Fast delivery, on demand: how flexibility and individualization policy are enacted in Swedish municipal adult education

ABSTRACT

National policy states that Swedish adult education should be flexible and individualized, based on students’ needs. However, adult education in Sweden is a municipal responsibility with a high level of decentralization. Drawing on national policies, this study focuses on how the concepts of flexibility and individualization are enacted locally and what consequences this has for teaching and learning. Starting from a teacher perspective and based on qualitative interviews with 50 teachers, the article analyses how policy requirements for offering flexible and individualized adult education are being enacted, and what the consequences of this are for teaching and learning. The findings show how flexibility and individualization are put into practice through measures such as a fast study pace, continuous admission of students, and pressure on municipalities to maintain a broad course offer, often by turning to distance education. This enactment makes it easier for adult learners to fit education into their lives, but it also has consequences for the quality of teaching and learning. It is causing fragmentation, a learning environment where interactions mainly occur on an individual basis, an instrumental view of education, and teachers experiencing high workloads and low autonomy in making pedagogical decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Adult education
• individualization
• marketization
• policy enactment
• teaching

Introduction

Sweden has a free and accessible education system for all ages, with adult education being a key factor in enabling inclusion and providing opportunities for lifelong learning (OECD, 2020). National policy states that adult education should be flexible and individualized, based on students’ needs. The national policies concerning formal adult education are enacted at local level within the framework of municipal adult education (MAE). Thus, adult education is a municipal responsibility with a high level of decentralization and devolution. The three primary objectives of MAE, as outlined in national policy, include promoting adults’ personal development and societal integration, facilitating access to further studies, and enhancing their employability. While national policy provides a general framework of operation, this education system being organized at the local level means that municipalities play a crucial role in how MAE is organized and provided. Drawing on the national policies that regulate MAE, this article focuses on how the twin concepts of flexibility and individualisation are enacted on a local level and what consequences this has for teaching and learning. Starting from a teacher perspective, the article will answer the following research questions:

• How are policy requirements for offering flexible and individualized adult education being enacted locally?

• What are the consequences of these enactments for teaching and learning?

Swedish municipal adult education

In Swedish MAE, adults can enrol from the age of 20, provided they are considered capable of successfully completing the course. The system offers financial support to adult students through publicly funded grants and loans, and importantly, there are no tuition fees. The participation rate in Swedish adult education is significant. In 2022, for example, 372,000 students (approximately 6% of the adult population aged 20–64) were enrolled in MAE (SNAE [Swedish National Agency for Education], 2023a). MAE encompasses both general and vocational courses equivalent to compulsory and upper secondary school education, as well as Swedish language courses for migrants (SFI)¹. The flexibility of the system allows students to create their own study plans by combining various courses that could be organized for part-time or full-time studies and with different study forms such as classroom teaching, distance teaching, and apprenticeships. Such courses are in part provided through municipally run schools, in part through external, non-public, providers (primarily private companies) contracted by the municipalities to deliver courses. Consequently, students may need to combine courses from different providers (Andersson & Muhrman, 2022a; Muhrman & Andersson, 2022. There is a considerable demand for adult education among migrants, primarily language learning (SFI) and, secondly, to facilitate integration into society. In 2022, 95% of adult students at the compulsory school level and 47% at the upper secondary level were foreign-born (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2023b).

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a growing presence of external private actors on the Swedish education market, as well as internal marketization characterized by a more business-oriented management approach within public institutions (Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2019; Lundahl et al., 2013). This trend of marketization is particularly pronounced in MAE. Many municipalities now contract private companies to offer courses, either instead of or in addition to their own public provision (Fejes & Holmqvist, 2019). In 2022, 51% of MAE was run through non-public providers, predominantly owned by private companies (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2023b). Such marketization in MAE has resulted in an increased emphasis on quality assurance and competition among providers, which also affects public schools owned by municipalities (Andersson & Muhrman, 2022a; Muhrman & Andersson, 2022). However, regardless of provider, the municipality is always responsible for the quality and accessibility of adult education for its citizens. Furthermore, the enactment of flexibility and individualization largely rests on a significant number of teachers, who play a pivotal role. In 2022/23, nearly 10,000 teachers were employed in MAE, with 3,400 working specifically in SFI (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2023c).

Flexibility in education and teachers’ work

The focus of this article is the enactment of flexibility and individualization policies in MAE. In recent decades, individualisation – i.e. the approach to teaching and education focusing on personalizing learning experiences for all learners based on their unique needs and interests – has emerged as a central theme in education across both the Nordic countries (cf. Carlgren et al., 2006; Kurki et al., 2017), Europe, and beyond (cf. Barros & Biasin, 2019; Holford, 2016). This is evidenced by changing semantics in policy documents, where concepts such as ‘education’ and ‘teaching’ have been replaced by the notion of ‘lifelong learning’ (Holford, 2016; Lumsden Wass, 2004). Where ‘education’ and ‘teaching’ convey a joint endeavour involving both students and educators in a school-like context, the language of ‘lifelong learning’ shifts focus onto the individual learners, who are increasingly portrayed as personally responsible for their own lifelong learning. As a result, teaching practices have shifted towards promoting ‘new pedagogies’ focused on self-directed learning activities and individual tasks (cf. Carlgren et al., 2006).

