National agencies and local stakeholders in large-scale interventions: exploring school improvement models in Sweden since the 1980s

This article examines national education agencies in Sweden and their changing organisation of large-scale school interventions between the 1980s and the 2020s. Three state interventions were selected as models to demonstrate these changes over time. The models differ in their justification, funding, evaluation, and degree of autonomy granted to local stakeholders. The inductive analysis revealed the bureaucratic intervention model, building on the value of a line of authority and local stakeholders as civil servants; the enforced cooperative intervention model, where the state agency works to convince local stakeholders of their apparent ne by guiding dialogic approaches; and the standardisation intervention model, which places an emphasis on local stakeholders following standardised improvement procedures and achieving education standards, all controlled by authoritative means. The models demonstrate the reorganisation of the relationship between state agencies and local stakeholders. While the first model aims at the decentralisation of educational leadership, the two other models seek to pursue recentralisation, albeit with different intensities and for different stakes.