Research has previously addressed elements of school supervision and inspection and the practices of state authorities. For example, Ouston, Fidler and Earley (1997)  have noticed that it is important how inspections and supervisions are carried out in terms of giving schools the possibilities to amend what has been identified as problematic. How countries organise supervision and inspection between authorities differ, but Ball (2007) in the UK and Apple (2005) in the US as well as Rönnberg (2012) in Sweden have noticed a discursive drift in how authorities present themselves, from a discourse with more emphasis on supervision, towards one with more emphasis on inspection. Here Sweden holds a certain position since the Swedish educational system since the mid 1990s, in a short time have turned from one of the most regulated to one of the most deregulated (Lundahl, 2002). In addition, the organisation of authorities and the function of authorities were reformed in a rapid pace.

In this presentation we put focus on the National Agency for Special Needs Education and Schools (SPSM), a new authority since 2008, that in relation to other Swedish authorities as the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) and the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (Skolinspektionen) holds an uncertain position. SPSM only acts on the request of schools and only supervises without legal authority to force schools to act when they find them not fulfilling their responsibilities.

The presentation explores the characteristics of counsellor work within SPSM as an authority with an uncertain position and with unclear “missions”. We argue there is a need to try to understand how the discursive chain of the uncertain position and missions of SPSM leads to unclear supervision. We base our analysis on an analytical tool that relates a variety of aspects, in this case aspects of counsellor work, to each other and to the broader mission of being a counsellor within the authority.

The tool is collected from Basil Bernstein's theoretical framework (Bernstein 1990, 2000), and later elaborated and operationalised by Norlund (2013). It relies on the conceptual pair of horizontal and vertical discourse. Roughly speaking the horizontal discourse connects to the informal and the context-bound, whereas the vertical discourse is often referred to as formal and generalisable. A characteristic of the horizontal discourse is that everyone  has access to this kind of knowledge, in other words it is a kind of collective property. In our presentation we look upon the counsellors as learners, which means that counsellor work oriented to the horizontal discourse implies an acquirer who does not experience a conscious progression between different counselling situations, and where knowledge is not easily transferred from one situation to another. This fact is theoretically expressed as if the horizontal knowledge form is distributed segmentally. Ultimately and in contrast, counsellor work characterised by the vertical discourse is oriented to such competences and knowledge that may be transferred from one situation of the profession to the other without being dependent on the context. To a higher degree it has professional and specialised characteristics. It is our assumption that work characterised by a horizontal discourse is perceived as unclear by the concerned counsellors, while work characterised by the vertical discourse may be preceived as clearer and more powerful. By extension, we assume that the latter is needed to enhance the possibilities for facilitating inclusive schools.

Apple, M. W. (2005). Education, markets and an audit culture. Critical Quarterly, 47(1-2), 11-29. Ball, S. (2007). Education plc: Understanding private sector participation in public sector education. London and New York: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (1990). Class, codes and control. Vol. 4, The structuring of pedagogic discourse. London: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: theory, research, critique. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Lundahl, L. (2002). Sweden: Decentralisation, deregulation, quasi-markets - and then what? Journal of Education Policy, 17(6), 687-697. Norlund, A. (2013). ”Varför tycker du att man ska ha dödsstraff, då?” – Ett sociologisk-didaktiskt verktyg för analys av klassrumsdebatter. Educare. 2013:1, 41-67. Ouston, J., Fidler, B., & Earley, P. (1997). What Do Schools Do after OFSTED School Inspections-or before? School Leadership & Management, 17(1), 95-104. Rönnberg, L. (2012). Justifying the Need for Control. Motives for Swedish National School Inspection during Two Governments. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 1-15.