Mellan mål och praktik - Det skolsociala arbetet bortom nationella dokument

Sammanfattning

In Sweden, there is a problem with school absenteeism, an issue characterised by a lot of complexity and no clear solution. ‘School social teams’ is a relatively new policy initiative used to address absenteeism through structured collaboration between schools and social services. This study aimed to examine how school social teams are described and understood in both national documents and by professionals working within the teams in Sweden to understand how these guidelines are translated into practice. Furthermore, we examined how professionals reason about governance within the framework of school social work. We used a qualitative method to answer our research questions. Firstly, we analyzed and thematized two national documents describing the goals and working methods of school social teams, which formed the basis of our interview guide. Secondly, we collected a total of five semi-structured interviews. The material was analyzed through the lens of Liljegren and Parding's article on occupational- and organizational professionalism and Michael Lipsky's theory of Street-level bureaucracy and his term discretion. Our results show the importance of preventative work, professional collaboration, and relationship work in school social work. The results indicate that the national documents mostly described the goals of school social work rather than providing detailed working methods. This leads to a high professional discretion in their practice. Results have also displayed that the governance is more characterized by an occupational professionalism, where the professionals have a high degree of discretion and influence over how the work translates into practice. Results have also shown that the professionals see both opportunities and limitations with their kind of governance.