and observations made in two different studies investigating mathematics in vocational education. The results indicate that there are many vocational students who areunmotivated to learn mathematics because they do not see any relevance in the subject.However, there seem to be positive aspects regarding vocational students’ motivation tolearn mathematics when they are given the opportunity to work with vocational-integrated mathematics tasks, especially in a vocationally authentic environment. In relationto self-determination theory, it is possible to see increased motivation linked to a senseof meaningfulness, competence and self-determination, as well as increased social collaboration. However, teachers need to be observant of students’ goals for their studies,so that even those who do not see a future in the vocation they are training for will findmotivating factors for their learning in mathematics.

This article presents an analysis of a team-teaching approach, applied in two learning spaces: a regular mathematics classroom; and a hairdressing salon at an upper secondary vocational education and training (VET) school. A mathematics teacher and a VET teacher jointly developed, planned and carried out the teaching activities in these two learning spaces. The overall goal was to prepare their 15 students for professional life. Observations made from the two lessons were analysed with the aim of identifying the extent to which the outcome of the team-teaching approach is dependent on the choice of the learning space. Drawing on Engestroms activity theory and research literature on learning spaces, our results indicate that tools, norms, division of labour and community differ significantly within the two learning spaces. The environment of the salon appeared to be more effective in promoting discussion, and encouraging self-confidence and identity-making, in comparison with the mathematics classroom, and there was a more visible interaction between mathematics and vocational subjects. This raises questions about the optimal design of the applied team-teaching approach and about whether the mathematics classroom can be considered a suitable learning space for facilitating students learning of workplace mathematics.

Denna rapport handlar om övergången från lärarutbildning till arbete som lärare i skolan. Rapporten bygger på intervjuer med tjugo relativt nyutexaminerade lärare och en enkät som besvarats av 87 skolledare. Resultaten visar att förväntningarna på de nya lärarnas kunskaper och förmåga att klara alla delar av yrket efter utbildningen är hög hos skolledarna. Samtidigt beskriver de nya lärarna att de upplever många utmaningar med läraryrket och att det finns ett behov av en mentor som kan ge stöd under det första året. De flesta nya lärare får en mentor, men i många fall får varken mentorn eller den nya läraren någon tid avsatt för att träffas. Detta kan leda till att de nya lärarna trots att de har en mentor inte får det stöd de har behov av. I svaren från informanterna framkommer både tankar om hur mottagandet av nya lärare skulle kunna bli bättre och hur lärarutbildningen skulle kunna utvecklas för att det ska bli en bättre övergång. Resultaten från dessa svar är grunden till de förslag på implikationer som avslutar rapporten.