Policies of dispersal are increasingly favoured internationally for the resettlement of refugees and asylum seekers. With forty percent of the world's forcibly displaced people being school-aged children, the dispersal of refugee-background people into regional areas means that rural schools are central sites of community response to refugees.…

This article focuses on Nordic school leaders and how rural principals experience autonomy and control in current governance regimes using a sample of principals in the very north of Norway and Sweden as a case. An analysis instrument constituting four different schooling domains (educational; social; developmental; administrative) and the ways in…

In the autumn of 2015 a large number of mainly Syrian refugees arrived in Sweden. They were unevenly distributed geographically by the authorities and smaller municipalities received proportionally larger numbers than others. The schools became central in the local reception processes. They faced difficulties but also possibilities, both…

The aim of this article is to analyze the perceptions on the local school and further education in the local community from a school leader's perspective. Another aim is to explore characteristics of sparsely populated rural areas. Data were derived from a survey on Swedish school leaders (n = 1,270). The results show significant variances between…

Starting in the late nineteenth century, the teaching profession became increasingly feminized. This article examines the results of this process, exploring the working and living conditions of rural female primary school teachers with a focus on the experiences of loneliness, harassment, and violence that they suffered in early twentieth-century…

With advances in communication technologies, remote special educational consultation has become a promising strategy for indirect special education provision aiming to support students with special educational needs as well as their teachers in remote and rural areas. This study explores how special educators in a rural municipality in Sweden…

Studies worldwide indicate that sexual minority students often face different forms of bullying in everyday life at school, and young people growing up in communities with conservative values, such as in rural areas, are often in a particularly vulnerable position. Nonetheless, there is an absence of studies addressing the everyday lives of sexual…

This article explores preschool practitioners' perceptions of their encounters with migrant parents in rural preschools. The practitioners' accounts are analyzed through Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. This theoretical approach was chosen based on the assumption that a successful integration process is accompanied by the presence of a dialogic…

The purpose of this study was to shed light on how work-related teacher support in the form of special educational consultation can promote the professional development of teachers working in rural schools located in sparsely populated areas. The phenomenon studied was professional collaboration between class teachers and special educators in the…

In this study French and Swedish teachers' and principals' opinions and everyday uses of the schoolyard is in focus: What do they perceive as desirable and undesirable in the schoolyard, what similarities and differences exist between the two groups of pedagogues, and how can these be understood? The study employs a cross-cultural design and is…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to explore equality and inclusion as an aspect of remote teaching in rural areas. Moreover, the aim is to explore teachers' pedagogical digital competence (PDC) and school organizational support as conditions for developing remote teaching. Design/methodology/approach: A mixed method approach with both qualitative…

Grade inflation, involving comparisons between public and independent schools, is presently under discussion in Sweden. This paper reports on discrepancies between national test results and the final course grade in social sciences, in year 9. Open data at school level were used in OLS regression analyses to scrutinise systematic differences…

This article discusses the significance of in-kind taxation and payments in kind for the establishment of an elementary school system in Sweden, in the 1840-1870 period. By analysing the funding of teachers' wages, the heating of the school facilities, and school building construction in the 12 rural school districts of the Sundsvall region, this…

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in six different types of rural area and their schools in different parts of Sweden, this article identifies how rural schools relate to the local place and discusses some of the educational implications from this. Recurrent references to the local community were present in some schools and people there explicitly…

This article presents a survey census study performed in a small, remotely located municipality with four rural schools in the north of Sweden. The study is part of a larger project, Remote Consulting in special needs education between special educators and class teachers, the aim of which is to increase the equivalence between the municipality's…