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Teachers and schools face multiple demands regarding how they should respond to student diversity. Thus, it is crucial to study these different demands in order to understand how they shape inclusive education in practice. Following this line of reasoning, this article presents an analysis of Swedish educational policy documents, which shows that differentiation policies are constructed as answers to different educational problems, and that these problems are framed by different ideals and assumptions about education. Five different policy approaches to differentiation are described and discussed in relation to the ideal of inclusive education. By studying the Swedish case, the article illuminates how different policy approaches can interact over time within the context of an educational system. The policy approaches can thus be understood as ideal types that can be used in analyses of other educational systems. Implications for inclusive education in Swedish schools are addressed in the article by discussing the conditions for schools' and teachers' enactments of the conflicting policy demands.

This article presents the findings from an interview study with 12 subject teachers and special educators in three Swedish lower secondary schools. The purpose of the study was to explore how school professionals perceive and respond to dilemmas related to inclusive education that require prioritizations between conflicting values, principles or goals. Through the use of conceptual tools and theoretical notions of policy enactment, the article sheds light on how such dilemmas can be played out in practice. Four different dilemmas were discerned in the analysis: special vs. general education settings, external control vs. professional freedom, curricular demands vs. students' needs and individual vs. group. The analysis illustrates how actors' perceptions and responses to dilemmas can be framed by policy demands in different ways, but also by contextual factors and the actors' roles and positions in their schools. In this way, the article provides a partly new understanding of such processes in relation to previous research. Moreover, it is argued in the article that the notion of dilemmas provides an educational dimension that can be an important addition in analyses of policy enactment.

This article presents an analysis of Swedish subject teachers and special educators’ discourses on the teaching of students with different needs in order to study their enactment of inclusive education in relation to competing demands. Drawing on notions of policy enactment, policies are here not only understood as regulatory texts, but also as carriers of discourses with certain ideas of what is common sense or true. In particular, the analysis aims to explore local school actors’ opportunities for resistance towards dominant standards policies that has been argued to constrain inclusive ambitions in schools by promoting competition and standardised goals of performance. Three discourses were discerned in the analysis: a standards discourse, a subject-teaching discourse, and a discourse of well-being, which are discussed in relation to each other and to the idea of inclusive education. While the standards discourse was dominant in the interviews, the analysis also shows how the interviewed teachers and special educators moved between different discourses, which provided some opportunities to challenge standards thinking. However, such resistance was not necessarily connected to a movement towards inclusion.

This article presents a review of qualitative research on interprofessional cooperation between regular teachers and special educators published from 2005 to 2019. The aim of the review was to gain knowledge about how different forms of cooperation take shape and about factors at multiple levels that facilitate or constrain cooperation as a means of achieving inclusion. In total, 25 studies were selected. The results are discussed in relation to Thomas Skrtic's theory of bureaucracies within the school organisation in order to compare and analyse different forms of interprofessional cooperation and schools' organisations of special educational work. Cooperative teaching, special educational consultations and mixed forms of cooperation were found to entail different benefits and challenges related to communication and the cooperating actors' roles. Facilitating factors included personal chemistry, an equal distribution of power and responsibilities and support from the school management through provision of professional development and adequate planning time. In several studies, a flexible cooperation was argued to be hindered by curricular constraints and standardised testing. Education policy is therefore emphasised in this review as important for understanding the conditions under which school staff are responsible for inclusion.