Changes in Swedish educational policy during the past twenty years have been in the direction of increased local autonomy. In addition, during this period a start has been made on applying a very generous policy towards independent schools. Until the beginning of the 1990s, private or independent schools were very rare in Sweden. These changes would seem to imply a shift from position 2 towards position 4 in the model.
The changes are certainly linked with the international neo-liberal trend and the awareness of the market that have been visible in international educational development in recent years (cf. Gök’s Appendix 1, this volume). The centralistic school policy became expensive to administer, and increased local control, it was assumed, would lead to more effective school economies, greater variation, greater freedom of choice and thus better quality (Ball 1987, Miron 1993, Englund 1994, Gewirtz et al. 1995).
New trends in Swedish educational policy created new conditions for teachers’ career development. Since the middle of the 19th century two competing teacher groups – grammar-school teachers, adjunkter and lektorer versus elementary-school teachers småskollärare and folkskollärare – have seen their professional status successively enhanced with the help of the state bureaucratic apparatus and through laws and regulations. This is how the teacher groups' professional claims vis-à-vis parents and the clergy were asserted once upon a time.
After the economic turn in school administration in the 1990s, the state was announcing that much of the work of the school was to be governed on the basis of the teacher groups’ own professionalism and with cooperation between local educational authorities and the teaching body. This was no longer the job of the state and the Parliament.