Privatisation of public education is becoming more and more common across the world. As much current research presupposes causal links between the degree of privatisation and issues of competition and student’s free choice, we see a need for research on other ways of organising the presence of private providers in public education. In this article, we study how two Swedish municipalities use public procurement to contract private providers and organise adult education. Interestingly, we find that competition is more heavily at play in the municipality that outsources half of its adult education, than in the municipality that outsources all adult education. We view these findings as vital for understanding how education is being outsourced to private providers and for furthering the discussion on the consequences of the ongoing privatisation of education.

公共教育的私有化在世界范围内越来越普遍。由于当前的许多研究都以私有化程度与竞争问题和学生的自由选择之间的因果关系为前提，因此我们认为需要研究其他方法来组织公共教育中的私人提供者。在本文中，我们将研究两个瑞典市政当局如何使用公共采购来与私人提供者签约并组织成人教育。有趣的是，我们发现，相比将所有成人教育外包的市镇，将一半成人教育外包的市镇的竞争更为激烈。