How anti-discrimination legislation becomes a solution for education

a policy analysis of the development of the Child and School Student Protection Act

Abstract

Legal concepts such as discrimination and degrading treatment have gained increasingly prominent positions within education during the 2000s. This development can be understood as a consequence of the introduction of the Child and School Student Protection Act in 2006, in which these incidents were banned. In this article, the Child and School Student Protection Act is understood as part of a larger shift towards a so-called juridification of education with an increased focus on individual rights that can be claimed through legal processes. Despite the fact that the Child and School Student Protection Act has significantly changed the conditions for education in several ways, little attention has been paid to how the regulations on discrimination became part of this act, and thereby a solution for education.

Against this background, the overall aim of the study is to examine the emergence of the Child and School Student Protection Act by placing the regulations on discrimination in the foreground and specifically examine how anti-discrimination legislation is constructed as a solution for education in the policy process. Based on critical policy analysis and a What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) approach, problem representations are analyzed in a chain of policy texts from 2002-2006.

The results show that anti-discrimination legislation was made possible as a solution for education through an active political practice in which Sweden used the EU to make new legislation for education, in which EU directives on discrimination were given influence over education. In this shift, education was given a democratic mission on a legally guaranteed liberal-democratic basis, in harmony with other EC legislation on discrimination - a jurified democratic mission with the fight against discrimination as central, where education was democratized through juridification. In the policy process, a national policy development towards a juridification of education became intertwined with national and international expansion of discrimination legislation as a basis in the Swedish liberal democracy.