Intertwined with the discourse of individualization in education is the concept of flexibility. For the context of education, flexibility is often read as a question of access or convenience – of being able to engage in education ‘anytime, anyplace’ (Veletsianos & Houlden, 2019, p. 454). However, flexibility is a multifaceted concept that encompasses more than just access to education. Elkhoury and Usman (2021) argue that flexibility which truly aims to widen access to learning, requires a pedagogical approach where learners actively participate in shaping what and how they learn. Thus, flexibility can also be understood as a pedagogical approach where teachers employ a range of instructional methods, course content, and assessment techniques (Veletsianos & Houlden, 2019). For teachers to exercise such pedagogical flexibility, they must have the autonomy to make decisions and choices regarding these parameters (cf. Baer, 2021). Furthermore, different interpretations of flexibility – such as access to education and as a pedagogical approach – are not always compatible. Samarawickrema (2005) argues that while flexible access to education can offer more opportunities to engage in education, it also puts pressure on students to take greater responsibility for their learning and become more self-directed. This can be challenging, particularly for beginners who may lack the necessary resources to make informed decisions about learning strategies or assess their own capacity and needs. Additionally, some critics argue that the emphasis on self-direction is a tool of neoliberal governance, aiming to make individuals monitor themselves (cf. Crowther, 2004; Fejes et al., 2016). Approaching the limitations of flexibility from another direction, Sheail (2018) points out that time is a finite resource. Therefore, though anything might theoretically be possible, everything is not. The availability of time and other resources influences the pedagogical choices that teachers can make. Lundström (2015) exemplifies this by noting that teachers are burdened with increasing responsibilities without corresponding increases in resources or, in some cases, while resources are being diminished.

In the context of Swedish MAE, the pursuit of flexibility and individualization was to be facilitated by introducing privatization and marketization into the system in the early 1990s. Encouraging MAE to be more flexible in its organization was done with the hope of increasing the individual adult citizen’s access to education (Lumsden Wass, 2004). However, studies on Swedish adult education highlight a tension between flexibility and individualization on the one hand, and marketization on the other. Following a private provider that implemented standardized programmes, Wärvik (2013) found that teachers felt hindered by such standardization and sought ways to bypass it. Despite limited autonomy, teachers made decisions based on their professional understanding of what students needed to learn. This resistance can be seen as teachers opposing the discourse of flexibility as access, instead favouring pedagogical flexibility (Fejes et al., 2016). Based on extensive fieldwork in SFI, Carlson and Jacobsson (2019) argue that marketization in MAE has increased teachers’ administrative workload, rather than enabling pedagogical flexibility and individualized teaching based on the learner’s personal needs. Consequently, MAE teachers are required to spend a significant amount of their time on tasks such as reporting student attendance and results, or creating documents aimed at meeting inspection requirements, rather than focusing on core pedagogical work such as planning lessons and supporting students in their learning.

Another consequence of privatization in Swedish MAE is the increased job precarity for teachers (Holmqvist, 2022). This is an important consideration, as international research indicates that precarious employment situations can impact teachers’ pedagogical practices (Breshears, 2019), including the amount of time they dedicate to lesson preparation and professional development (Haque & Cray, 2007). For the context of adult basic education in the US, Smith et al. (2003) demonstrate that both high resignation rates and teacher burnout have negative effects on students’ satisfaction and educational outcomes. The quality of teachers’ pedagogical practices, including planning, teaching, and assessing, is, of course, influenced by their stress levels. In the field of science education, high levels of stress have been linked to the use of coping mechanisms such as relying on standardized lesson plans or simple experiments and focusing more on students’ experimental outcomes than their engagement and comprehension of the underlying principles (Lord, 2022). While such simplified teaching approaches do provide some opportunity for learning, they have been shown to have a negative impact on students’ familiarity with and understanding of the subject being taught (Fitzgerald & Smith, 2016; Harlen, 2013). Put differently, teacher stress is detrimental to pedagogical flexibility and individualization based on the learner’s needs.

A further limitation to flexibility is the decline of professional autonomy for teachers (Frostenson, 2015; Mausethagen & Mølstad, 2015). The discretion to choose teaching methods, for instance, is central to teachers’ work (Mausethagen & Mølstad, 2015). At the same time, Mausethagen and Mølstad (2015) note a clear trend towards ‘curriculum delivery’, where teachers’ discretion of making pedagogical and didactical choices is diminished. Similarly, Lundström (2018) shows how Swedish policy reforms implemented since the 1980s in upper secondary education have shifted discretion over education away from teachers and towards other educational stakeholders, such as the state, municipalities, school leaders, and the market. While these reforms did not explicitly aim to control teachers’ work or alter power dynamics between educational actors, they have nevertheless had a negative impact on teachers’ professional autonomy (Lundström, 2018). Pedagogical flexibility and individualization further rely on teachers’ ongoing reflection and engagement in professional development, as they require teachers to draw on a range of instructional methods, course content, and assessment techniques. However, when teachers experience reduced autonomy, they are less likely to engage in continuous learning (Livingstone, 2018). A recent study of how teachers in MAE interpret and enact the national curriculum and other governing policies (Andersson et al., 2023) describes how the strive for flexibility and individualization is resulting in fragmentation. The time restraints created by a high study pace and short courses make it difficult for teachers to follow and fulfil the mandated curriculum. Other factors, such as continuous admission, distance education, and a crowd of many different providers, are also shown to contribute to the fragmentation. As a result, teachers more often engage with individual students rather than groups, and there is a general mistrust for the accuracy of grades among teachers (Andersson et al., 2023).

