In 2019, Hjørring Municipality launched a comprehensive Youth Guarantee programme to ensure 'positive destinations' for the municipality's youth. The strategy was explicitly inspired by Edinburgh's interpretation of the Scottish Youth Guarantee. In this article, we conceptualize the Youth Guarantee as a policy instrument and unpack the transfer,…

Return on investment (ROI) has become part of the policymaking toolkit, particularly pertinent for activities like school-based career guidance deemed optional by some policymakers. There are institutions supporting ideal ROI methods alongside an academic critique, but little research on how ROI has been applied in practice in a guidance setting.…

This study draws on data from TALIS Starting Strong 2018, an international survey of early childhood education and care (ECEC) staff and leaders, to examine the staff roles (leader, teacher, assistant, specialised staff, intern, other) that are included in ECEC centres in nine countries: Chile, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Korea,…

This article explores the struggles over the development of new national tests for the Danish public school system before, during, and after the lockdown of society due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The article throws light on the stakeholder positions, arguments, and discourses involved in assessment policy formation with particular attention on the…

Early learning agendas are currently being introduced in early childhood education and care (ECEC) by transnational organizations such as the EU and OECD. In this paper, we focus on Denmark, where such agendas interweave with a pedagogical tradition emphasizing a child-centered approach and children's play. Based on ethnographic research, we…

Discussions about the role of universities have long been framed in terms of questions of what is good for the public, as well as how and whether higher education serves that good. Today, the language of 'societal impact' has become an accepted way for policymakers to frame the matter, but just who is included in the underlying definition of…

Transnational organizations like the OECD and the EU have, for many years, focussed on adult career guidance (ACG) as a policy for solving problems, especially those related to the labour market and labour market transitions. In this article, we take a closer look into the development of ACG policies in Finland and Denmark. Drawing on multiple…

The arrival of guest workers in Denmark from the late 1960s meant new political questions of how to receive their children in school. During the 1970s, the heyday of welfare state reforms, a new area of welfare state politics and policy emerged concerning these children: an education politics of migrant pupils accompanied by knowledge being…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the nature of socially distributed leadership in Denmark and the USA, specifically teacher and staff leadership practices distributed in schools. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a confirmatory factor analysis and a second-order factor analysis to examine elementary USA and 0-9 Danish…

Following ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, councils involving young people have become widespread, both in developed and developing countries. However, these councils are said to reflect the hierarchical nature of parliamentary and representative democracy, leading to tokenistic…

Intersectionality highlights that different aspects of individuals' identities are not independent of each other. Instead, they interact to create unique identities and experiences, which cannot be understood by analysing each identity dimension separately or in isolation from their social and historical contexts. Intersectional approaches in this…

This paper contributes to the theoretical debate over a global upsurge in higher education (HE) regionalisms which pursue different region-building processes and create policy spaces beyond national boundaries. Focusing on the Nordic countries, the paper studies parallel processes of intra-Nordic and European HE and research cooperation. Although…

This handbook provides a global synthesis of on-going research in education and policy change during the last decade. It examines discourses of globalisation from the perspectives of the global North and global South. Major theories of globalisation and education policy reforms employed in the handbook are classified into two broad categories:…

Across OECD countries, the increasing demand for evidence-based policy making has further led governments to design policies jointly with clear measurable objectives, and to define relevant indicators to monitor their achievement. This paper discusses the importance of such indicators in supporting the implementation of education policies.…

Module A of the OECD Higher Education Policy Survey (HEPS) 2022 elicited information on policies to promote digitalisation of higher education in OECD member and accession countries. In total, 30 jurisdictions responded, providing comparative information on various areas of digitalisation policy, from regulation and governance to financial and…