The current educational policy is characterized by education being seen as less a concern for society at large. The main responsibility for educational choice is hereby brought onto the individual and the family. By accentuating the possibility - and the obligation - to make an active choice, students and their parents are forced to take personal responsibility for the consequences of their educational choice or lack of choice (Ball, 2006; Hargreaves, 2003). Many students who switch schools from the city’s outskirts to inner city schools, which are considered more successful, are students with a first language other than Swedish, the main reason being their wish to apply to a school where the majority of the students speak Swedish as their first language. (Bunar, 2006). Our aim is to problematize the issue of identification and identity taking place in an inner city school where educators discern students as ”Swedish2students”. We analyse the discursive practices discernable in the speech about the students and the social practice concerning the detachment of students in time and space. Our analysis is carried out against a background in the competitive situation for city schools and how this dilemma could be interpreted in a (post)colonial perspective. Within postcolonial theory a view of identity has been developed where the relation to the Other has become crucial to how our identities are formed, developed, changed and reinforced (Bhabha, 1994; Hall, 2003). Furthermore, we look upon how identities are articulated in teachers’ and school leaders’ speech and in relevant policy texts. By articulation we mean a process of linking together and making a unity of separate parts which are by no means given (Fairclough, 1995; Hall, 2003). This implies that we scrutinize how different affordances of identity are linked to a formation of chains of significance of properties, actions, and representations and how these can be tied to representations of the city as a socially divided space loaded with meanings of class and ethnicity (Asplund & Lunneblad, 2007).

The data are collected from an ethnographic inquiry situated in a compulsory school with children aged 10-12, in an inner-city area in Sweden. Alongside with interviews; observations, conversations with educators are data analyzed in the study. Observations and interviews were usually documented through field-notes and tape-recorded. Additional data sources consist of schedules, policy documents, artefacts, etc (Burgess, 1984; Hammersley & Atkinson 1995; Thomas, 1993). The methods of analysis used are text analysis, discourse analysis and ethnography.

Results show that students categorized as ”Swedish2students” not only are students recently immigrated as is stated in the descriptions of the subject. In everyday life at school the identity of ”Swedish2student” is articulated from a more general linguistic and social ability as well as the ability to take part in classroom activities. On the other hand not all students with a demand of education in Swedish as a second language are offered this opportunity since teachers and school leaders claim that there is a lack in resources and competence. In this kind of speech these students, the majority of whom have chosen to switch from a suburban school to this particular inner city school, are described as belonging to a category of students separate from the supposedly normal student. (cf. Blackledge, & Pavlenko, 2004; Cummins, 2001). Students from suburban schools are described as substitutes for students living nearby, due to the fact that this particular school for many years has been exposed to a loss of students choosing other well renowned schools, has opened the opportunity for suburban students to apply to this school.