During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden’s approach to school governance diverged from other nations by keeping schools open while integrating digital education. This strategy positioned school leaders as key intermediaries, translating national guidelines into operational practices. The study explores, based on two complementary surveys, how institutional frameworks influenced crisis management and digital transformation in Swedish schools.

Swedish school leaders navigated the crisis under strong municipal autonomy, facing limited formal authority but demonstrating high perceived implementation capacity. The pandemic functioned as a stress test for school governance, highlighting the balance between bureaucratic constraints and adaptive leadership in street-level bureaucracy. Our results indicate that school leaders in municipal schools experienced more intensive oversight and accountability compared to independent schools, who however increased their coordination with the local governing bodies.

In comparison to other Nordic countries, the Swedish school leaders experienced that they had more sufficient digital tools to manage the pandemic constraints and higher digital transformation readiness. Digital transformation played a critical role in crisis adaptation, with schools leveraging technology to maintain educational services and inter-municipal collaboration. By exploring the school leaders’ views on their capabilities, conditions and constraints during the digital transformation linked to the pandemic, the article contributes to research on local digital transformation in times of crisis. There is a need for further research on digital transformation and how governance structures shape crisis management on local level in a digital era.