This study gathers evidence on policies that aim to raise students' learning outcomes through incentives and support measures to enhance teacher quality. A central concern is to identify policies that are effective and efficient. These include incentives and support systems to ensure that high-quality candidates are recruited to initial teacher…

Since the UNESCO conference in 1994, inclusion has been a major denominator in the educational debates of most OECD countries, focusing on how to facilitate education and social interaction for the diversity of pupils. By international standards, the Norwegian education system is regarded as inclusive, but the ongoing debate and political pressure…

This article will show how the global educational policy expectations of being a "self-managing learner" unfold in the context of two school organisations in Norway, and contribute to the exclusion of so-called newly arrived minority language students. The theoretical framework is Niklas Luhmann's theory of the global educational system,…

Sociology of education in Norway has traditionally been preoccupied with the classic problems related to education and the reproduction of social inequality. As the general social scientific and political focus on inequality decreased, the sociology of education also became less visible. At the same time, the sociology of youth evolved, and…

More and more nations are losing the ability to control their education systems. OECD is an important premise provider for educational policymaking championing a neoliberal agenda. With the aim to investigate the impact the OECD may have on national policymaking, this paper compares their recent teacher education policies with those of Norway. The…

Based upon fieldwork in two upper secondary schools in Norway, this article offers an analysis of inclusion and exclusion processes for newly arrived minority language students. Minority language students are defined by policy as students who have a different mother tongue than the Norwegian and Sami languages, and students who are newly arrived…

This paper deals with policymaking in the higher education sector as an activity which happens on many levels, with many and varying interests involved. As the present thematic issue highlights, language is present in higher education policymaking, whether explicitly or implicitly. This special issue's initial claim is that "Policy is what…

How do the constituencies in higher education re-interpret Bologna's function with regard to the European Higher Education Area? This research examines how institutional actors re-construct the policy framework in the light of their own institutional agendas. Drawing on empirical data from a survey of academics, students and administrative and…

As is the case in most OECD countries, boys in Norway are more likely to have lower levels of academic achievement and attainment than girls. While this phenomenon is not recent, it has become increasingly pronounced in recent years and, as a result, is attracting considerable attention from policy-makers in many countries. This paper develops…

This article investigates neo-liberal policy on education in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Traditionally, the edifice of the education system in these Scandinavian countries has been built on egalitarian values, but over the last 20 years they have increasingly adopted market-led reforms of education. The extent of neo-liberal policy varies between…

Since the end of the 1980s, the Norwegian education system has gone through major reform, influenced largely by new managerialist ideas. Strategies to renew the public sector were promoted as the new public management (NPM). This paper investigates the way ideas connected to NPM reforms have been introduced and interpreted in the Norwegian…

Education has continuously been regarded as a vital tool in Norwegian policymakers' immigrant integration agendas. This study analyzes semantic structures substantiating the policy language of historical Norwegian immigrant education policies from their inception in 1973 until today (2013). The analysis is framed by Kronenfeld's linguistic…

By analysing five separate OECD reviews of evaluation and assessment practices with Norway and Sweden as cases, our study illustrates different ways in which a specific international educational reasoning is blended into more context-based national education policies and, as such, works in parallel with internal reforms and agendas. It is evident…

Government policies are central factors shaping the environment of higher education institutions. European governments have included in their higher education political strategies the principal goal of implementing the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The perceptions that key actors of higher education institutions (HEIs) have about…

This article discusses how teachers construct new representations about accountability and professionalism in the context of increased external control. Over the last decade in particular, concerns about the quality of schooling and the quality of teachers has been raised by both politicians and the public alike, while prominent policy responses…