Parallel lines – tensions in teachers’ enactment of the vision of a newly established school in Sweden

ABSTRACT This paper aims to share new knowledge about tensions in establishing a new school in a marketised educational landscape, with a special focus on teachers’ experiences of enacting a highly profiled vision. The paper is based on a single case study using observations, surveys, interviews and document studies. To cover the complex enactment process, we have created a multilayered enactment triangle to analyse the enactment process of the school and strategies the teachers use to realise the vision. To be able to hold on to the vision when the first generation of students arrive, the teachers in this study connect the vision to a more abstract ‘future school’. Meanwhile, in the daily practice in the ‘present school’, they perceive difficulties in working in line with the vision. The relations between teachers and vision and the relations between teachers and students, respectively, become parallel lines. It seems then, that for visionary work to function from the start in a newly established school, all the relations in the enactment triangle, i.e. between the vision and the teachers, the vision and the students, and the teachers and the students, need to be there.


Introduction
When a new school is established, there is a lot to be considered.A number of crucial decisions have to be made, ranging from where the school should be erected, the design of the premises, recruitment of leaders and staff, to whether the school will have a specific orientation of pedagogy (Bunar & Ambrose, 2016;Grote, 2017;Tal & Tubin, 2021;Tubin, 2008).Then comes the crucial moment when the school starts, when the students arrive and the visions and plans are supposed to be translated into everyday practice.Existing research on school establishment defines this as a difficult phase needing careful consideration from the actors in the establishment process (Grote, 2017;Ryan, 2010).
In this paper, we report on the establishment of a new, strongly profiled upper secondary school, with special focus on the teachers' experiences and strategies in the enactment of the school's vision.There is a plethora of research on policy enactment (see e.g.Aldous et al., 2022;Ball et al., 2012;Harris et al., 2020), and some research on school establishment (see e.g.Grote, 2017;Ryan, 2010;Tal & Tubin, 2021;Tubin, 2008).Less attention has been given to the establishment process in terms of enactment of a specific pedagogical vision in a new school.
Since Swedish school market reforms in the 1990s, schools using pedagogical profiles to attract students and to increase their value on the market have become common (Bunar & Ambrose, 2016).Marketisation has had wide-reaching effects in Sweden.The school system has experienced a number of decentralisation reforms in different steps, for instance that municipalities were given an expanded role in financing schools.In Sweden, the 'public schools' are thus organised and financed by the municipalities.In this paper, we refer to them as municipal schools.On this quasi-market there are also tuition-free independent schools, that is for-profit or nonprofit schools owned by companies or foundations, 'financed by the government through a voucher system' (Trumberg & Urban, 2021, p. 570).Today most independent schools are owned by a few large education conglomerates (Fjellman, 2019).The marketised educational landscape in Sweden has led to competition between schools to attract students, which affects both independent schools and municipal schools (Olsson, 2016).
The aim of this paper is to share new knowledge about tensions in establishing a new school in a marketised educational landscape.More specifically, we focus on the teachers' experiences of enacting a highly profiled vision.The teachers are crucial policy actors (Ball et al., 2012), enacting policy in practice in their contact with the students, and therefore it is of interest to study how the teachers deal with the difficult school start phase (Grote, 2017).
To reach this aim, we ask the following questions: • What happens in the establishment process of a new, strongly profiled municipal school, and why? • How do the teachers experience the enactment of the new school?
• What strategies do the teachers use to realise the school's vision, and why do they use those strategies?
The school we study, Newschool, is a municipal school situated in a mid-sized Swedish town where the existing municipal upper secondary schools are popular, which implies that the students-to-be have to compete for admission.Still, the schools compete to attract students (Malmström, 2019;Olsson, 2016).In this marketised educational landscape, to attract students, the school we study has chosen to market itself as a school with an entrepreneurial approach and a 'challenge-based' pedagogy (Newschool, 2017b).The vision of the school, '[w]e solve the challenges of the future now-with knowledge and creativity', functions as an overarching policy.It is supposed to lead everything else that happens at the school-from constructing the new premises and recruiting teachers and students to the individual's appearance in classrooms and graduated students' role in society.
