Policy for Integration - The contextual influence on the actors' role in integrating newly arrived children and youth into elementary school

Sammanfattning: In 2016, a national policy package consisting of six support measures was legislated and clarified in the Swedish school law. The six support measures aim to create clarity and guidance for teachers, principals and other relevant actors to integrate newly arrived children and youth and ensure they achieve the national curriculum requirements. Recent reports state that the gap between native and foreign-born students continues to grow and that segregation increase in Sweden. Foreign-born students fall behind in terms of study results and make up the majority of those who are not eligible for high school. This research focuses on those relevant actors whose primary responsibility is to enforce the policy package 2016 into practice. The research aims to explore and understand how these relevant actors experience, understand and enforce the policy package 2016 in practice through the lens of critical policy analysis and four contextual dimensions. This research undertakes a qualitative study with interviews as the primary method for data collection. The findings from the interviews show that context plays an essential role in how the relevant actors experience, understand and enforce the policy package 2016 into practice. The main finding indicates that the policy package 2016 is perceived as vague and open up for individual interpretation. The relevant actors' individual interpretation is affected by their school's geographical location, student intake, competence, experience, routines, resources, and collaboration.