Enacting policies on flexibility and individualization

The general interest in this study is policy enactment (Ball et al., 2012; A. Braun et al., 2010) in Swedish adult education (Andersson & Muhrman, 2022a, 2022b, 2023; Holmqvist et al., 2021; Muhrman & Andersson, 2022, 2024), with a focus on the enactment of flexibility and individualization. From our perspective, the connection between education policy and practice is not a straightforward process of implementation but a complex and multifaceted process of enactment of policy into local practices (Ball et al., 2012; Maguire et al., 2015). Thus, policy enactment is about how various educational actors interpret and translate policy texts and abstract ideas into action, for example, by producing artefacts such as procedure guidelines, agreeing on certain routines or praxis, and organizing and managing everyday life in schools in particular ways (Ball et al., 2012, p. 45). Actors do such policy enactment work within the scope of their discretion and their contexts. Interpretation refers to how education actors make sense of policy texts and mandates, decoding them in relation to situated, sociomaterial contextualizations. This refers then to the meaning-making processes involved in ‘doing’ policy in an educational context. Translation, on the other hand, refers to how such interpretations are then ‘put into action’, for example, by producing artefacts such as procedure guidelines, agreeing on certain routines or praxis, and organizing and managing everyday life in schools in particular ways (Ball et al., 2012, p. 45). Though heuristically distinct, interpretation and translation are nevertheless closely interwoven and overlapping processes that ‘work together to enrol or hail subjects and inscribe discourse into practices […] changing structures, roles and relationships, and very importantly the identification and allocation of posts of responsibility and the allocation of resources’ (ibid, p. 47). In Sweden, adult education policy on a national level is primarily expressed through the Education Act (2010), the Adult Education Regulation (2011), and the national Adult Education Curriculum (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2017). The key elements of policy relevant to this study emphasize the need for a broad provision of courses based not only on students’ needs and demand but also on the requirements of the labour market. Municipalities are required to offer all eligible applicants a place in basic courses (compulsory school level), Swedish language courses (SFI), and upper secondary courses for university eligibility. However, municipalities are not obligated to provide places for all eligible applicants in general or vocational courses outside these areas. In the latter case, if there are more applicants than available places, priority is given to those assessed to have the greatest need for the course. The policy also highlights the importance of flexible course offerings, including options for distance learning, flexible study pace, continuous enrolment, and fast admission, all based on students’ needs (Adult Education Regulation, 2011; Education Act, 2010).

Individualization and flexibility are central concepts in the curriculum, which was introduced in 2012 (Fejes & Nordvall, 2016). The curriculum has undergone revisions in 2017 and 2022, but for the purpose of this study, we refer to the 2017 version (SNAE, 2017), which was in effect when this study was conducted². The importance of adapting education to the needs and circumstances of the individual learner in adult education is emphasized in the curriculum:

Adult Education’s target group is heterogeneous and the students are individuals with highly varied prerequisites and prospects. In addition, the students’ goals, so far as the educational courses and programmes are concerned, may vary sharply. The education provided must consequently be adapted on the basis of the individual’s needs and preconditions and it may vary both in terms of length and content. The Adult Education shall always respond to each student on the basis of his or her needs and preconditions. (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2017, p. 5)

A further running theme throughout the curriculum is a focus on flexibility:

An equivalent education does not mean, however, that the education in question must be prepared in the same way everywhere, nor that the resources available to the educational activity must necessarily be allocated equally among the students. Due account must be taken of the individual students’ different preconditions, requirements and level of knowledge. There are also different ways to reach these goals. […] Consequently, teaching, guidance or accreditation should be designed differently for different students. […] The Adult Education shall support those students who, during their study time, need to combine education and work. Flexibility shall always be aimed for where the education is concerned; this may relate to the venue, time, rate of study and learning method for the relevant education. (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2017, pp. 6–7)

Flexibility might thus, according to the curriculum, refer to how education is designed (logistically and didactically), but also when it is offered. Adult education should always aim for flexibility and individualization.

