ABSTRACT
This chapter explores collaboration between Sweden's Art and Music Schools (SAMS) and compulsory schools from the perspectives of leaders in SAMS, highlighting their policy practices. Furthermore, it offers insights into the ways music education leaders can and do engage in policy practice adaptation and how policy practice draws from contextual needs and strengths while at the same time responding and potentially contributing to larger educational policy aims such as those regarding inclusion of children and adolescents. The authors describe the potential impact of a multicentric approach, which actively promotes the views of all individuals (or groups of individuals) as centres when rethinking inclusive policy action. Findings from three focus-group conversations show that collaboration with the compulsory school system is a central intersection when inclusion and policy are discussed. The authors conclude that the collaboration discourse has a dominant position in relation to national policies for inclusion of all children and that the potential of collaboration in sparsely populated regions needs to be further explored and considered by policy actors on different levels.
