The governance of the Swedish Educational system was centralized before 1990 and Education was seen as a part of the Welfare state. Many reforms were implemented since then that have made the system decentralized, but goal-oriented and accountable, following the wave of New Public Management inspired reforms that were introduced in many other educational systems. On behalf of the government, the Department of Education sets the educational goals and evaluate the results, while the local authorities, the 290 municipalities, have the main responsibility to organize and deliver the adequate education to the citizens, employ the teachers, following the curriculum and other directives and regulations. The role of the National Agency of Education, has changed overtime. The NEA not only proposes goals to be reached, collects and reports data on school results, but has taken over the years a more active role in school development, developing materials and guidelines, and also distributing supplementary national funding on particular projects. Despite prioritizing Education as a key sector, the performance of the Swedish school system is declining. The results in literacy and mathematics as measured with international assessments has shown the largest dip, compared with other countries. The number of low-performer students has increased and the number of top-performers has decreased in several assessments. The share of immigrants students is 15% in Sweden. The performance decline is not imputable to an increase in their numbers, however.  On the other side, the consistent performance gap between immigrant and non-immigrant students is an issue.  Although there are policies in place that support the integration, second language learning and mother-tongue tuition of newly-arrived students, there are signals that the educational system is not working optimally for these students. For this reason, the Department of Education launched a project administrated by the NEA, giving additional funding to Language learning, with the aim to increase the efficacy of their schooling.  The schools apply for the project and get a reimbursement for each student enrolled, if they offer 105 hours extra tuition in Second Language Learning to the newly-arrived students.  The paper will look at the interaction between the national policy and the local practice, doing an analysis of policy and policy realization in a decentralized system, where the policies may be considered as re-created in the contexts of practice. The New Public Management inspired reforms may have influenced the educational system, with several unintended consequences, among others an awakening of traditional humanistic educational values and duties, and of the sense of education as public good. Bureaucratic rationalization and indirect controlling mechanisms may coexist today with fragmentation and flexible adaptations, which may increase the system's complexity and worsen its performance. The general formula of indirect steering through target setting accountability and competition, have been to some extent modified by the re-introduction of central interventions. The paper looks at how the national efforts are interpreted at the local level, and at how the policy seems operating, with reflections about the realization of the intervention aimed at improving the performances of a particular group of students all over the country; a related aim was also to  reduce the inequities in the system.

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