This article aims to chart a new critical geography of elite schooling by comparing the importance of space and place in elite schooling in the UK, Canada, and Sweden. We do so to illuminate the present patterns and historical developments of elite schooling in each of the three countries while highlighting the role of geography. We build on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of elite education by developing its spatial sensitivities and begin to theorise how national and local places and contexts matter to the formation and entrenchment of elite schooling in an era of neoliberal privatisation in our increasingly globalising world.

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.

Principals have been identified as key actors for students’ performance. Accordingly, how leaders affect classroom activities has also emerged as a research field. One basic argument is that principals should focus on activities that can affect students’ learning outcomes. In particular, they should develop their instructional leadership, close to the core activities of teaching. However, schooling does not only consist of classroom activities – students, teachers and other professionals spend a lot of time in school long after the bell has rung. In this chapter we explore the potential benefits of considering schools not only as places for knowledge production towards academic achievement, but as a whole study environment that includes multiple spheres of activity and learning. We argue that, while the inner sphere is given a lot of leadership attention, there are several reasons for principals to also discover what we call the outer and middle spheres of schools and education. We consider the complexity of the local school context as the fundamental but forgotten, or unexplored, aspect of school leadership. 

During the early 1990s Sweden underwent extensive educational reforms. Vouchers, freedom of choice, establishment of so-called “free-schools” together with far-reaching decentralization took the place of a highly centralized educational system, with few private schools and a very low degree of differentiation. A stated intention of these reforms was that freedom of choice as well as a greater number of educational options would level the playing field. It was believed that existing regulations hampered socially disadvantaged students and, by extension, opportunities for social and geographical mobility. Educational marketization has advanced and intensified since the 1990s, particularly in metropolitan areas and medium-sized cities. This is evident both in the increasing number of schools and in students commuting to inner city schools, and additionally in the continuous development of marketing strategies. Consequently, marketization has become an institutionalized part of Swedish education, and students and schools must equally adjust to the prevailing competitive conditions. Much of the research in the field has focused on the effects and extension of marketization and how free-schools and school choice affect socially vulnerable areas. However, instead of focusing on schools in socially vulnerable areas, I am interested in the schools at the top of the hierarchy and the elite segment of upper secondary schools in Stockholm. More precisely, the focus of this dissertation has been on how three sought-after and prestigious upper secondary schools position themselves in the educational market, but also how they are affected by and adjust to it. A further aim has been to analyse students’ educational strategies and the socialization processes that arise in their encounter with the schools as institutions. 

This thesis has been guided by a theoretically inspired ethnography. The ethnographical data were primarily collected during a single academic year and within three separate elite upper secondary schools. The data set consists of observations in classrooms and other school-related spaces (meeting rooms, corridors etc.), interviews and data from official statistics. It also contains a wide array of documents, web sites, school magazines, anniversary books and photographs.  

Using a Bourdieusian perspective, the analysis shows how both schools and students deploy strategies to cope with and adapt to the hierarchies and struggles of the contemporary educational market. The schools rely on accumulated institutionalized assets such as history, alumni, transfers to prestigious universities and their geographical locations. At the same time, they also need to provide an up-to-date educational setting to stay ahead, and moreover, to be able to collaborate and compete with the other elite schools. The analysis also illustrates why students choose these socially and academically selective schools and how they adjust to the school environment. It is illuminated that these schools are more than formal educational settings, they are places where students negotiate, debate, explore and develop soft skills. Nevertheless, they are also competitive school environments and while some students thrive, others struggle. This becomes apparent when they encounter and act in relation to the different social, symbolic and academic boundaries that exist in each school.

This article examines how the outcome of neoliberal educational reforms has affected urban schooling in the inner city of Stockholm - making it into a centralized nexus or a hot-spot' for students and schools. The aim is to analyse how geographical place and space have become major distinctive criteria in inner-city students' educational strategies, as well as a comparative advantage for upper-secondary schools in the fierce in-between school competition. The data consist of interviews with close to 120 participants, official statistics and marketing from 55 inner-city upper-secondary schools. Our findings suggest that the growing commodification and upward socio-spatial homogenization of the inner city both affect the way schools use spatial representations in their marketing and also the strategies deployed by students in their school choice.