In the Nordic curriculum theory tradition, questions linked to educational reforms and school governance have long been a crucial research issue (Lindensjö & Lundgren, 2000; Englund, 1986; Wahlström & Sundberg, 2018). The mainly focus in this tradition has over time been on the relationship between changed societal conditions and (trans-)national school policy and its implications for local school practice. However, less attention has been paid to the processes that occur between the national political decision level and the national school agency level. That is, national educational policy and state policy directives must often, in a first step, be interpreted and operationalized by a national school agency in more concrete school reforms and programs before they are implemented at the local schools.

In this study, the implementation of a national large-scale school improvement program in Sweden, “Collaboration for the best school as possible” (CBSP) has been used as an empirical case. Based on a neo-institutional theoretical point of departure (e.g. Scott, 2001, 2008) in combination of sense-making theory (e.g. Weick, 1995, 2001) this paper aims to explore the state governance of the CBSP and how officials at the state agency level made sense of the ideas behind the reform and operationalized them in policy actions. Officials of the Swedish National Agency for Education (SNAE) were interviewed. This interview data in combination of Swedish Government Official Reports and formal directives from the Ministry of Education were analyzed to identify how regulatory rules, professional norms and cultural–cognitive beliefs shaped SNAE’s design of the program. 

The results show how different types of governance logics (i.e. regulatory rules, professional norms and cultural–cognitive beliefs) set the direction for managing the CBSP. In particular, the lack of clear regulatory directives enabled Officials’ sensemaking processes, clearly influenced by normative ideas and cultural–cognitive beliefs.