Navigating the creation of educational offers: insights from Swedish upper secondary schools

Purpose Our aim in this paper is to develop new knowledge about the creation of educational offers amidst competing schools. Turning to sociological theorizing on “menus”, we pose the following research question: How do school leaders navigate tensions between innovation and standardization when creating educational offers in competitive situations? Design/methodology/approach We examine our aim using rich qualitative data, consisting of 17 interview instances with principals at publicly and privately owned upper secondary schools in a Swedish municipality context. In addition, we use 790 document pages from political motions and education board proceedings at the municipal level to triangulate various events that principals retrospectively raised during interviews. Findings Our data analysis first shows that innovation expectations and standardization requirements turned the creation of educational offers into balancing exercises for principals. Our analysis then shows how peer schools, structural aspects and marketing-related activities engendered three uncertainty types that also transformed the creation of educational offers into distressing exercises. These uncertainties were acknowledged—although not entirely comprehended—by principals, who added different profiles to standardized programs in processes within which imitative dynamics became more prevalent than innovative endeavors. Originality/value We propose our findings contribute to school leadership literature, which has become growingly concerned with supply-side issues in competitive situations, many of them sprung from market-inspired reforms. Studying principals as supply-side representatives, we show how they navigated tensions between expectations, requirements and uncertainties to create educational offers in balancing and distressing exercises.