In adult education, the issue of quality has become an increasingly important topic throughout recent years. Henning Loeb (2007) argues that the society is changing, and as a consequence many adults need to re-qualify their skills in order to fill the needs of the labour market. Additionally, adult education has been emphasised as self-sufficient for unemployed and newly immigrated citizens. Thus, there is a demand for adult education with systematic good quality, that is flexible and individualised for students with different backgrounds and needs. However, the Municipal Adult Education (MAE) has over the years been criticised for its lack of quality and inefficiency (Bjursell, Chaib, Falkner, & Ludvigsson, 2015) not least in the media, where the topic is debated frequently (Lindgren, 2018; Suhonen, 2016).

One way of ensuring quality in Swedish adult education has been through school inspection carried out by the Swedish School Inspectorate (SSI), by order from the state. Here, the SSI’s role is brought up since the interpret national policy in order to conduct their inspections. Whereas previous studies that has been carried out in the field of school inspection and education did not focus adult education, the need for research that explore the still uncharted field is motivated (Segerholm & Hult, 2018). In this paper, one of the SSI’s quality audits targeting flexibility and individualisation in MAE will be studied, therefore bringing up the research question of how quality is enacted in different settings in Swedish adult education. 

Within the theoretical framework of policy enactment, policy is understood as something that ‘create circumstances in which the range of options available in deciding what to do are narrowed down or changed, or particular goals or outcomes are set’ (Ball, 1994, p. 19), instead of seeing policy as a document that explicitly stipulates what to do. Within policy enactment, policy is closely linked to questions of power and discourses, where policy is described as ‘a certain economy of discourses of truth’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 93). Hence, the difference within this specific framework of enactment is that power is perceived to be executed at all levels, in contrast to a top-down perspective. According to Ball, Maguire, Braun, Hoskins, and Perryman (2012), policy enactment could be studied as a process of interpretation that includes different actors and different contexts, thus dismissing the idea of policy enactment as an event that is tied to a specific moment. 

In order to scrutinise how quality is enacted, this study consists of observations of the SSI’s quality audit and school inspectors’ interviews with school actors from six different municipals since the interviews are a part of the quality audit. In addition to the observed and recorded meetings between school inspectors and school actors, other forms of data such as the SSI’s official decisions and reports regarding the six municipalities are included in the sample. The empirical material has been transcribed and then coded and analysed.

The analysis is focused on identifying three different dimensions of quality (Ball, et al., 2012). The first dimension of quality focuses questions of how adult education is organised since it varies a lot between the municipalities, ranging from organising it by themselves, to outsourcing it through tendering private companies. The second dimension of quality that was identified concerns the implications for the different forms of course design and the impact of either distance teaching or classroom teaching. The third dimension of quality regards enrolment to the MAE, where questions of how often students should be enrolled during the school year in relation to how flexible the organisation is, are emphasised. 

Drawing from the three different dimensions that were identified in the sample, it is argued that the question of quality in adult education often is left out in the conversation between the school inspectors and the school actors as much attention instead is drawn to questions that regard the pre-requisites of the education. The result of the study can provide insights for how quality is enacted in different settings of MAE, and thus have significance for the international discussion of adult education in contemporary time.