This study report on the outcomes and transformational potential of the European Universities initiative presents the progress, achievements, and transformational potential of the European Universities initiative, and gives insights on remaining challenges. It provides recommendations to continue making the European Universities initiative a…

Purpose: This paper aims to further our understanding of policy-practice gaps in organizations from an organizational learning perspective. The authors conceptualize and analyze policy-practice gaps in terms of what they label the "dual challenge of organizational learning," i.e. the organizational tasks of both adapting ongoing…

This article analyses the Swedish case of the government's funding for equity, which annually provides over 600 million euros to improve equity. Being one of the largest funding schemes ever for work towards educational equity it also provides full autonomy for local education authorities (LEAs) to use the money at their discretion. By studying…

Few notions seem to capture the imagination of education policymakers today as completely as digitalization and leadership. Through these two, schools are believed to become transformed, and in turn, these transformed schools will transform people and society. This paper critically analyzes a Swedish official digital policy instrument that…

For decades, cluster initiatives and funding programmes have been used as instruments of industrial and innovation policy--addressing system failures by strengthening linkages among actors, fostering innovation, and developing more effective innovation systems. More recently, a growing segment of these initiatives are also focused on driving…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is changing across Europe, reflecting multiple-policy intentions and assumptions about education in early years, and the role of the state in supporting, funding and regulating its institutions. In this article, we examine the evolution of ECEC comparatively in Finland and Sweden, and we explore the shifts…

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…

According to the Swedish Education Act, schools should support both students' knowledge development and personal development. Students' levels of knowledge are measured and compared through their examination results and formal grades as well as through international comparative studies and other tools. However, students' personal development is…

In the Nordic curriculum theory (CT) tradition, questions linked to educational change and school governance have long been a crucial research issue. However, despite several decades of decentralized school systems, local school governance has been a highly neglected field of research. Considering the changing landscape of school governance in…

Purpose: This study aims to explore school health promotion (HP) as a set of institutionally embedded professional practices. Design/methodology/approach: This is a qualitative study using data from nineteen interviews with school professionals in Sweden. Data analysis was informed by practice theory and an institutional logic perspective.…

This article sets out the findings of a systematic review on research into career guidance policy in the Nordic countries between 2008 and 2022. In total 60 papers were reviewed from across the Nordic region. They focused on national career guidance systems, career guidance systems for young people, the adult guidance system and career guidance…

The aim of the present study is to investigate how the concept of systematic quality work is perceived by school teachers. Eleven interviews were conducted and analysed according to the phenomenographical method, inspired by qualitative content analysis. Five qualitatively different descriptive categories were identified: (i) tools for…

This article presents the development and application of a model that can be utilized to compare the autonomy of principals in various historical and national contexts. Drawing on former conceptual work on autonomy in education, the model conceptualizes principal autonomy as two-dimensional. The first dimension is the decision making expected from…

This study seeks to explore the effect of tools of school governance advanced by the global reform agenda (1) on student performance and (2) on reducing the effect of sociodemographic variables on this performance. To do so, we compare two Nordic welfare states with an egalitarian tradition: Sweden and Finland. The Swedish school system has…

This paper contributes to method development in educational leadership research. The focus is on a visual method and the inclusion of visual material in data collection and analysis. Core concepts in this paper are educational leadership, power and authority. The method was used in face-to-face interviews in a research project that studied the…