"Det är svårt för skolan när det inte är uppenbara försummelser"

Abstract

This paper examines Swedish secondary school’s strategies for supporting students who lack parental care, and what explanations school professionals use to describe and categorize this group of vulnerable students. The results indicate that students’ family backgrounds are central to the explanations given for social problems, as well as to how different student groups are categorized. Discourses of the non-­‐respectable family are provided as the main explanations for neglect among the students categorized as stigmatized, whereas discourses explaining problems among students who could be categorized as middle-­‐class, revolved around the absent and career focused parent.