This paper examines how teachers in Swedish compulsory schools understand and respond to the demands of their work when supporting students with complex academic, social, and emotional needs. It focuses on care and discretion as central features of everyday teaching, through which teachers exercise professional judgement, decide how far their responsibility extends, and sustain their capacity to remain in the profession over time. The study approaches care as a form of practical and moral work that develops through experience within specific organisational and policy conditions.

Across Europe, inclusive education policies have expanded teachers’ responsibilities, while increasing expectations, and resource constraints shape how these responsibilities can be realised in practice (Haug, 2017). Under such conditions, changes in teachers’ professional judgement, priorities, and sense of responsibility often emerge through situated decision-making. In Sweden, teachers are expected to translate broad national policy aims into classroom practice within a highly decentralised education system. Responsibility for inclusion and student wellbeing is widely distributed, while access to specialist support, planning time and resources varies substantially between schools (Westerholm & Lindqvist, 2024). As a result, teachers must continually decide which student needs can be prioritised, how deeply they can engage, and where limits must be drawn. These decisions shape how teachers’ professional roles and orientations take form over time.

The paper draws theoretically on Nel Noddings’ ethics of care (2013) and Michael Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucracy (2010). From an ethics of care perspective, teaching involves attentiveness and moral responsiveness to students’ lived realities and is sustained through ongoing relational work. From a street-level bureaucracy perspective, teachers are viewed as frontline public servants who must exercise discretion in interpreting policy, allocating time and emotional energy, thus, prioritising needs under conditions of scarcity and ambiguity (Taylor, 2007). Bringing these perspectives together, the study uses the term discretionary care to capture the routine, judgemental labour through which teachers translate ethical attention into feasible action within organisational constraints. This framing gives attention to the conditions under which teachers’ professional judgement occurs and highlights how boundary-setting, emotional regulation, and prioritisation are practiced and shaped by organisational context.
The aim of this study is to show how teachers come to recognise limits, adjust their engagement with students, and develop ways of working that allow care to be sustained over time. The study addresses the following research questions:

1) How do teachers understand the responsibilities in their professional role for meeting the diverse needs of students?

2) What do teachers’ narratives reveal about the relationship between discretion, care and the structural conditions in the school environment? 

3) How do teachers narrate their experiences of balancing care and discretion in their everyday work with students’ academic, social, and emotional needs? 

The European relevance of the study lies in its contribution to understanding how teachers’ professional judgement and practices of care are shaped within inclusive education systems in decentralised contexts, highlighting how everyday organisational conditions and expanding expectations structure teachers’ capacity to negotiate responsibility, sustain care, and remain in the profession over time. By conceptualising care as a discretionary and relational practice, the study offers an analytical lens for examining how teachers navigate tensions between ethical commitments and organisational constraints. In doing so, it shifts attention away from individual resilience towards the institutional conditions under which care can be sustained as part of teachers’ professional work. The findings, thus, contribute to European debates on inclusion, teacher professionalism, and teach workload by foregrounding the everyday labour through which inclusive education is enacted.

The study draws on narrative interviews with four primary school teachers (grades 1–6) working in municipal schools in two Swedish regions. These teachers were purposively selected from a larger dataset conducted as part of a broader study of teachers’ working conditions. Selection was based on the conceptual richness (Riessman, 2008) of their accounts and their capacity to illuminate processes related to care, discretion, and professional boundary-setting. The participants worked in contrasting socio-economic and organisational contexts, including middle-class urban schools, commuter municipalities, and socioeconomically vulnerable areas, classified using indicators from the Swedish municipal classification system (SKR, 2023). This variation enabled exploration of how organisational resources, student composition, and local support structures shape teachers’ work and professional judgement. Teachers were recruited via school principals who distributed an invitation to staff, resulting in a voluntary sample (Wanat, 2008). Semi-structured interviews lasting approximately forty-five minutes were conducted digitally in Swedish during autumn 2025. Interviews focused on teachers’ descriptions of everyday work, perceptions of responsibility and experiences of student needs. Ethical procedures followed university data management policies and departmental ethics approval. Analysis proceeded in two stages. First, a descriptive coding process was undertaken across the full dataset using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2021). Codes related to working conditions, role expectations, student needs, emotional demands, and organisational constraints were developed iteratively. This phase functioned primarily as an organisational and familiarisation tool rather than a means of producing final themes. Second, a holistic-content narrative analysis was conducted for the four selected cases (Riessman, 2008). Attention was paid to narrative structure, recurring tensions, points of emphasis, and the moral and emotional orientation of each account. Narrative profiles were constructed to capture how teachers described their use of judgement, boundary-setting practices, and responses to competing demands over time. This approach enabled close examination of how teachers exercise discretion in their specific school contexts.

The findings indicate that care is central to teachers’ everyday work and that it is enacted in varied and context-dependent ways. Teachers engage in sustained relational and emotional labour to support students’ participation and wellbeing, consistent with Noddings’ (2013) conception of care as an ethical, relational practice. However, the form that care takes, and the extent to which it can be sustained, is shaped by organisational conditions, access to support, and teachers’ position within the school. Teachers with greater experience, autonomy, or institutional security describe a stronger capacity to set limits around care, prioritise tasks aligned with their professional judgement, and resist ongoing role expansion. In contrast, teachers in less secure positions absorb additional responsibilities, compensate for systemic gaps, and must continuously improvise to manage competing demands. These discretionary practices effectively constitute the practical enactment of inclusive education policy, illustrating Lipsky’s (2010) argument that frontline workers shape public services through everyday judgement under conditions of constraint. While discretionary care enables inclusion and classroom stability, it also produces emotional strain, workload intensification, and uneven conditions for sustaining professional engagement, echoing research on emotional labour and teacher attrition (Kariou et al., 2021). This study highlights that processes often associated with professional development, such as refining judgement, learning where to draw boundaries, and sustaining engagement, are deeply embedded in everyday work. Supporting teachers’ professional sustainability therefore requires attention not only to individual competence, but to the organisational and policy conditions that shape teachers’ capacity to care, exercise discretion, and remain in the profession.

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