Due to the lack of student places in the municipality (Municipal Council, 2016), the school opened four years before the completion of its architect designed premises.This means that at least the first three cohorts of students both start and finish their studies in preliminary premises.
In this paper, we have a special focus on the difficult phase when the planned school is realised in practice.Since they are on the frontline in the contact with the students, the teachers are in a different position regarding the realisation of the school's pedagogical vision than the school management and other staff.This paper will show that the teachers use strategies to hold on to the vision of the school and at the same time deal with a present situation where the student group is in some respects seen as a barrier to realising the vision.

Previous research
There is a dearth of research on school establishment (Ryan, 2010;Wallace, 2021).A handful of dissertations from the US examine school openings in the US.A majority of these are interview studies investigating principals' responsibilities, activities and experiences of opening a new school (see e. g.Holmes, 2009;Powers, 2007;Santos, 2009).One study involves a survey with 149 teachers about the most important characteristics of principals opening new schools and concludes that teachers, regardless of work experience, state respect as the most important characteristic (Gazell, 2011).In a case study following a new school's first three years of enacting a vision of inclusive practice, Ryan (2010) concludes that the student intake, the rapid growth of the school, and a shift of principals hindered the implementation of the inclusive vision.These American studies all focus on success and effective strategies targeting the role and work of the principal.
In a dissertation exploring more comprehensive perspectives on the establishment of new schools, Grote (2017) studied German private schools, following the establishment process from the moment someone has the idea of a new school to the end of the third school year.According to Grote, the establishment of a school consists of five phases.The first phase is the initiation, where someone has the idea to start a new school and investigates whether anyone else is interested in the idea.The second phase is about negotiation; seeking permission to start the school and beginning to formulate a pedagogical vision.The third phase consists of waiting for and preparing the school start; finding or building a school, getting funding, and appointing interested teachers.The fourth phase is the short but euphoric school start.Then follows the fifth phase, where the pedagogical vision is translated into school-practice; structures are built, the school is re-profiled and delimited.
The everyday capability of the pedagogical vision of a school is tested when it is translated into practice.Phase five is a critical point in Grote's study because the way of talking about the school needs to change from the earlier phases, where the school is promoted and advertised using flattering talk, to phase five, when the complexities of everyday practice have begun.One of the principals in Grote's study fails to change her language in this shift.She continues to talk about the school in a flattering way, which leads to conflict in relation to the staff, who are 'on the floor' experiencing a more complex and sometimes troublesome practice.
Grote's study concerns private schools, which in many cases have been initiated by parents or organisations who wish to start a school that is an alternative to and therefore different from the established school system.Parents might be looking for an alternative for their own children and a school that diverges from their own experiences of schooling.In our study, the school is municipal and in that case part of the established system, but it is still envisioned as new, alternative and different.Tubin (2008) on the other hand, investigates the 'creation process' of two Israeli elementary municipal schools.Like Grote, she pins down different phases in the establishment process.These are 1) building construction and resource achievement, 2) goal prioritisation, 3) staff development, and 4) vision formulation.Unlike Grote, Tubin sees a difference in the chronology of the phases at the two studied schools, and attributes the difference to whether the school is 'new' or 'innovative'.The distinction between 'new' and 'innovative' in Tubin's study is that a new school is established to meet demographic needs or due to disappointment with existing schools.An innovative school, on the other hand, is based on novel pedagogy.At Tubin's 'new' school, the creation process follows the four phases in chronological order.At the 'innovative' school, however, the chronology is reversed.There, the vision formulation comes first and influences the decisions in the other stages.
Prior research on school establishment has focused on principals, rather than on teachers.Therefore, it is important to direct the attention towards teachers' work and experiences in the school establishment process.Wallace (2021) studied how the teachers experienced seven intentional change decisions at a new elementary school and how these changes impacted the new school's culture.Through the analysis of data from both individual and focus group interviews with teachers, she concluded that a sense of belonging is necessary to the development of a positive culture.
