This paper discusses the European Semester as a particular form of policy instrumentation that has achieved a shift in both the intensity and nature of EU involvement in education policy. The literature on the Europeanisation of education explores the regulatory power of the EU most often through an analysis of policy discourses, the use of numbers as policy instruments, and the construction of framework programs (Alexiadou, 2016; Gornitzka, 2018; Grek, 2013), as well as through economic allocations (Souto-Otero, 2016). The main focus so far has been on the European Education Area and its predecessors, ET2010 and ET2020, and on the policy ideas and institutions that operationalize them (Alexiadou & Rambla 2022; Papanastasiou, 2020). Comparatively less attention is paid to policies organized through economic and employment governance that have direct effects on education (for exceptions see Eeva, 2021; Stevenson et al. 2017). Our presentation uses the concept of a ‘policy instrument’ as a device that has distinct technical as well as political and social properties that “organize specific social relations between the state and those it is addressed to” (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007:4). We view the Semester as a policy instrument that intends to shape the direction of policy and reform in member states and constitutes a particular ‘technology of governance’ employed in parallel to the more conventional policy making in the EU (Le Galès, 2016:510). This approach can shed light on EU decision making in the field of education policy, including the interactions between the different policy actors involved (ibid.). Following these ideas, our research has two key objectives. First, we examine the evolution of the Semester process as one of the instruments employed to steer education policy change, through (a) an analysis of interviews with European Commission and Council of the EU policy actors; and (b) an analysis of documentary material. Second, we analyse and compare the Country Specific Recommendations, issued as part of the Semester process, for the countries of Spain and Sweden over the period 2011-2021. Our research describes the logics of instrumentation embedded in the Semester, as well as the tensions and struggles that characterize the process of education policy making. In addition, our research sheds light into the conditions under which EU policy has consequences for education policy in Spain and Sweden.

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