“It’s never easy to know if you’re doing the right thing…” : A study of collaboration between secondary education and social services regarding adolescents diagnosed with ADHD

The purpose of this study is to examine collaboration between social services and secondary education in a municipality in Sweden regarding adolescents diagnosed with ADHD. Swedish legislative texts stipulate that authorities working with adolescents should collaborate in matters relating to children in risk of harm. Earlier research shows that children and adolescents diagnosed with ADHD often behave contrary to how students are expected to behave in the classroom, that they may need support from social services, and that they rarely get such support to manage their education. The method used in this study was qualitative and the empirical data were obtained through semi structured interviews. Eight respondents participated in total, four social workers and four school counsellors. The results were analysed using profession theory and collaboration theory. The results show that the two professions both have a positive attitude towards collaboration, but that it rarely happens and when it does it feels unstructured and irregular, particularly for the social workers. Almost none of the respondents had any experience of working with students in secondary education diagnosed with ADHD, and instead spoke generally about their experience of collaboration. There seems to be a gap between the tendency to direct efforts, both divided and conjoined, to adolescents in an educational setting after they move on from elementary school