"Skolan är inte anpassad till barn som inte följer strömmen" : Barns och föräldrars delaktighet i upprättandet och uppföljningen av åtgärdsprogram.

Sammanfattning: As soon as the school realise that a student has special needs, they must make an Individual educational plan (IEP). When the IEP is made both child and parents should participate according to Swedish educational law and United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This participation should, among other things, include the opportunity for the child to describe its own needs, plausible interventions and evaluate the support it has been given.    The purpose of this study has been to investigate more closely the perceived feeling of parents that they and their children were made involved in the creation of the IEP.  As a theoretical basis and starting point for analysis, Shier's and Hart's participation models have been used, supplemented with Lundy's participation model. Concepts from Foucault's theory of power and Bourdieu's theories of capital have been used as a complement. The design of the study was a qualitative interview study with a phenomenological focus where the focus was on the informants' own experience. Based on this, a thematic analysis was carried out. The themes that emerged were an experience of communication but not of participation, that the IEP is seen as a document that does not reflect reality, that the children´s participation is extremely deficient and that the parents are used as mouthpieces for the child. In the majority of the interviews, it emerged that the child was not asked at all about its opinion regarding its needs and the interventions it was offered.  This study was limited to the parents´ experience of their and their children´s participation in the establishment and evaluation of the IEP. Future studies could explore other perspectives on the phenomenon, such as the school´s or the child´s own perspective. However, after seeing how the results of the study reflect the shortcomings demonstrated by several years of studies in the field, future research should instead focus on how the school can practically increase participation and create a culture that values children´s participation highly and sets this as a priority.