In an influential project, Ball et al. (2012) tested and developed ideas about enactment of policy, rather than implementation top-down, through case studies of four state secondary schools.They show how teachers are both subject to and objects of policy.The teachers are supposed to represent policy and to act in accordance with policy, which requires an ongoing process of interpretation and translation.In this process, teachers and other school staff can take different roles; some to facilitate the enactment, such as narrators and entrepreneurs, others to resist whole or parts of policies, such as critics (Ball et al., 2012, pp. 43-71).
In this paper, we draw from policy enactment research and school establishment research to focus on the stages in the establishment process, in particular the teachers' enactment of the vision once the school has opened.The contribution of this paper, compared to previous studies on school establishment, is the focus on teachers' experiences in the school establishment process and the combination of methods, where we do not solely rely on interviews or surveys, but also use observation and document studies.

Conceptual framework
During our initial observations and informal discussions with the teachers we realised that the relations between teachers and the vision, teachers and students, and students and the vision seemed to be central dimensions for understanding the first years of the school.Therefore, as an analytical tool, we have created the multilayered enactment triangle (Figure 1) to grasp both the marketised education landscape and the relations and tensions between vision, teachers and students on a more concrete level.The model is a heuristic device to help us analyse the relations and different layers in the enactment process.It is influenced by the didactic triangle, which emphasises the relations between the subject, the teacher, and the students.In this study, in order to understand the relations between vision, teachers, and students, an analysis of the context is crucial (cf.Ball, 2015).In the model the context is conceptualised as the institutional level and the marketised educational landscape.
A newly established school is affected by forces on various levels.At the inner layer in the enactment triangle are the relations between the vision, which is seen as an actor in its own right (see e.g.Latour, 2007), the teachers, and the students.The next layer is the institutional level; local policies, politicians, administrative leaders in the municipality, school leaders, etc., which influences the enactment process.The outermost layer is the marketised educational landscape on a local, national, and global level, which affects the inner layers, in the model illustrated by an arrow reaching to and from the vision.
As Ball et al. (2012) state, policies could be seen as discursive processes, based on politics, texts and material conditions and negotiated in social interaction.This highlights why the relations are imperative.In our model, first, there are the relations between the different actors in the triangle, and second, there are the relations between the different layers.

Methods and materials
In this section, we describe research design, methods and materials.Finally, we describe methods of analysis and the use of the enactment triangle as an analytic tool.
We have studied this particular school since its launch in 2018 as a single case study, approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Dnr 2020-06272).A case study can be useful to answer how-and why-questions when examining current, new and complex events that lie outside of the control of the researcher (Yin, 2014).A particular benefit of the case study is the possibility to investigate a phenomenon in its context (p.16).Further, a strength of case study research is its ability to trace changes over time (p.151), which is of great value in a study following the establishment of a school over the course of several years.
The establishment of the school has been investigated through interviews with key stakeholders in the municipality and at the school, as well as through document studies, observations of both day-to-day activities and special events at the school.We have followed the school at its different temporary premises, reviewed various political and school internal documents and also used questionnaires and interviews with students and teachers.
Inspired by the bottom-up approach of the letter-method (Berg, 2003), the questionnaires have contained few but open questions.We asked the teachers: 'What is it like to work at Newschool?', and 'Why did you apply for a job at Newschool?'The students were asked similar questions: 'What is it like to be a student at Newschool?', and 'Why did you choose to apply to this school?'.This allowed us to pose why and how questions, despite using a survey method, which is usually more limited to who, what, where, how much etc (Yin, 2014, p. 9).
As desirable in case study research, we use several sources of evidence.The data analysed in this paper contains of: (1) fieldnotes from lessons, project weeks, staff meetings, graduation ceremonies, open days, inaugurations, (2) transcribed semi-structured interviews with the principal, the school director in the municipality, and eight students, (3) two questionnaires with all staff at the school, one conducted in 2020 (30 respondents) and one in 2021 (21 respondents), (4) a questionnaire with all the last year students in 2021 (71 respondents), (5) political protocols, official reports and internal working documents such as different assessments, policies and quality reports.
