Förskolesystemets framväxt

Today, Sweden has one of the world's most extensive pre-school sectors, where a larger proportion of all children under school age spend more hours in pre-school than children in most other countries (OECD 2019). To understand and explain this fact, the expansion of the Swedish preschool and the emergence of a system where parents can choose between different kinds of preschools in one kind of market are two decisive, and partly interconnected, processes.

In this chapter, these two lines of development will first be presented separately before they are related to each other in the concluding part of the chapter. In this way, it is also possible to explain how the expansion of preschools, where not only the number of preschools increased but also the percentage of children in preschools became larger, to some extent contributed to the creation of a preschool market, and how the preschool market also contributed to enabling the political decisions that the extensive the Swedish preschool sector demanded. To explain this development, we will use concepts such as path dependency (path dependency) and sequencing (sequencing) to explain how previously made decisions can affect the possibility of making new decisions.