The article aims to depict the political framing of three grading reforms in Swedish compulsory school, in terms of the political problem they are supposed to solve and what kind of attention is given to the lowest performing pupils. Discourse analysis is employed, focusing on statement producers. The empirical material consists of policy…

For more than 40 years, health and physical education (HPE) academics in universities and teacher education colleges have drawn attention to issues of social justice specific to the context of PE and advocated for teachers in fields, gymnasiums and other physical activity spaces to do a better job of promoting more equitable outcomes for all…

Analysis of Swedish educational policy will start the importance of some state commissions on education. The first one was published in 1946 (SOU, 1948:27) and the second in 2017 (SOU, 2017:35). The first commission's main aim was to form democratic citizens, while the second focused on equity in learning opportunities. Both state commissions had…

This report seeks to explore some of the reasons Sweden developed an independent school sector dominated by for-profit schools by drawing on prior scholarship and reports as well interview material from Swedish school entrepreneurs, researchers, and prior public representatives that helped create and implement the Swedish voucher program. This…

Purpose: Taking läxhjälp/homework support in Sweden as a case, this article aims to further explore shadow education, especially as a pedagogical object from curriculum theory perspective. Design/Approach/Methods: Approaches including policy analyses, ethnomethodological work based on video-recorded interaction, and narratives have produced…

Educational equality has been a central tenet framing educational policy in Nordic welfare states and stimulating school reforms in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the conceptualisation of equality has fluctuated, reflecting the changing economic and political climate within which policy statements have been made. In this article, we analyse policy…

Since the mid-twentieth century, higher education has been subject to spectacular growth. While the expansion of higher education is undoubtedly a general trend, its actual characteristics in terms of its specific conditions and driving forces vary by context. In this article, our aim is to develop such a socio-political historical narrative of…

This book identifies the cultural and moral foundations of country-specific educational governance and school leadership and presents the principles of justice and the diversity of common goods that guide leadership practices in schools. It contributes to an existing research field that studies diversity and ethical leadership in schools. The…

This article focuses on the Swedish context of upper and post-upper secondary education provided in two sectors, universities and the Swedish Folk High School. The article is centred on the analysis of the support services offered by fifty-five university and Swedish Folk High School institutional websites to individuals and groups designated as…

Under a recent national curriculum reform in Sweden within a highly decentralised, competitive, and marketised education system, access to post-16 education is restricted. In this study, we map and analyse the early onset of new preparatory programmes. We draw on interviews with local politicians and school staff in six different municipalities,…

The concept of a Nordic model of education is sometimes used to refer to the considerable similarities of education reforms and systems of the five Nordic countries (i.e. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) during the second half of the 20th century--reforms that aimed at social justice, equality and cohesion not least by providing…

The Nordic Education Model was an important part of the social democratic welfare state for many years in the second half of the 20th century. Since the millennium, transnational agencies have drawn education from the realm of politics into a global market place by advocating strategies such as efficiency, competition, decentralisation, governing…

Academies (and free schools) in England and independent grant-aided schools, "fristående skolor" (or "friskolor"), in Sweden have been the subject of much academic debate, but there is a paucity of comparative research relating to policy development or outcomes. This paper adopts a comparative perspective, outlining the…

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…

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…