In the analysis, Grote's (2017) and Tubin's (2008) studies have been important since they provide multifaceted longitudinal perspectives on the school establishment process.We have compared the establishment of Newschool with patterns in their studies.Further, the enactment triangle (Figure 1) was used to study the relations between vision, teachers, and students (i.e. the triangle in the model).To understand the tensions that the teachers experience, the outer layers in the model also have to be taken into account.We draw from the study by Ball et al. (2012) of how schools do policy.This is a perspective that does not see policy as something more or less implemented, but as something that is continuously enacted.Moreover, the importance of taking the context into consideration is highlighted.
Our data has been analysed through the different layers in the enactment triangle, and through the different relations in the triangle we have been able to create and interpret patterns in the material.We have worked with explanation building but also looked for rival explanations (Yin, 2014).The three authors have functioned as critical friends (Petroelje Stolle et al., 2019), constantly checking and discussing each other's analyses.
The fact that our data collection takes place as the establishment process is ongoing means that the actors' interpretations of their experiences are probably more open than when shared narratives of the school start and enactment of the vision are formed.On the other hand, a possible drawback is that the actors might not have had the opportunity to reflect on the events from a distance.

Results
The results section is chronologically structured, following Grote's five phases of school establishment, notwithstanding the fact that the process is not linear, but rather a bit messier than accounted for here.Thus, in the first section, the planning stages, the time before the school starts, are analysed.Then follows a section on what was supposed to be the euphoric school start (Grote, 2017), and the unforeseen events the staff, especially the teachers, had to grapple with.The final section deals with the teachers trying to come to terms with unfulfilled expectations, still holding on to the vision.

Planning stages: the vision, the building and the recruitment of teachers
Newschool is situated in a part of Sweden where 37 municipalities have a joint agreement aiming to make it possible for students to apply to any upper secondary school in the area, regardless of in which municipality they live.The upper secondary schools in the town where our school is situated, are extremely popular, probably due to the long tradition of the town's university.For this reason, many students apply to the schools.This in turn leads to difficulties in school placement for the local young people.They risk being involuntarily pushed out to upper secondary schools in other, less attractive, municipalities if their grades are too low.
In the initiation phase, the idea about a new school had to do with the need for more student places (Municipal Council, 2016).During the second phase, the negotiation phase, there was a political and public debate which ended with a decision in the municipal council about building the new school and the location of it.In the municipal school director's reflections on this process, it seems as if he sees decisions in the initial phases as strategic steps on a market: I often say that there are three important factors to take into consideration when starting a new school: the location, the location, and the location.With five different municipal upper secondary schools, we compete with ourselves but also with private schools and other municipalities (Interview with the municipal school director, 2021-02-04).
As the director states, there is a competition between the municipal schools, the private schools and other municipalities.The marketised educational landscape, the outer layer in the model, pressures the schools to do their utmost to attract students.This is why location is pronounced; the school needed to be built near the city centre.But location is not enough.The school had to have its unique orientation.Early in the process the school director handpicked a project-leader from one of the other municipal schools.According to the school director, the task of the project-leader was to shape and profile the new school to make it competitive in the school market (Interview with the municipal school director, 4 February 2021).Later, the project-leader also got the position as principal in competition with other applicants.The principal was thus involved in the planning of the school from the early stages.As a project leader, she had a leading position in formulating the school's pedagogical profile and the vision of the school: 'We solve the challenges of the future now-with knowledge and creativity'.There was no need to attract funding because of the school's status as a municipal, publicly financed school.However, there was a need for a new school building, since there were no existing premises in the city that could accommodate the more than 1500 students that were expected.An architectural competition was launched and won by one of the most famous architectural firms in Sweden (Newschool, 2017a).
