International education policy highlights career guidance as a pivotal tool for improving pupils’ educational choices and facilitating educational transitions for integration into labour markets. Employing Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) approach, this paper critically examines the assumptions underlying policy constructions of educational choice as a problem, and the positioning of guidance as a solution to uninformed choices within Swedish educational discourse. The study focuses on education policy for compulsory and upper secondary schools in Sweden, drawing on empirical data from policy documents spanning 1992 to 2022, including curricula, Government Official Reports, and evaluations conducted by authorities. We demonstrate that the dominant problem representation places pupils’ cognitive abilities at the centre of educational choice, highlighting their capacity to transcend social norms and thereby promote social mobility. The policy discourse individualises responsibility for educational transitions and constructs a division among pupils based on their perceived ability to make informed choices. As a result, compensatory guidance efforts are tailored to individuals along this divide. It is argued that such a policy framing risks perpetuating inequalities in educational transitions and social mobility.

This article aims to explore perceptions of learning outcomes, central professional competence, and the profession among students graduating from the higher education programme in career guidance and counselling in Sweden. The empirical data consists of semi-structured interviews with 22 students graduating in career guidance and counselling. The students consider individual career guidance counselling to constitute the heartland of the professional practice and emphasise practical competence, or know-how, learned in courses in conversation methodology and workplace learning. They find that the substance, or know-what, of career guidance counselling, such as knowledge of education systems and the labour market, needs to be learned in professional practice as it is specific to the organisation and workplace. They argue that their profession has a low status in society and that career guidance counsellors are expected to display professionalism and establish a basis for trust and legitimacy in the workplace.

Regulating private actors within education systems remains a highly contested issue. In recent years, the Swedish government has introduced proposals to impose restrictions on profit-making and increase control over private actors in education, known as independent schools. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s framework of ‘orders of worth’, this study investigates how a non-profit and a for-profit private actor in education justify their roles in education and navigate the uncertainty introduced by proposed regulatory changes. The empirical material consists of debate articles published in newspapers by these actors, intending to examine how private actors justify or critique the suggested reforms. The analysis focuses on the arguments and claims made, and the various higher principles within education used to support them. While the for-profit and non-profit actors offer contrasting perspectives on their respective roles in education, their justifications are mostly situated within the civic, market, and industrial orders of worth, albeit blended and coordinated in different ways. This is a strategy for temporarily reducing uncertainty. Examining debates surrounding education reforms through the orders of worth framework highlights moral principles, compromises over educational values, and the tensions that emerge between them. This approach provides a nuanced understanding of disagreements within education policy.

This paper presents a framework for understanding epistemic injustice in career development theory and practice. It is based on Fricker's philosophical conceptualisation of epistemic injustice and its sub-forms of hermeneutical and testimonial injustice. The intention is to generate insights that direct us to injustices embedded in knowledge production and institutional practices that harm a person's capacity as a knower. Moreover, the intellectual-ethical virtue of mitigating epistemic injustice and how this virtue can be enacted in the context of career guidance are discussed. I argue that epistemic justice approaches contribute to intellectual and ethical dimensions of social justice and there is a need to examine distinct forms of injustices of knowing manifested in the knowledge of career development and career guidance practice.

This article investigates the professional integration of a group of newly arrived teachers, mainly from Syria, who participated in the labour market Fast-track programme in Sweden, which aims at facilitating quicker pathways to teaching positions. Drawing on the institutional perspective, our analysis focuses on formal and informal institutional conditions that hinder or enable newly arrived teachers in their striving for legitimacy as professional teachers. Analysis of focus group interviews and observations show that despite their professional experiences there are limits to their prior professional skills and competences being recognized within the Swedish school. The main institutional challenges identified were acquiring Swedish, understanding and managing the pupil-centred curriculum and its associated communication skills and taking on the facilitator teacher role. Handling and negotiating these challenges are important for gaining recognition as professional teachers, which, it seems, influences their opportunities for employment. To afford them opportunities for professional socialization, it is important to enable them to become acquainted with, handle and negotiate institutional conditions within a new school culture. In contrast to the quick-fix view of European integration policy, our study shows that the professional integration process takes time and includes a socialization process.