Navigating Sweden’s Parental Choice Education System : A Study of Asylum-Seeking Parents

Sammanfattning: As high levels of forced migration continue to challenge Europe, countries like Sweden are attempting to incorporate asylum-seekers into its education system. Over the past 50 years Sweden’s education system has undergone a unique shift from a centralized to a decentralized parental-choice model of schools. An approach called plural education promotes equity through shared experience and support for equity creating initiatives. Proponents of choice argued that plural education was maintained across the decentralizing shift in policy. Yet some evidence has begun to show that these values are not being upheld. Marginalized groups, such as asylum-seekers, appear to face a number of barriers to accessing the entirety of choices. In this qualitative study employing a grounded theory methodology, seven asylum-seeking parents were asked for their experiences entering their children into the Swedish compulsory school system. Semi-structured interviews explored the barriers, information and strategies each parent had for enrolment and school choice. Analysis found that parents had insufficient information for school choice, few strategies to find new information and faced a number of barriers. The implication of these findings are that these asylum-seekers did not have the support or knowledge to successfully participate in school choice and that education in Sweden may have weakened in its ability to promote equity for these respondents.