The year 2000, when the Lisbon strategy (Presidency Conclusions 2000) was adopted by the European Council, can be viewed as a starting point of an increasing interest in education policy on the transnational arena. Both the EU and the OECD are intergovernmental organizations where governments and national authorities cooperate closely across national borders. This co-operation results in common objectives and evaluations, but above all, in a common language about education and a shared view of education's problems and solutions (e.g. European Commission 2017). This kind of transnational cooperation, including private actors such as McKinsey and Pearson, forms an international discourse for education policy (Dale, 2010; Grek 2009; Robertson 2008). Thus, we consider the Swedish curriculum reform for compulsory school, Lgr 11, as part of a transnational policy movement in which the different countries relate differently to certain key policy messages. Such messages include that school needs to be more effective in providing all students with knowledge and raising the achievement of knowledge outcomes. Another clear message is that the national school systems need to be clearly governed from national level (Wahlström & Sundberg, 2017). Drawing on discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2015) and organizational and institutional theory (Coburn, 2004), this paper focuses on the central educational policy messages from transnational and national policy arenas and their recontextualization on a municipal and school level with Sweden as an example. To capture the links between macro, meso and micro arenas, key policy “messages” from the macro policy arena can be examined regarding in what ways, and to what extent, these messages are adopted or rejected by actors on the municipal and school arenas (Coburn, 2015; Höstfält et al. 2017). For exploring the ‘governing by discourse’, coordinative and communicative discourses are identified, as well as background and foreground ideas (Schmidt 2015). The study builds on interviews with 18 teachers teaching in grade 6 and 9 in different municipalities and schools, and 12 superintendents in charge of compulsory school as well as 12 chairmen of political committees responsible for compulsory school at municipal level. The interviews are analysed in relation to in what ways the actors assimilate or reject the policy messages and to what extent they use deliberative or coordinative discourses to form their understanding of the curriculum reform.

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