In Europe there are many new schools to be built. In Sweden, for instance, 1000 new schools are to be built between year 2020 – 2025, which is a substantial amount in relation to the size of Sweden. As a response to this need of new school buildings, there are policies emerging. One example is the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning (SNBHP), who published guidance by presenting a digital collection of seven built schools (Boverket, 2021).

School building can be many things. For example, a school building is a place that children and students go to every day to socialize. A school building can thus be thought of as a socialspace. A school building is also a place for knowledge production and different teaching and learning activities. From this perspective, a school building is a space for teaching and learning. Several educational researchers (see for example Biesta, 2015; Dewey, 1938/1997, Englund, 1987; Popkewitz, 2007) have shown that a school is also a place that shapes the coming generation, and a school building can thus be thought of as a space for societal change. All in all, school building must be understood as educational policy that operate in different ways.

The aim with the paper is to acknowledge school building policy and discuss the consequences for what is possible to change (and not) through school building policy. Two research questions have been formulated: 1) What is the policy of school building aiming to solve? 2) What educational spaces are constituted in the policy, with at specific focus on (i) the social, (ii) teaching and learning and (iii) societal change.

Research on school building show a close connections between pedagogical change and school buildings (Alerby et al, 2006; Björklid, 2010; Bjurström, 2003; Blackmore et al. 2011, Grannäs & Stavem, 2021; Krupinska, 2022). One major shift of change is a so called a ‘teacher-centred egg-crate classroom’ to that of a student-centred learning environment (Fisher, 2007). The reasons for the shift is, according to Bjurström (2003), a separated perspective on educational activities to a more integrated perspective. Another connection between pedagogical change and school buildings, is the use of a new vocabulary in educational policy. Wood (2020), for instance, points out that by labelling a space a ‘learning environment’ rather than a classroom, the perception of the room changes. The perception of a space is not always the same even if similar words are used, such as the words “variation” or “flexibility” (Rönnlund, Bergström & Tieva, 2021). Thus, what words that are used to describe an educational space becomes important to acknowledge but also how the words or ideas materialise perceptions of what one can do in a specific educational practice.

When paying attention to school buildings and pedagogy, school culture, or what Williams (1958/1963) defined as “selective traditions” is also relevant to acknowledge (Gislason, 2010). A selective tradition, according to Williams (1958), points to the process by which we select from the legacy of the past to explain, support and justify actions in the present. Therefore, a new school building will never operate on its own as a neutral space but is always connected to its past. Thus, when examining the school building policy, it becomes relevant to explore what selective traditions that are (re)produced in the policy, in our case with a focus on the social, in teaching and learning, and as societal change.

To answer our research questions, the analysis is made with the aid of Carol Bacchi’s (2009; Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016) framework on policy analysis, ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR). The core of the analysis is to identify how a need for change is produced and made, in our case, what SNBHP wants to solve with their policy on school building. By addressing a policy document as a solution for something and by identifying what and how this something came to be, the analysis shows the production of policy, or what Bacchi defines as ‘What is the problem represented to be?’. For the analysis, four of Bacchi and Goodwin (2016, 20) analytical questions are used: Q1. What’s the ’problem’ represented to be in a specific policy? Q2. What presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ’problem’? Q3. How has this representation of the ’problem’ come about? Q4. What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ’problem’ be thought about differently? The analysis started by reading the policy document several times to identify problems and solutions. Here, three analytical concepts were used: (1) binaries, pointing to words that are described in contrast, (2) key concepts, significant indicative words that constitute a specific meaning, and (3) categories, which is a concept that plays a central role in governing the policy, for example, how people are described. When the problems and solutions were identified we linked them together to find a pattern that could answer the analytical Q1 and Q2. In doing this, the problem representations were identified which answers to our first research question: What are the problem representations in the policy of school architecture? By turning to the concept of “selective traditions” (Williams, 1958/1963), and specifically focusing on the social, the teaching and learning, and societal change we deepened the analysis to discuss Bacchi and Goodwin’s analytical question Q3 and Q4. The result of this analyze, answers our second research question: What educational spaces are constituted in the policy, with at specific focus on (i) the social, (ii) teaching and learning and (iii) societal change.

Seven examples school are presented by SNBHP and out of this data, four problem representations were identified: (1) the school as solving inequity in society, (2) the whole school/preschool as a learning environment (3) the careful designed school (4) and movement allure school. There are also a veriety of educational space constituted in the policy that involve the social, teaching and learning activities and how schools can produce societal change. These finding will be elaborated on and discussed in the paper. For example, problem representation 2 highlights how students are learning everywhere and there is no limitation of where a learning environment can be. This challenges a selective tradition of governance of pedagogical space, but the policy becomes logical when the design of the school has gone from subject specific learning to designing life milieus. In the paper, we will argue that school building policy cannot be reduced to the individual but must start in an understanding of how material design always intertwines with collective habits and selective traditions. This argument has consequences of how school building policies are talked about and used. For example, sometimes one can hear that teachers or a school must “choose” a pedagogy so the school architecture can be designed accordingly. However, this argument rests on a false premise as a pedagogy is always relational and situated in a specific practice where there are collective habits and selective traditions. Another misunderstanding is that “teachers do not use the space as intended”, which is an utterance that black boxes the selective traditions that are reproduced in school practice. In the discussion, we will further discuss the consequences of school building policies and what happens when educational research is neglected.

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