Rather than keeping the categories 'new' and 'innovative' apart, as in Tubin's study (Tubin, 2008), to understand the establishment of Newschool, we need to bring them together.This school is a 'new' school in Tubin's sense because the idea to start a school stemmed from demographic needs (the lack of student places).However, the vision of the school was formulated very early in the planning stages and contained supposedly novel pedagogy (Newschool, 2017b).Thus, the school is both 'new' and 'innovative', in Tubin's terms, at the same time.
Late in 2017 the municipal board decided that it could not wait for the new school building to be finished.The need for new student placements was too urgent.The school would open the next autumn, four years before the new and modern schoolhouse was built, and move between different temporary premises during the first years, which means that at least the first three generations of students would both start and finish their studies in preliminary premises (Municipal Council, 2017).
In the recruitment of teachers for Newschool, emphasis was on the school's profile and vision.In the job advertisements, it is stated that the teachers should be prepared to centre their teaching around current challenges in society and to cooperate with external actors.
Newschool is a brand new municipal upper secondary school focused on creativity, agency and entrepreneurship.Together, we take the first steps towards creating a better future, for both you and others.Planning [of the school] and an architectural competition for the school building are underway, but the school will start long before the school building is finished (Job advertisement 2018-02).
The principal describes the situation as exceptionally positive: It is probably the dream situation for most principals to get to start a school on the basis of a clear pedagogical vision.I, personally, see myself as more of a developer and entrepreneur than as a manager of a full-fledged organisation.[. ..]Employing all staff on the basis of a joint, explicit idea is a fantastic opportunity.
The use of the concept entrepreneur is not clearly defined in the quote above.In the school's internal and official material, expressions such as entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial education etc. are seldom given a concrete pedagogical meaning.
Entrepreneurship has gained ground in education during the recent decades.The increasing popularity has been related to neoliberal, market-oriented policies (Åström Rudberg, 2022).There is, however, a scholarly discussion about defining entrepreneurship in education.Lackéus (2018) identifies three different approaches: the first is about starting businesses, the second about making the students more creative and opportunity-oriented, and the third about value creation for others.This complexity of the concept is also observed in other research that has emphasised the lack of a clear definition of an entrepreneurial leader (Mockler et al., 2023;Yemini et al., 2015).
Alignment with the vision seems to have been of importance in the selection of teachers.In the survey directed at all staff at the school, 19 out of 27 respondents answered that the vision and profile of the school was a decisive factor when deciding to apply for a job at the school.One of the teachers puts it like this: T30: The profile of the school, emphasising collaboration and entrepreneurship, appealed to me.I wanted to contribute to the build-up of a really good school that dares to think and act outside the box.I wanted to work together with other people wanting the same thing.I thought that we, who apply to this school, head in the same direction.
The quote attests to the important relation between vision and teachers, as well as the influence of the institutional level, that is the local policies and the school leaders, for the enactment process.Additionally, the headmaster's vision, as exemplified in the quote above, reaches out to the outermost layer in the enactment triangle, the marketised educational landscape, in its orientation towards pedagogical trends on a global level, such as entrepreneurship, challenge-based learning and collaboration.In the empirical material there are no signs of the vision being formulated with an ear to the inner parts of the model, that is, the students' and, possibly, parents' interests.It seems to have been taken as a given that entrepreneurship, challenge-based learning and collaboration would appeal to potential students.The vision, however, probably does not reflect the students' and their parents' ideas of what schooling is about.Since the school is located in a longestablished university town, perhaps traditional academic values would be more appealing to them.

School start: things not going according to plan
The school opened its doors in 2018, located in the basement of a lower secondary school, and the first generation of 158 students arrived.Regarding the school start, there is a pattern in the material suggesting that the student group was not the expected one.This is something that most of the teachers at the school comment on in the questionnaires in response to the question on what it is like to work at Newschool.A majority of the teachers write that the students need much support, owing to a lack of study habits and motivation, as well as neurodevelopmental disorders.Some write about the disappointment and low self-esteem students at the school feel because they wanted to go to another school but due to too low grades did not get a place: 'Many of the students arriving the first year did not have Newschool as their first choice of school, which led to a sense of failure and the feeling that they did not want to attend Newschool' (T11).
