Traditionally, the strong state and governing control in Sweden was viewed as fundamental for assuring equity and equal opportunity in education. However, during the 1990s several radical school reforms changed the Swedish school system vastly from being highly centralized to an extremely decentralized and market-oriented one (Lundahl, 2002; Lundahl, et al., 2013).

The launch of the voucher system with free school choice in Sweden in the early 1990s broke the constraints that the proximity admission principle has. Individual students were offered opportunities to choose schools of their own preferences. Meanwhile, the independent school reform encouraging private companies or voluntary groups to establish independent schools. This leads to a rapid increase of the amount of independent schools as well as students enrolled in independent schools. Students bring their voucher money with them, thus making it possible for independent schools to be financed by taxpayers. Today in Sweden, almost half the country’s schoolchildren choose not to go to their local schools. More than 20% attend upper secondary independent schools, two-thirds of which are run by private companies.

The main intentions of these reforms were to increase education quality, equity and efficiency through choice and competition (Bunar, 2010; Trumberg, 2011; Arreman & Holm 2011). However, the choice – competition model of a market-like education system in Sweden has caused increasing discrepancy in the social ethnic composition of school intakes and movements of the pupil cohorts (Skolverket, 2012). Empirical evidences have shown that school segregation has increased largely (Gustafsson & Yang Hansen, 2009; Levin, 2002; Sahlgren, 2013).

The National Agency of Education (2012) investigated methods to identify local and regional school markets. Using information about the home municipality and the school municipality of all students in upper secondary school during the academic year 2009/10, they identified 94 so-called local school markets defined by municipalities between which there is a large exchange of students. The 94 local school markets were further divided into six different market types according to the geographic and socio-demographic characteristics of the markets. However, the local and regional school markets cannot be assumed to be stable over time. The dynamics of the school market are affected by changes in the size of the pupil cohort and the range of schools and programs on offer. And changes in the structure of the local school markets also reflect the marketization process of schools, the development of independent schools and implementation process of school choice in Sweden. Against this background, the structure and dynamics of school markets can offer a promising approach to describe changes over time of the Swedish upper school system and can help the study of consequences of the introduction of quasi-market principles for students, teachers, schools, and municipalities.

The proposed study is thus local school market of Swedish upper secondary schools and to examine the changes in the structure of the local school market and market types between 1994 and 2013.

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