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Lost in transition : Policies to reduce early school leaving and encourage further studying in Europe

Despite great attention and numerous efforts across countries to reduce school dropout, it remains a persistent challenge. One such initiative, named New Possibilities, launched by the Norwegian Mi...

Low completion rate in upper secondary education is seen as a bigproblem in the Nordic countries. School failure has shown todramatically increase the risks for unemployment and labourmarket exclu ...

Collaboration between schools and parents has become increasingly prominent on the political agenda in Norway. Schools are obliged to promote parent–school cooperation in accordance with parents’ rights as stakeholders in education. This article explores the governing strategies of seven primary or lower-secondary schools that have taken initiatives to improve parent–school collaboration. The main intention is to explore how New Public Management (NPM) measures (such as market values, decentralization, competition, and output control) and New Public Service (NPS) tools (including coalition building and citizens’ involvement) are reproduced at the local level when parent–school collaboration is put on the agenda. The analysis shows that street-level discretion at school level implies considerable uncertainty around the achievement of policy objectives. Different opinions on parents as a target group seem prominent in explaining how frontline workers act and strategize. Two distinct collaboration strategies are identified: serving and steering. The serving strategy is based on a linear partnership by making use of local knowledge in order to reach parents and enable their participation. The steering strategy is characterized by non-linear relationships with parents and certain steering mechanisms by routinizing collaboration activities, modifying goals for parent–school collaboration and rationing school services to parents.

Local autonomy is one of the recent trends in reforms of compulsory education. However, several parallel trends such as individual accountability, performance and visibility challenge professional autonomy. The aim of this article is to explore how accountability and transparency reforms affect teacher autonomy in Norway and Sweden. The authors argue that both individual teacher autonomy at the local workplace and autonomy at the national level embracing teachers as a collective group are important in analysing teachers' professional autonomy. In comparing teachers' professional autonomy they differentiate between processes of individualisation and collectivisation. Their analysis indicates, although intra-national differences, that the difference between Norwegian and Swedish teachers is striking. While the Swedish teachers experience a high degree of individual autonomy, their influence on national policy processes seems weakened. This leads to the assumption that professional autonomy as a result of transparency and accountability reforms, even if the teachers report individual professional autonomy, reduces the authority of the profession at the national policy-making level. The analysis indicates that Norwegian teachers are characterized by old professionalism. The strong input regulations in Norway limit individual teacher autonomy. Even with weakened individual autonomy, teachers still manage to supply conditions for national education policy making. This means that teachers still are autonomous at the collective level. Moreover, the findings indicate that national standards and control in education are accepted as tools for securing professional knowledge and status.