The Nordic countries are often perceived as a coherent group representing the Nordic model of welfare states, with a strong emphasis on the public provision of universal welfare and a strong concern with social equality. But today we see a change in the Nordic model as part of a global knowledge economy. The aim of this article is to examine…

The aim of this article is to investigate why Sweden, the epitome of social democracy, has implemented education reforms leading to an extraordinary growth in Free Schools in contrast to liberal England, where Free School policy has been met with enormous resistance. Conventional wisdom would predict the contrary, but as a matter of fact Sweden…

Over the last two decades, education privatization has become a widespread phenomenon, affecting most education systems and giving place to a consistent increase in private school enrolment globally. However, far from being a monolithic phenomenon, privatization advances through a variety of context-sensitive policy processes that translate into…

This article employs Social Representations Theory as a theoretical instrument to analyse the right of children to an equitable education. It analyses how social representations of students and students' performances can be used by political actors as an interpretation system to manage contradictions in the equity education policies implemented in…

What does a country do when its schools and educational system in general do not produce the results the country believes they are capable of? This article describes the political debates that comparative international studies such as the Programme for International Student Assessment have given rise to in Germany and Sweden. As a result of the…

The author, a former headteacher and now a county councillor, argues that the structural changes to the education system put in place in the first weeks of the new government in the summer of 2010 will exacerbate the gap between the highest and lowest achieving schools, will destabilise the state-funded education system, will expose it to…