One teacher writes that some of the students did not get a place at popular vocational programmes and ended up at Newschool's theoretical/academic programmes because that was their only option if they wanted to stay in the city.The programmes at Newschool are considered 'too academic' for them: T31: Another challenge is the fact that a large part of the students attending the school at the moment are not motivated to study.Some of them had applied for vocational programs [at another of the municipal upper secondary schools in the city] but did not get a place there because of low grades.When Newschool started, we had places available here and thus they got a place at programmes that are too theoretical and academic.We have some problems with bad behaviour from their side.
In an internal assessment from summer 2019 the first year is described as tough and difficult: Everyone was new to the organisation at the beginning, which created instability and some anxiety.The workload was heavy, mainly because of so-called 'tough' students in combination with too few resources . . .Dip in October/November when some teachers resigned (Newschool, 2019).
What we see in these quotes is that the expectations of the teachers on the student cohort were not realised.This could have led to a strengthened focus on working in line with the vision to get the students 'on board' and uplift them, but instead, the relations between teachers and students seem to have fallen into old patterns of more traditional subject teaching, special education needs and disciplinary actions.The belief in entrepreneurial ideas and challenge-based pedagogy seemingly wavered when obstacles were met, even though these students would perhaps be most likely to benefit from the pedagogy (DeJaeghere & Baxter, 2014).The entrepreneurial and challenge-based ambitions do not permeate through the school; several of the teachers mention in the questionnaires that the visionary work is reduced to a couple of thematic project weeks per semester.
The relations between the teachers and the students, then, became different than expected.In addition, the relation between the students and the vision was also a challenge-in our interviews there is only one student who is familiar with the vision, and that pattern repeats itself in the student survey: not a single student mentions the vision.When the students explain why they chose to study at Newschool most of them either talk about it as a negative choice due to their grades, or that they were attracted by the opportunity to attend a new and relatively small school.The vision does not seem to have influenced their choice of school.
Adding to the feeling of disengagement among students, a group of students left the school during the first semester because they suddenly got a place at a school they had ranked higher in their application.According to the teachers, the defections had a negative effect on the efforts to build a school culture characterised by entrepreneurial spirit and agency.One of the teachers expressed the loss of students with relatively good grades, as a 'loss of pillars'.The lost students could be seen to jeopardise the important relation between students and teachers needed to create a campus ethos (Kezar, 2007) built on the vision.

Coping: holding on to the vision
In this situation, where the school is planned and marketed with a strong profile and pedagogical vision but the advent of the first generation of students creates dissonance, many teachers express themselves as if there were two schools.One is the school of the vision, present in statements as 'We are the school of the future', and the other, parallel, school is the current situation, where the students need so much support that it, according to the teachers, becomes difficult to use the visionary pedagogy they believe in and have planned for.One teacher describes the school as in the process of 'becoming the school we are supposed to be': T39: It [working at Newschool] is challenging and sometimes strenuous because relatively many of our students have great difficulties managing theoretical studies at upper secondary level.Mentoring and classroom management take up a large part of your time.It is important to shift between the perspectives 'building a school for the students we have at the present' and 'building good conditions to become the school we are supposed to be in the future'.
In the teachers' way of speaking about the school, the relations between the vision and the teachers are often strong.The following excerpt is from a teacher who writes that the school's vision and ideas hopefully will succeed in the future, hinting at the fact that they have not succeeded yet: The pattern of thinking about the present school as something other than the future school is also expressed in more subtle ways as in the following citation from another teacher, who describes work as trying to create a school that attracts other students than the present ones: T23: Being part of something new where you can set the framework for the future is exciting.It is also exciting to be a part of creating a school that students want to apply to because of something, instead of being the new school to which the students can apply because it is an unknown school with lower admission points.