Adult Education shall strive for flexible solutions where the organization, working methodology and types of work are concerned, based on the individual’s needs and preconditions. The individual student should be able to combine, on the one hand, studies in several different types of education within Adult Education and, on the other hand, studies with actual work. (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2017, p. 8)

On a local level, various actors, such as politicians, school leaders, principals, guidance counsellors, and teachers, are involved in complex processes of policy enactment (cf. Godden, 2022; Holmqvist, 2022; Köpsén, 2022). Such local education actors do not operate ‘in a void’, of course. The context surrounding the education system is also influential in policy enactment. This context encompasses societal influences, as well as embedded cultures and traditions within the organization. As a result, policies are interpreted and reformulated in different ways across different environments and contexts. According to Ball et al. (2012), the relationships between society and local contexts that prevail in an environment can both encourage and deter specific actions. Different policies might be contradictory, with the consequence that their enactment within a local educational context might be messy and incomplete. Additionally, policies that are less prescriptive and more general allow for a certain degree of freedom in local enactment (Holmqvist et al., 2021). This means that local actors within municipalities can interpret and translate policies on flexibility and individualization to align with their own models of adult education.

Policy enactment can help us understand to what extent organizational principles have permeated the school system and become legitimized as a result of policy reforms, and how such mandates are utilized (Frostenson, 2015). This understanding can shed light on the development of the teaching profession and how the enactment of flexibility and individualization as a question of access to education may impact flexibility and individualization as pedagogical stances.

Methodology

This article is part of a larger study that examines the enactment of Swedish MAE in terms of political decisions; the involvement of procedures used to contract external providers in this public education system, including how such providers are commissioned, as well as how they work with quality assurance, admissions, and guidance; and how all of this affects students, teachers, and education. Specifically, this article explores how flexibility and individualization are enacted locally, as reported by teachers. As actors in education, teachers are particularly well suited to investigate, since they play a key role in enacting policy (Ball et al., 2012). The article is based on 42 qualitative, semi-structured interviews − 38 individual and 4 group interviews. A total of 50 teachers from both general and vocational subjects participated in the study. These teachers were affiliated with 12 different public and private MAE providers located in five municipalities across Sweden. The selection of these municipalities aimed to encompass both larger and smaller municipalities, as well as different ways of organizing MAE in terms of the mix of public and private providers, ways of contracting private providers, and regional cooperation between municipalities. The interviews focused on themes related to the organization of MAE, the work of teachers in MAE, the structure of teaching, how teachers see their work situation, and how they see the structure and content of courses in MAE from the perspective of students.

The interviews were recorded as audio and transcribed. The qualitative data were then analysed thematically, following the approach outlined by V. Braun and Clarke (2006, 2022) guided by the research questions addressed in this article. The thematic analysis included six steps. All interviews were analysed together. In the first step, codes were generated from the data. In subsequent steps, the codes were grouped into themes that captured phenomena related to the purpose and questions of the study. In the next step, these themes were analysed in relation to national MAE policy mandates in order to find out how these become enacted in local contexts and how this affects teachers’ pedagogical work. All interviews were conducted in Swedish, and the quotations that are used to illustrate the qualitative findings have been translated into English.

The study adheres to the guidelines set forth by the Swedish Research Council (2017) concerning good research practice, which include matters such as information provided to interviewees, consent, confidentiality, and the use of data. Consequently, we have treated the data with confidentiality and taken precautions to prevent the identification of specific municipalities or respondents. To maintain anonymity, the respondents have been anonymized, and we have not disclosed the identities of the municipalities included in the study.

Enactments of flexibility and individualization policy “on the floor” and in the classroom

In our interviews with teachers, we explored how flexibility and individualization are put into practice in adult education. The teachers described aspects such as a fast study pace, continuous admission of students, and pressure on municipalities to maintain a broad course offer, often by turning to distance education. We begin by presenting the findings on how flexibility and individualization are enacted, and then discuss the consequences and implications of these enactments.

Fast study pace that keeps increasing

MAE courses follow the same syllabi as their counterparts offered in child and youth education but are run at an increased study pace. Where a course in upper secondary education is usually offered over an entire school year, in MAE the study pace is at least doubled. In the 1990s, such courses were generally offered on a 20-week basis, which corresponds to the length of a school semester. Since then, however, the pace has increased. The teachers we interviewed witnessed that ten- or even five-week courses have become more prevalent in recent years. This fast study pace has both become more commonplace, and is reinforced by other education policy actors such as the Student Finance Board (CSN), which supervises student loans and grants.

Previously we could let students take an entire semester to finish a course… they could choose to take multiple courses at the same time [in parallel, to extent the number of weeks spent studying]. But that will change now, after pressure from CSN who took issue with students not finishing their courses by the registered due date and then cut students’ financing. So … these students will also be structured into the five-weeks model. So, if you have not passed the course by mid-February, then you get an F [failing grade] and then you go on to the next course. (VET teacher, private provider, municipality 3)

CSN’s policy interpretation is that a standard size course of 100 credits studied at a full-time pace should take five weeks to complete. As adults with financial needs and responsibilities, many students choose to enrol at a full-time study pace to secure funding during their studies. Consequently, courses have to be offered at this pace. This shows that the time-crunch experienced by teachers – and students – is in part a consequence of other education actors’ policy enactments.

