Ecosystemic cooperation among the state, municipalities, and commercial actors is evident in the public education of Finland. The edu-ecosystems can include firm interdependences, value creation, co-specialisation, and co-evolution with an aim to sell products and services to the global market as well as to open up markets in a particular country.…

As evidence has become the predominant requirement for decision-making on policy in modern democracies, the importance of experts has increased tremendously. Education reforms are no exception. International organizations have gained power globally in national education policy and politics, particularly through the data they produce and the policy…

In this article, we analyse reforms of academic quality assurance in light of organizational theory using the case example of Finnish higher education. Our purpose is to shed light on the processes behind repeated reforms and the motivation to continuously modify quality models that have only been in use for a relatively short period of time. In…

The article starts with the serious question of why educational reforms do not lead to better learning. Although access to education has increased remarkably, the quality of education can be very low. The reality is that by 2030 there will be 800 million young people who do not have basic skills in reading and math. The answers will be sought from…

This book offers an original contribution to the area of international research on comparative education policies and the influence of transnational agencies on national school policy and reform. With a focus on grasping what "the Nordic model" or "the Nordic dimension" means in school and educational policy, the book explores…

This article studies issues of coloniality in so-called capacity-building projects between universities in Africa and Scandinavia. Even fifty years after independence, the African higher education landscape is a product of the colonial powers and subsequent uneven power relations, as argued by a number of researchers. The uneven geography and…

This open access book presents an in-depth analysis of data from ICCS. An international group of scholars critically address the state of civic and citizenship education in the four Nordic countries that participated in the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) in 2009 and 2016. The findings are of particular relevance to…

This study aims to gain a better understanding of the Finnish national curriculum reform by examining how the educational practitioners, at the district level, orchestrate the shared sense-making concerning the reform work in their school districts. Qualitative focus group data was collected from 12 groups, throughout Finland, that were…

In 2009, the Finnish parliament passed a new Universities Act that aimed to strengthen the institutional autonomy of the country's universities. But why and how did the idea of autonomy come to frame the reform agenda in the overt way it did? In analysing a sample of authoritative policy and strategy papers by the key stakeholders in the higher…

Reading and understanding texts of all kinds form a basic competence for participating in social and cultural life and for being successful on a job. Although most European adolescents have adequate reading competences at their disposal by the end of school, about a quarter of them cannot meet the minimal standards. The urgency of this societal…

As different forms of short-cycle higher education have developed along with traditional university studies, they are often perceived as "different but equal". In Finland, with the introduction of the AMKs (polytechnics) in the early 1990s, this interpretation was clearly a part of the rhetoric of government presentation. "Equal but…