Guidance counsellors hold an important role in youth's educational and vocational choices, well-being and future careers. Central Norwegian policy documents recommend dividing counselling practices in schools into two functions: (1) career guidance and (2) educational welfare guidance. Policy documents also promote a holistic view of the pupil and…

With a view to identifying inclusive policies and good practices to respond to the many challenges that refugee students face to access higher education in their host country, this Policy Paper has conducted a review of available statistical data and literature. In addition, six selected countries with considerable refugee populations have been…

Increasingly, school leaders and teachers are being expected to use digital technologies to collect data to analyze, plan and organize teaching and learning. Such expectations can be traced to a number of policy initiatives over the last decade. This study is concerned with how educational policy puts forward ambitions of digital school leadership…

Higher education partnerships between the Global North and the Global South are a recognized as means of developing research and education capacity, especially in the institutions of the Global South. Due to the realities of individual agreements, however, not all partnerships work effectively. This article examines a Norwegian and Ethiopian…

In this article, three researchers and music teacher educators reflect upon the possibilities for and challenges of fostering preservice teachers' critical and democratic capacities and agency in music teacher education in line with recent 21st-century skills-oriented policy reforms. Based on experiences from participatory action research with…

In this article, a study of combined discursive emphasis on the concepts "culture for learning" and "learning outcomes" in recent education policy messages is presented. These concepts have been individually examined but seldom as parallel or converging policy messages. Inspired by discursive institutionalism, we address the…

Reform in higher education is on the agenda worldwide, and there is increasing political interest in the content of study programmes. This article looks at the policy process leading to the new national curriculum regulation (NCR) for kindergarten teacher education (KTE) in Norway in 2012. The following questions derived from Kingdon's Multiple…

Learning outcomes have become a central feature in European higher education and are intended to create a plethora of change concerning teaching, relevance, quality and transparency. However, there have been few studies on how learning outcomes have been introduced within disciplines. This article therefore studies the introduction of learning…

The people who prepare teachers -- teacher educators -- are often explicitly or implicitly held accountable for teacher quality and are frequently blamed when school students do not meet national or international expectations. Despite high expectations, historically there has been little attention to the education of teacher educators or to local…

This paper aims to survey the current landscape of education policy evaluation across OECD countries and economies by examining recent trends and contextual factors that can promote more robust education policy evaluation, as well as identifying key challenges. It takes a view of policy evaluation as an activity that takes place throughout the…

This paper explores policy related to digital competence and the digitalisation of Nordic K-12 schools. Anchored in some key transnational policies on digital competence, it describes some current Nordic movements in the national policies of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The concept of boundary objects is used as an analytical lens, for…

This paper examines how worldviews and national values are displayed in the national (Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) curricula of Sweden, Finland and Norway. The specific interest is to investigate what similarities and differences there are between these three ECEC curricula with regard to the position of religions and other…

This article presents a case study on changing food practices from traditional cold sandwich meals to hot meals in a Norwegian kindergarten. Data were sourced from interviews, complemented by non-participatory video observation and observational notes. Building on Fullan's model for understanding a change process, this paper presents the…

This report presents the results of the 2023 data collection on the structural indicators for monitoring education and training systems in the area of digital competence. The report contains six indicators on key policies in the following areas: 1. curriculum, 2. teachers, 3. assessment, 4. the digital education ecosystem. The paper contains…

This article examines organizational change in national ministries responsible for higher education in light of public sector reforms. The article suggests an analytical framework based on authority/autonomy and capacity developments, paying special attention to the creation of agencies. Empirically, this is exemplified by two cases: the Austrian…