Consequences of an increased study pace

The fast study pace makes it easier for students to fit education into their adult lives – e.g. having to take a leave of absence from work for a shorter time period – but it also has pedagogical consequences. From a teaching perspective, a fast pace means that course content must be covered in a short time, leaving teachers with less time to prepare content. Further, the compressed timeframe of courses seldom leaves room to give MAE students as many teaching hours as in the corresponding courses run in compulsory and upper secondary schools.

In upper secondary school, they have about 80–90 class sessions or hours for a 100-point course. Here the same courses get 50 [hours]. Teachers who work in upper secondary school do not understand. [They ask] ‘how can you get students through an advanced and difficult 100 credit course when you only have 50 hours?’ They struggle to do it in 90 hours! But this is the reality that we have to contend with. (General subject teacher, public provider, municipality 5)

More crucially, however, the interviewed teachers argue that the fast study pace in MAE interferes with deep and meaningful learning. The enactment of flexibility and individualization policy as a fast study pace is seen as having major consequences for the students’ knowledge development. The interviewed teachers question whether it is cognitively possible to learn new subjects in such a short time.

When you study a subject, you need to process. You can’t learn math or Swedish or 100 vocabulary words in a day. That is not compatible with how the brain work. The brain [synaptic connections] gets built. You need more time, and you need repetition to remember things and to learn. And they [MAE students] do not get this opportunity. (Special needs teacher, public provider, municipality 2)

The fast study pace has also led to some innovation in course provision. Looking to alleviate the consequences of the time-crunch, some municipalities and education providers have turned to offering migrant students combined courses, where vocational courses are combined with parallel studies in Swedish language courses (SFI). The idea is to reduce the time it takes for the students to secure employment. The teachers involved in such combined courses are generally positive and consider this enactment to have educational benefits. Instead of having to first take part in a Swedish language course and then, afterwards, a vocational course, this combined course solution allows students to take the two courses in parallel. Chronologically, this allows for a longer time period in which to learn and acclimatize to the language. Further, there seems to be some synergy when combining language training with a vocational course. The vocational content provides concretization to the language learning and gives students with diverse profiles something in common to converse and bond around, thus potentially increasing the students’ sense of meaningfulness. At the same time, the combined courses can also lead to an increased workload for the teachers. Since combined courses are neither mandated nor the norm, there is no teaching material available that fits the needs and prerequisites of the students or the combined aims of the courses. Teachers must produce most of the teaching materials themselves.

In summary, looking at the consequences of enacting flexibility and individualization in MAE as a fast study pace, we see that this affects teaching. For instance, choosing pedagogical flexibility and individualization, while beneficial for students’ learning, is time and resource consuming for teachers within these conditions.

Wide range of courses offered

Flexibility and individualization are also enacted in a broad supply of courses and a wide range of different providers that the students can choose from. The broad supply is based both on the individual right to study certain courses and on ambitions of the municipality to meet individual needs as well as local competence needs in the labour market. Certain courses or course packages are priorities because they are important to the municipality’s own supply of skills in certain professions. As there is pressure to provide as broad a course offer as possible, various solutions have arisen to deal with this.

Some schools (and smaller municipalities) that do not have large groups of adult learners have chosen to merge multiple courses into one classroom. Some teachers explain that they are under pressure from the school principal to mix students learning at a compulsory education level with students taking upper secondary level courses, for example, in mathematics.

Another solution we have encountered is collaboration between municipalities to provide a joint course offer, where students can study some courses in one municipality and other courses in another. Many municipalities have also turned to outsourcing MAE courses to non-public providers, thus having MAE courses spread out over multiple schools locally. In both of these cases, students who study several courses at the same time or one after the other may have to study with several providers and even travel to neighbouring municipalities, depending on where the course is given.

Not only does this mean that students must learn to navigate the particularities of multiple learning contexts, but if the student takes several courses at the same time with different providers, this can also lead to conflicts in schedules.

Sometimes [for students] it is like ‘yes, now I have a national exam at one school, but it clashes with this other test or this other lesson at the other school’. (General subject teacher, private provider, municipality 5)

We can also see in the results that multiple education providers can have difficulties coordinating with each other and, if they are in direct competition for contracts and students, even not wish to cooperate.

By far the most common enactment to the demand for a broad course offer is, however, moving courses online, i.e. offering students courses through distance education. But the experience of teachers is that not all students appreciate this enactment of flexibility and individualization.

Some students at least find it very difficult that we do not offer more courses on-site. So, they basically must take some courses online to collect enough credits. To complete an upper secondary level degree for instance. (General subject teacher, public provider, municipality 4)

Here, distance education does provide access to courses students would otherwise not have access to – at least not ‘whenever’. At the same time, students can perceive the online distance format as an imposition, because there is no other possibility for them to participate in the courses, even if they would prefer to take the courses in school.

A risk when moving education online is that teaching becomes invisible to others, since there are no (or much fewer) classes scheduled. In MAE, this has led to municipalities allocating less resources to distance courses. Teachers are simply paid for fewer working hours per student studying online than on-site.

