Lately, there has been a worldwide growth of private tutoring as homework support in out of school settings, involving a variety of forms and a growing number of participating students (Bray 2011, UNESCO 2015). This phenomenon of educational support outside of the ordinary school system has been conceptualized as shadow education (Stevenson and Baker 1992; Bray, 1999, 2011; Forsberg, et al. 2015) as it occurs separated from the formal settings of an education system, but mimics and changes in relation to the ordinary school. Shadow education aims at improving students’ chances in the school and targets both slow learners and high achievers. This growing educational setting, in which private actors hold a significant place has created new forms of education policy discourses (Ball, 2009) in which the tutor becomes an important actor.

In Sweden a shift in educational governance has opened the gates for more actors in the educational landscape. With falling school results and increasing differences between groups, the standard and legitimacy of the formal school system is in question (Trondman et al. 2014). While this earlier has been researched in relation to marketization and the growth of private schools (Lundahl et al. 2014), existing studies have to a large extend  ignored the emerging shadow education sector (Bouakaz 2012).

The present study is part of a recently started research project targeting different kinds of homework support in Sweden as forms of shadow education (Forsberg et. al. 2015). In the paper we take a closer look at how the private tutor is presented on the websites of the largest private companies on the Swedish market today. The turnover by private companies, providing homework support in Sweden, has grown rapidly in recent years, partly because the earlier opportunity to make tax deductions when buying these services, but also as a consequence of a global trend. The five largest companies in this sector had in 2014 a turnover at nearly SEK 160 million. Today these companies employ hundreds of people providing services related to homework support for pupils in elementary and secondary education. These new homework support companies on the education market legitimize their existence and services by claiming to meet the needs for homework support among families as well as by providing job opportunities, mainly for young people. On the websites of the homework support companies this dual legitimization is evident through marketing and recruitment strategies. These two website contexts address different audiences (families and prospective co-workers) and thereby produce different tutor identities. In this paper we target online narratives that present the tutors to potential customers as well as narratives used to recruit new tutors.

We take our theoretical point of departure from a perspective on policy enactment as discursive practice (Ball 1999, Ball et al. 2012). Descriptions of the private tutor on the websites are thus understood as policy enactment. In this policy enactment the identities of the tutor, as well as the student, are constituted and produced in relation to the intended recipient of the description. This process of enacting policy illuminates representations and images of the educational setting and the actors involved in the setting. In the different website contexts, connect to the dual legitimization mentioned above, we focus on the narratives of the private tutor and the ways the tutor is positioned.

The main research question in the paper is: Which private tutor identities are produced on the websites of Swedish homework support companies and what social and educational functions do they fill in the shadow of the Swedish education system? 

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