In educational research, educational policy is often discussed in terms of events, time and space connected to international and national arenas (e.g. Lawn & Grek 2012, Meyer & Benavot 2013, Rizvi & Lingard 2010). In this paper, the contextualization of policy is instead the local arena. The paper examines local responses of transnational/national policy at a classroom level. The study can be viewed as a response to two of the questions posed at the website of NW 23: “How do we conceptualise and understand the procedures and constraints of policy making at the local level?” and “How is policy received, perceived and used by different social actors?” [e.g. the teachers]. The paper is part of the project ‘Understanding curriculum reforms: a theory-oriented evaluation of the Swedish curriculum reform Lgr 11’, financed by the Swedish Research Council. The purpose of the paper is to explore how education policy, both enabled and constrained by transnational policy flows as well as national policy built up by social, cultural and historical traditions, is enacted through curriculum on the classroom level, in terms of ‘curriculum events’ (Doyle 1992). More specifically, the aim is to explore how policy rationality embedded in the structure and content of curriculum transforms into a specific rationality of classroom teaching. The research questions are: How can classroom discourse be understood as part of a wider context of education policy codified through curriculum? What different rationalities, linked to education policy as enacted in curriculum, may underlie certain patterns of teaching repertoires?