We have many more students who study remotely, but we hardly get paid for that. That is incredibly strange because it is often more demanding to teach students that you never meet [in person]. It feels like the people who make the financial decisions regarding compensation do not really know anything about distance education pedagogy compared to classroom teaching. (General subject teacher, public provider, municipality 5)

The limited resources made available for distance education can also mean that actors try to pool students from different municipalities, e.g. by having a distance teacher work with students from different municipalities at the same time. This has consequences for the teachers’ work, as different municipalities have different regulations that the teachers must keep track of.

Consequences of the demand to maintain a broad course offer

Enacting flexibility and individualization policies as distance education affects the quality of the teaching that students take part in. Distance education changes the nature of both teaching and learning, according to the interviewed teachers. Personal interactions and relationships with students diminish. Instead, there is more administrative work, and assessment of students’ work tasks and feedback to students become central parts of the teacher’s work.

The biggest difference is the contact with students, because [in distance education] you have no classroom where you can have continuous interaction or meet the students in person. Sure, you can do it through [video platform], but it is not the same. And then with distance education there is also … There is a lot of grading work. Really a great amount of material to assess all the time. (General subject teacher, private provider, municipality 5)

For the students, learning becomes individualized work at the computer, with a focus on submitting work tasks and taking tests. This is an enactment of flexibility and individualization that is demanding for students and that suits some students but not all.

There are students who cannot manage in distance education […] but they might have been able to cope in on-site classroom teaching, because then they would have been able to practice together and muddle on. Here [in distance education] it all leans heavily on completing assignments and tests. For some students that is good but for others it is. (VET teacher, private provider, municipality 2)

However, teaching and studying in distance courses is not just computer based. Some courses – e.g. within science or vocational education – include laboratory or simulation practice even when taught at a distance. In such cases, the distance education format can require pedagogical flexibility. A science teacher exemplifies how laboratory tasks performed at home differ from laboratory work at school.

Yes, well. I send them instructions for labs to complete at home. Simple things like boiling red cabbage. So, then you have to go buy red cabbage and check different pH values or discover the colour will differ depending on the pH value. Or the water cycle, where you take ice cubes, boil water, and then check the efficiency. Which is better – using the microwave or a kettle or the stove? (General subject teacher, private provider, municipality 1)

Moving laboratory and simulation practice out of the school and into students’ home spaces has consequences. The demand for distance education can prompt teachers to focus on execution over content and learning, i.e. focusing on the fact that labs should be carried out, not how the labs are done or what their content is. With this enactment, there is a risk that both the purpose of learning to work in a laboratory and the in-depth understanding of various scientific phenomena that the laboratory work is supposed to provide, end up in the background.

Some municipalities do not offer these types of courses as distance education, opting instead to collaborate with neighbouring municipalities. In these cases, quality is quoted as the reason to not offer distance education. However, in conjunction with a fast study pace and students being spread out across providers, one consequence of only offering school-based courses with the intention of increasing quality can be that the courses offered on-site have very small groups. Even this, some teachers believe, might have a negative influence on the educational process and the outcomes:

It sounds like it is a really great thing to have a single student to teach on-site. Like … oh how great for this one student, but it is not all that great. You sometimes need to have a group to discuss and interact with – that is learning too. (General subject teacher, public provider, municipality 3)

Small classes are not always connected to there being many providers. In small municipalities, a wide range of courses can result in few students enrolled in each course and teachers who are alone in teaching their subjects. This can have consequences for teachers’ pedagogical reflections and opportunities for professional development because the teachers lack colleagues to discuss subject-specific pedagogical issues, such as teaching and assessment. The teachers describe that it is difficult to develop and improve teaching methods when they are alone with their subject. They also see that there is a problem with fair assessment when there is a lack of subject colleagues to make a joint assessment with.

Continuous enrolment, as soon as the need arises

Another characteristic described by the interviewed teachers that we identify as an enactment of flexibility and individualization is how enrolment in courses – i.e. access to education – is organized. As policy on enrolment is rather vague, there is no common practice for this. Some schools offer enrolment in courses four or six times per year; others once a month; and others still once every week. Here, the teachers point to other education actors’ interpretations of flexibility and individualization – in this case, the aim stipulated in national policy texts to offer education to adult citizens ‘as soon as the need arises’ – as an influence on the schools’ local practice.

The Swedish Schools Inspectorate says that we [this school] have quite a low pace. Well, according to the Schools Inspectorate, we should have continuous enrolment during the entire year. And that’s a target that our school doesn’t really meet. […] We enrol students in August, October, January, and March. (General subject teacher, public provider, municipality 4)

Mirroring the pressure for a high study pace, we see that other education actors’ interpretations of flexibility and individualization policy clash with and come to affect the work of teachers in MAE. For instance, having interpreted flexibility and individualization policy from a pedagogical perspective, some schools have translated this policy into four periods of enrolment per year. The Swedish Schools Inspectorate, however, does not view this as flexible enough and puts pressure on schools to offer more frequent opportunities for enrolment, thus affecting the schools’ policy enactment. The continuous intake of students, however, makes it hard to gauge throughflow and student volumes.