Another teacher experiences a competition over time between planning and visions for the new school and solving the present issues at the school: T43: The fact that some necessary routines are not in place stresses me out.Sometimes I do not know what is expected of me, particularly to what extent I am supposed to do things.Planning and visions for the future enterprise are constantly craving attention, but in everyday life, you need to solve what's in your hands there and then.
As the quotes illustrate, despite the strong relations between the teachers and the vision, the student group's needs and disinterest in the vision bring other challenges to the forefront than the challenges of the vision's challenge-based pedagogy.None of the teachers suggest that the pedagogical vision could be a strategy to support students or a solution to challenging behaviour.The relation between teachers and students, then, is characterised by relational work rather than enacting the vision.
Analysed with the enactment triangle, the relation between teachers and students is linear in the base, while the students' relation to the vision is broken.In this situation, the teachers' relation to the vision is separated from their relation to the students.These two relations become parallel lines, which we will return to in the discussion.
In the internal assessment document from summer 2019 this tendency is visible (Newschool, 2019).In the document, a proposal is also presented, stating that the school's assistant principals should be given the opportunity to focus on the current situation while the principal can continue working with the future vision.According to the document, improving the current situation includes working with concrete measures to improve the students' behaviour.
From the students' perspective, the teachers' division between the current school with its challenges and the future school, built on the vision, is not visible.Strikingly, the teachers' struggle in between the two schools is not noticed by the students.Students in the study comprehensively relate that the teachers are doing a good job and that they are there for them in the present.However, when it comes to the school management at the institutional level, one of the students describes the situation as if the administration is already working in the future school, but not the present one.They are in meetings related to the school establishment in the future premises.According to this student, the school management is interested in asking students about what they think about the future of the school, but they are not that interested in problems the students are experiencing in their current school situation: S1: It has been more difficult at this school to get hold of the school administration and guidance counsellors/ . . ./my guess is that it is because they have worked on the start-up of the school and had meetings with politicians and so on.[. ..]My experience is that they are more difficult to get hold of if it is a problem that concerns me.I mean, the school management has asked us a lot about things they want to know.But if we have had a problem we want to talk to them about, it has been hard to get hold of them.
This excerpt gives the impression that the school management can disappear into the school of the future, whereas the teachers need to stay put with the current students.The position of the teachers is thus different compared to the school management, which could be a reason that the teachers need to visualise two different schools to be able to hold on to the vision.

Discussion: parallel lines
This study focuses on teachers' experiences in the establishment of a new school and their strategies regarding the enactment of the school's strong vision.Our first research question concerns what happened in the establishment of this new strongly profiled municipal school, and why.In our case, the school, having to compete on the marketised educational landscape of the municipality, was believed to need to have its own profile in the process of attracting students.In this sense, the school's vision necessarily had to come from above.However, since the vision was not renegotiated when the school started, the vision underwent a somewhat strange enactment process where it was preserved at an institutional and discursive level but not entirely present in practice.
In response to our second research question, 'How do the teachers experience the enactment of the new school?', the teachers experience a strong sense of belonging and unification in relation to the school's vision, but there is a dissonance in relation to the students.
Regarding the strategies used by the teachers to realise the school's vision, our third research question, the analysis renders visible that to be able to hold on to the vision when the first generation of students arrive, the teachers connect the vision to the 'future school' rather than the present.The teachers claim they have to work on the relations with the students in order not to experience chaos.This implies that the visionary work is kept apart from the day-to-day work in the classroom, since the students' relation to the vision is lacking.In the enactment triangle, this could be illustrated by taking away the relation between the students and the vision as in Figure 2.
The fact that the students' relation to the vision is missing is illustrated in Figure 3 as a collapse of the triangle.Surprisingly, the teachers do not function as a link between the students and the vision.Rather, the relations between teachers and vision and the relations between teachers and students, respectively, become parallel lines, where the former is connected to the school of the future and the latter to the present situation and students.
It seems then, that for visionary work to function from the start in a newly established school, all the lines in the triangle, i.e. the relations between the vision and the teachers, the vision and the students, and the teachers and the students, need to be there.
