Free schools have been a significant part of the Swedish educational landscape for over twenty years. Despite conflicting scholarly debate on the impact of this transition to schooling at system level in Sweden, there is no qualitative research on the transformations which have occurred within teachers as a result of working in these new, privatized contexts. This study explores how Swedish and non-Swedish teachers negotiate their professional identities in a variety of for-profit free schools. Narrative interviews were conducted to enable teachers to position their existing teacher selves within a social, historical and political context. Teachers’ substantive selves remain fairly intact despite the challenges of the environment in which they work; these teachers are student-centred, pedagogically focused, and place high importance on moral professionalism. However, against the dominant neoliberal discourses of choice, quality and efficiency, these small narratives reveal how a culture of competition and comparison within a vulnerable education market creates a less stable situated self and undermines opportunities for a collective professional identity both within the school and, potentially, the wider professional community. Further, they expose the damaging effects of the performance-profit culture inherent in the business model of schooling and how teachers’ professional identities are determined locally by school leaders rather than mandated nationally by politicians. From this perspective, the use of narrative enables a small-p perspective of policy. It highlights the response of local ‘policymakers’ to policy reforms, namely, the teachers and school leaders who interpret and struggle over policy reforms within their own local school contexts. Ultimately, the storytelling nature of narratives permits a view of education policy and teacher identity as a parallel process.

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