Courses fill up with new students almost every month because we have so many admission periods per year. (General subject teacher, private provider, municipality 1)

Since students can enrol anytime, there are not always enough students who want to start at the same time to warrant starting an on-site, classroom-based course. Generally, it seems that, when there are fewer than ten students applying to enrol at the same time, courses tend to be run online.

Here we can see how one enactment of flexibility and individualization affects another. Offering enrolment on a continuous, frequent basis limits the range of study forms that students can choose from. Continuous enrolment also means a high throughflow of adult learners, where students come and go at a high pace and the student body is constantly changing, which has pedagogical consequences. In one example, a teacher tells us about a class they teach, where almost all students are at different points in the course.

We have had three enrolment periods each semester, so students are not always synced or in the same phase of the course because they start at different times. Then, individual students also progress at different paces – some rush through the first part of the course, while others need several weeks to get through [the same content]. So it is very fragmented. Study pace becomes a very individual matter… (General subject teacher, public provider, municipality 3)

The continuous intake of new students means that, despite students gathering as a group in class, teaching is almost exclusively individual. This leaves the teacher with the added difficulty of having to simultaneously divide their attention between many students.

The fact that all the students are in different places in the course and in their learning process, also means that the teachers must shift their focus away from planning lessons and teaching and instead focus on grading and the assessment of learning outcomes.

It gets so fragmented. I have one [student] who is on assignment 1 and another who is on assignment 5 and another who … When you see the list, it’s always… one assignment from each course. When you teach a class of 32 [students], you have copies of the same exam to assess and grade. Now [in this system] you have 50 different assignments and exams to keep track of, so it takes a bit of time to orient yourself – which assignment is this again? (General subject teacher, private provider, municipality 1)

Furthermore, the fact that courses run all year round without a break during holidays, also means that there may be problems with completing certain parts of the courses. For vocational courses in MAE, continuous enrolment can mean that students’ workplace-based learning falls during periods when internships are hard to find, for example during the summer months or over the winter holidays, but that the school is still expected to accommodate this, since courses are short and new students enrol all throughout the year.

Consequences of continuous enrolment

From the teachers’ perspective, the requirements or pressure to ‘follow flexibility and individualisation policy’ is perceived to undermine and remove focus from the core activities of teaching and learning. In response, teachers find different, individual ways of coping with such pressures and confinements. One strategy is to put more responsibility on the students. The teacher in the quote below does not feel stressed by the continuous admission, as he believes that it is up to the students themselves to follow their study pace. He has constructed schedules for different study rates and places great responsibility on the individual student to follow this scheme.

It does not stress me that students show up to class irregularly. Ultimately, it is up to them. I do not set up a personalised study plan for a student that starts, say, in October. I have my general plan that extends over one semester. If a student comes to take the course in ten weeks, I do not make a new plan. Instead, I say ‘here is a plan that stretched over 17 weeks’ or something like that. ‘If you are going to take the course in ten weeks, then you have to make sure that you go at double the pace’. And then they can let me know when they are ready to take an exam and we schedule them in for the next exam slot available. (General subject teacher, public provider, municipality 3)

Putting more responsibility on students can, however, create problems. For instance, not all students are up to the responsibility of planning their studies on their own. Knowing that there are better ways of engaging students in learning but being limited by this seems to frustrate many of the interviewed teachers. The teacher below, for example, believes that more students would have passed the courses if it had been possible to teach students as a group, on-site and thus to gauge whether students understood the content as it was taught.

It is a little too flexible. Without so many enrolment periods, for example, we could have had more on-site teaching. Then, I think, more students would have reached passing grades. At least in my subject area. […] Students who have a bit of a hard time, they would benefit from on-site teaching. So, you [as a teacher] could help them and check that they have understood. [the content] (General subject teacher, private provider, municipality 1)

In short, pedagogical flexibility and individualization, teachers argue, require close contact with the learner and an understanding of their knowledge and needs. However, the current system does not create room for this.

Discussion

Starting from a teacher perspective, this article has sought to explore how flexibility and individualization policies are enacted in adult education and what consequences this has for teaching and learning. As the findings show, the policy requirements for flexible and individualized adult education are enacted in multiple and various ways. Some practices, such as combining vocational and language courses, or prohibiting practice-based courses from being run online, are not very common. Others, such as pushing for a faster and increasing study pace and moving courses online, appear well established and widespread. The results show that flexibility and individualization are mainly interpreted as questions of access in such enactments. Turning to the consequences of this for teaching and learning, a complex picture emerges. Through enactments such as a fast study pace, frequent opportunities for enrolment and online courses, it becomes easier for adult learners to fit education into their lives. This is in line with MAE policymakers’ hope of increasing adult citizens’ access to education (cf. Lumsden Wass, 2004). However, the results also show that this conceptualization of education as something that can be engaged with ‘anytime, anyplace’ has consequences for the quality of teaching and learning, e.g. by causing fragmentation (see also Andersson et al., 2023).

