In times of global competition there has been a growing demand for reliable evidence among national policy makers to raise educational performances. The challenge they face has to do with gathering and evaluating the relevant sources to include, often produced by different actors operating at different policy levels. In this paper we examine what official policy knowledge was selected and used as the evidence base for the latest Swedish compulsory school reform and how they were used to legitimate national reforms. The three research questions are: How do Swedish policy-makers draw on national and regional/international knowledge in formulating a Swedish education policy reform? What knowledge sources count as evidence in the 2015/2018 educational reform? What sort of reform does the Swedish 2015/2018 reform represent?

The empirical data consists of one white paper and eight green papers, together making up the official evidence base for the reform and the nine source documents of the study. Using text-based network analysis, the citations and references in the source documents have been examined in order to find the social structures of policy coalitions, and interpret the various epistemic discourse coalitions they make up. The preliminary result shows that every document draws heavily on evidence, and that although the OECD plays a special (and unusual) role in this school reform since the Swedish government themselves turned to the OECD asking for guidance in setting the goals for the national educational reform agenda, domestic policy still plays an important role at the national levels. Looking at the Swedish case