ABSTRACT
The chapter approaches parental involvement in education in Sweden. The first part gives an overview of the Swedish education system, offering descriptive details of underlying normative ideas and historical traditions. Next, insight into the legislative and regulative context of parents’ roles in education is provided through a view of political development, and a presentation of the four most dominant fields of inquiry within Swedish research on parental involvement are summed up. A current research projects explores the implications of changing policies on homework support for a more overriding conception of parental involvement in Sweden. Through the theoretical lens of discursive institutionalism, policy documents between 2007 and 2017 are analysed, highlighting a detectable shift in government policy during this period regarding how policy ideas on parental involvement in education is produced. The analysis illuminates how the view on parents as responsible consumers and providers of homework support gradually dissolves, and is replaced by a view on parents as unreliable providers of the same. Overall, the chapter illuminates the complex and often multifold context of parental involvement in education in Sweden, and the duplex relationship of policy and practice there within.