Our findings mirror previous research that has identified individualization as a central theme in contemporary education systems (cf. Barros & Biasin, 2019; Carlgren et al., 2006; Holford, 2016; Kurki et al., 2017). The push for continuous intake and the prevalence of distance education as a study form in MAE make for a learning environment where students rarely meet each other or their teachers, and where interactions mainly occur on an individual basis. As others have argued before us, such learning setups affect teaching practices (Carlgren et al., 2006; Orozco et al., 2023; Samarawickrema, 2005) and encourage both students and their teachers to view learners as self-governing and responsible for their own lifelong learning (Crowther, 2004; Papadopoulos, 2023). In this article, we have shown how the enactment of flexibility and individualization policies leads to teachers interacting very little with students. For on-site courses, this is due to the fast and increasing study pace and the continuous intake, which make it hard for teachers to form meaningful, pedagogical relationships with students. We see that teachers view flexibility and individualization policy enactments as interfering with deep and meaningful learning. Here, time seems to be a resource that affects what becomes possible (Sheail, 2018). A fast and increasing study pace means that both time spent in class engaged in active or direct learning, and time between classes or from course start to finish, is very limited. For online courses, all this is true, with an added physical distance where interaction is mainly confined to email conversations or chats on the school’s digital learning platform. Through this, online students risk becoming ‘mere names on a screen’. Not only do these enactments of flexibility and individualization discourage pedagogical interactions, but they also bring about a sense of fragmentation (Andersson et al., 2023) and alter teachers’ day-to-day work – from classroom interactions with students and similar teaching activities, to sedentary typing in front of a screen; from planning lessons with students’ learning foremost in mind, to administrative tasks such as reporting students’ attendance and test results.

Further, we conclude that the current enactment of individualization and flexibility policies in MAE risks creating a focus on grades rather than knowledge and learning. This is connected both to continuous admission – i.e. to the interpretation of flexibility and individualization as matters of access to education – and to the fast study pace common in MAE. Together, such enactments seem to create a demand from students for fast outcomes. The focus on constant access to fast paced courses that result in grades as soon as possible, encourages a view of education as a necessary hurdle that students must pass to get on with life, rather than as a place or space for knowledge development and skill acquisition. Put differently, students are encouraged by this enactment of flexibility to comport themselves first and foremost as consumers, rather than as learners. With this system having been in place for more than two decades, this has created a general mistrust of grades’ accuracy and a fear of grade inflation (Andersson et al., 2023).

Lastly, we see that these enactments of flexibility and individualization policies lead to teachers experiencing high workloads and low autonomy in making pedagogical decisions. In tandem with increased job precarity for MAE teachers (Holmqvist, 2022), such teaching premisses risk affecting teachers’ professional judgement and the quality of their teaching (Breshears, 2019; Haque & Cray, 2007). Autonomy and discretion to make pedagogical decisions are central to teachers’ work (Mausethagen & Mølstad, 2015) and a prerequisite for flexible, individualized, diverse teaching (Baer, 2021). Previous research on marketization in Swedish MAE has highlighted teachers’ resistance to following pre-made lesson plans and their conviction to make pedagogical decisions based on their professional understanding of what students need to learn (Fejes et al., 2016; Wärvik, 2013). Nevertheless, the pressured teaching conditions made evident by our findings risk incentivizing teachers to become instrumental, take shortcuts, or focus on student progress as a matter of completing assignments and passing courses rather than on what students are and should be learning (Andersson et al., 2023; Lord, 2022). Pedagogical flexibility and individualization are also affected by teachers’ level of ongoing reflection and engagement in professional development (Livingstone, 2018). Working in the fast-paced, fragmented system we have discussed, however, makes it difficult for MAE teachers to engage in professional development and to find space for their own learning.

In conclusion, the contribution of this article is to show how the enactment of individualization and flexibility policies in Swedish MAE favours flexible and individualized access to education over flexible and individualized teaching. Continuous student admission, a fast and increasing study pace, and distance education with little interaction between teachers and learners make it easier for adults to enrol in education and to combine studies with the commitments associated with adult life. However, this comes at the cost of learning, as it creates an educational environment where there is no room for reflection, dialogue, or mistakes. Students who are skilled at managing their studies and completing assignments are not negatively affected by this, but those who are not – who depend on skilled teachers to recognize their pedagogical needs and to support them in their learning – are to fend for themselves in such an education system. More broadly, the study contributes an example of how ‘flexibility’ and ‘individualization’ are multifaceted concepts that could be interpreted in different ways and result in different translations of policy into practice. We argue that such policy enactments matter and deserve our attention, as they frame teachers’ pedagogical discretion and encourage certain enactments at the expense of others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vetenskapsrådet (The Swedish Research Council) under Grant number [2017-03603].

Notes

1. After a recent reform, MAE also includes education for adults with intellectual disabilities, servicing about 3,000 students per year (SNAE, 2023b). However, this part of MAE is not included in the present study due to its recent inclusion into the system.

2. Quotations from the only official English version of the curriculum, which is a translation of the original 2012 version. However, the quotations here are identical in all versions in Swedish except from a minor, formal amendment of a few words in 2022.