This paper reports initial findings from an ongoing research project (Rönnberg, 2018) aiming to map, explore and analyse the international establishment and work of Swedish private (“free”) school companies in the Global Education Industry. Enabled by policies of school choice and free school legislation implemented primarily from the 1990s and onwards, a national for-profit Swedish education industry has emerged and flourished. As a more recent expansion strategy, Swedish school companies have begun exporting their schooling and ECEC activities by setting up international operations. The three largest Swedish for-profit free school companies are now operating across Europe, Asia and the Middle East (Rönnberg 2019).

In this paper, we study a selection of these foreign operations set up by Swedish school companies to provide schooling and ECEC internationally. The studied cases include two primary school companies, Kunskapsskolan Education (India), Internationella Engelska skolan, IES (Spain) and a preschool provider in Germany owned by AcadeMedia. All three companies are dominant actors at the Swedish domestic school market and operating for-profit. Their approaches to and organisation of international expansion vary, from setting up schools abroad under their own brand (Kunskapsskolan) to buying and operating existing brands and companies (AcadeMedia) or by re-branding acquired existing operations with a version of the Swedish company trademark (Internationella Engelska Skolan).

This paper aims to analyse the selected foreign operations by addressing the following questions: 1) How are the schooling and ECEC-services owned by the Swedish companies portrayed in the non-Swedish settings? 2) In what ways are educational profiles and/or work used to frame the offered services to foreign audiences? 3) Is the ‘Swedish’ ownership made visible (or not) in such representations?

Our analytical framework emphasises the fluidity, mobility and circulation of education policy and its actors and highlights the role played by commercial interests in these processes (Parreira do Amaral et al, 2019; Verger, et al., 2016; Au and Ferrare, 2015; Ball, 2012; Steiner-Khamsi, 2018; 2016). We draw on research on the changing and borderless nature of policy and actors in the growing global education industry (Hogan & Thompson, 2021; Verger, et al., 2016; Au and Ferrare, 2015; Ball, 2012; Junemann and Ball, 2013; Lingard and Sellar, 2013; Robertson, et al., 2012). We also build on literature theorising policy mobility, policy learning and circulation, along with local embeddedness and adaptation (Steiner-Khamsi, 2016; McCann and Ward 2013; Ozga and Jones, 2006) and work on edvertising from a neo-institutional approach (DeMartino & Jenssen, 2018; 2016; Lubienski, 2007). The analytical framework thereby acknowledges the international flows of ideas and their national manifestations, carried and enabled by actors and organisations, including commercial actors and edu-preneurs that are working to advance and promote certain ideas and products.

Empirically, we study the companies’ self-representations by analyzing data collected from company websites and curricular documents in each of the studied foreign operations (selection described above), as well as information on the Swedish parts of the companies through for instance websites and official Swedish registers. Furthermore, we have gathered the companies´ annual financial reports, presentations in social media, and marketing materials etc., taking into account multi-modal expressions including uses of images, video etc. In addition and as secondary background material, searches in the international media database Retriever Business/Retriever Research (former Factiva) have informed our contextual understanding on how the foreign operations have been portrayed in the media as well as on how the Swedish companies feature in international media reporting. The empirical sources have been analyzed thematically (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) firstly to discern how the foreign operations portray themselves, and secondly to identify and locate the role of educational ideas and work in these self-representations, and thirdly to relate these to any acclaimed ‘Swedishness’ and/or ownership. Each company and foreign operation has been analysed by a team of two or more researchers in the project group, enabling discussion and validation of findings within and across the operations.

Our findings illustrate how the three companies expand abroad by developing and following different business models and how the companies use and portray pedagogical ideas in different ways as they move their services and activities from the domestic to the global domain. The foreign operations of the Swedish school companies display elements of both continuity and adaption, as some features (and not others) being highlighted when Swedish education companies establish themselves abroad. Edu-preneurs carry services developed and enabled by the Swedish free school ’market’, which are then blended in particular ways to appeal to other national settings. The foreign operations portray particular ideas of pedagogy and schooling adapted to suit the profiles of the respective businesses. At the same time, certain Swedish, nationally embedded education policy narratives of equality, individualization and social mobility are, in some instances, transformed and repackaged into ‘sellable’ and legitimizing arguments in the foreign contexts. The results from our research point to the need for further discussion on the ways in which national-international interactions are prompted by commercial actors and rationales. The findings furthermore illustrate important processes relating to private actors in education, and empirically highlight the commercialization of educational profiles and ideas as well as the important role played by business and for-profit logics in branding, shaping and providing education and childcare in the wider and growing Global Education Industry.

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