The school can be seen as a place that reflects the wider community. Here is a school welfare officer an important representative of the school social work. The main subject of our study is to clarify how the school welfare officers’ talk about documentation in the individual meeting with the pupil. Through individual interviews with five school welfare officers in elementary schools in three municipalities in the southern part ofSweden, we have attempted to explore these main research question.

In addition to qualitative interviews we have accomplished a survey study that included 178 school welfare officers throughout the country.

The result of our two studies demonstrates the school welfare officers’ free work where the choice to document or not is wide. Even on those occasions when documentation is an obligation, they have an opportunity to choose how much they should expose the pupil. The study also shows on an uncertainty as regard to record in general and where the written words end up in particular.

The school welfare officer seems to be comfortable in his/her free role, but still want some sort of guidelines to enhance the pupil’s equal rights. They have an apologetic or justifying way of talking (accounts) about the documentation, which can be due to their free role and the fact that documentation has a tendency to be difficult to interpret in the law.