A possible explanation for the missing link between the students and the vision, illustrated in Figure 3 as a collapse of the enactment triangle, is that the teachers planned to enact the vision together with the students, a student group they had imagined as interested in the vision and with a certain amount of academic capital, just like other comparable student groups in the town.When these students did not apply to the school, the teachers failed to become the link between the vision and the unexpected student group.And perhaps the school management misjudged the school market in the town when they enticed with entrepreneurship instead of the more traditional academic values that the town rests upon.The small number of students who had the school as their first choice would possibly attest to such an interpretation.Our study messes up the chronology of the school establishment in both Tubin's and Grote's studies.Compared to Grote's chronology, Newschool oscillates between phase 5, the enactment phase that inevitably occurs after the school opens, and phase 3, waiting and planning for the new school.Newschool has started.At the same time, it has not yet started.A renegotiation of the vision does not really occur-it is kept intact.The school can be in two phases simultaneously.
The same pattern occurs in relation to Tubin's (2008) research on starting new versus innovative schools.Applying Tubin's results to this study, Newschool starts as an innovative school.First, the vision is set and then a vision-friendly staff is recruited.The following steps should be goal prioritisation and, finally, building construction.But in this goal prioritisation step the enactment of Newschool's vision is being challenged.In relation to the students, the teachers seem to think that they have to make priorities in a way that endangers, or at least pauses, the enactment of the vision in the daily pedagogical practice.In the teaching and the relational work with the students, the teachers deal with more urgent issues such as disciplinary problems and students with different learning difficulties.In this work, they do not use the vision.It becomes more pressing to help the students pass grades than to solve the problems of tomorrow.The fourth phase in Tubin's model, the building construction, in our case runs parallel to the goal prioritisation of the third step, rather than following after it.In the work on the construction of the school building, the school management can preserve the vision for the future, while the teachers at the same time work with the students in the present.
According to Ball et al. (2012), '/t/he teacher subject is constructed in a network of social practices which are infused with power relations' (p.211).Teachers act on policy based on local circumstances but they are not autonomous subjects.At Newschool, we can see that when there are strong tensions between enactment of the vision and everyday practice, the teachers start to separate the school's vision from what they consider as more acute short-term goals and professional considerations on a daily basis.Most of them continue to believe in the vision, but put it aside while trying to facilitate the education of their present students.
The teachers and the school management are all recruited on the basis of the school's pedagogical vision, which creates a sense of belonging and contextual resonance (Rosenberg, 1977;cf., Ryan, 2010) among the staff.In questionnaires, interviews and fieldnotes, the staff give the impression of agreeing with the vision and also consider it as an important unifying factor among the teachers.A striking aspect in relation to Grote's and Tubin's studies is that there is no re-negotiation and development of the vision; it stays intact, even after the school starts.But using the vision to recruit students did not seem to work.This creates a dissonance between teachers, who have applied to the school because of the vision and wish to work in line with it, and students, who are there for a different reason.In relation to the students, the teachers adjust their teaching to what they believe are the students' needs, interests and attitudes, which leads to a continued weak relation between the students and the vision.This leaves us with a situation where the vision is kept intact, but separate from the day-to-day teaching.
Our focus on relations in the study means that we do not go into detail about the content of the teaching, which could also be an important factor in the enactment process.Due to the fact that we have only interviewed and observed teachers and students who stayed at the school the first years, a limitation is that we cannot say for sure why the student and staff who left the school did so.A suggestion for further research would thus be to find and interview the defectors.
In earlier research on school establishment, the enactment process is rather linear.Our paper points towards areas in need of supplementary exploration-most obviously there is a need for studies that further theorise the complexity and non-linearity of policy enactment in school establishment processes.In this, the enactment triangle can be a helpful analytical tool to investigate how various forces influence the enactment processes.The triangle could for example be used to analyse establishment processes of schools where the recruitment of the staff is not aligned to the vision, or already established schools that start enacting new overarching policies.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. The enactment triangle with the missing relation between the students and the vision.