This School Research Newsletter presents the research program of the National Swedish Board of Education (NBE), as adopted by the NBE Board of Directors in June 1982. The successive decisions on decentralization taken in the educational sector since 1976 have led also to a decision to alter the thrust of the research and development work within at…

Efforts to achieve greater decentralization, deregulation, and management by objectives in the public sector have left an indelible mark on the school sector in Sweden during the 1980s. The experimental scheme of local agencies and free municipalities illustrates two such reforms. Under the free municipality experiment, a number of municipalities…

The public sector in Sweden is under pressure to augment its productivity and cut costs, and the education sector is faced with the same demands. Most people believe that adequately proportioned, efficiently operating schools are essential to Sweden's long-term economic development, but this is seldom mentioned in connection with spending cuts. In…

Modern school research in Sweden has shown that the old selective school has been slowly transformed into an elective school, which in many ways resembles the old selective school with its parallel education systems. It is known that social background and a number of other variables (sex, nationality, type of class, etc.) have a crucial bearing on…