Choosing a school for your child can be important for the child's future. But how do you as a parent make the right choice? What knowledge is required for parents to be able to absorb, sift through and evaluate the information that municipalities and schools offer? And what do municipalities and schools do to reach parents and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to make well reflected choices?

The Swedish school choice process, where parents are expected to act on information they receive from schools and municipalities through, among other things, websites and information meetings, can be seen as an opportunity for individuals to exercise citizenship. However, the conditions for doing so are affected by the individuals' skills and resources, as well as by what information they are offered and in what ways. This is something schools and municipalities need to handle in their work around the school choice process. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity and accessibility of the school choice system, actors at all these levels - municipal, school and individual level - should be studied.

This project investigates how schools and municipalities enable and how parents exercise social citizenship through the school choice process, by studying practices and communication between municipalities, schools and parents. The main focus of the project is what information is offered by municipalities and schools to help parents make an informed choice and in what ways this is done, as well as how this information is received, perceived and handled by parents in the process of choosing a school. More specifically, the aim of the project is to examine school choice within compulsory education in Sweden as a way of exercising social citizenship, by studying the literacy practices of and communication between a) municipalities, b) local schools and c) parents, focusing on the information provided by schools and municipalities and how it is received by parents. What is communicated by municipalities and schools to help parents make informed choices? How do individuals value and use this information in their school choice decisions? How do these practices around the school choice process affect individuals' opportunities to exercise social citizenship?

The study is based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of texts such as web pages and information material from schools and municipalities, questionnaires with parents/guardians, and ethnographic materials such as observations of information meetings and interviews with parents. The project is multidisciplinary and is based on ethnological, linguistic, and political science perspectives and concepts, with social citizenship and New literacy studies as a common theoretical framework. Results from the project are expected to be used in municipalities' and schools' work with the school choice process.