Jorunn Møller (University of Oslo, Norway) and Linda Rönnberg (Umeå University, Sweden)

What is the problem? How does the chapter support your thinking about the problem?

The key issue for this chapter is to situate educational leadership in Norway and Sweden within the broader political environments that have taken place during the last decades in these two countries. We show how the enactment of leadership is defined not just by their local contextual conditions, but also by their macro-level political structures as neoliberal reforms of education have been gradually adopted in the Nordic countries. While Norway has been more reluctant and has defended the comprehensive and public organization of education, Sweden has allowed private providers to play a much more significant role in delivering education services. In the chapter, we offer possible explanation to why these countries embarked on different routes in the 1990s and still represent marked contrast in this respect. Furthermore, we show how new expectations of public reporting and external accountability create both challenges and possibilities for school leaders and we ask you to reflect on what is considered as successful school and successful leadership in your own context, and why.

We also ask you to bear in mind that the distinction between public and private good is useful as a way to promote discussion on the aims and overall drivers of education in relation to its political context. As we argue, it is difficult to see how a mixed public/private education system relying on a possessive individualism could prepare citizens better for the communicative society than a public education that provides the right of the child to encounter the pluralist society within the school.

What are other ways to think about this? Where can I go next to follow these up?

Public education – beyond Scandinavia

Issues of how public education is transformed and challenged is on the agenda worldwide. This chapter looked at Sweden and Norway, and these national cases can be used to contrast and situate these issues in wider international and global contexts. We suggest these two edited volumes as possible starting-points for further exploration into issues of ‘publicness’ in contemporary education across national domains:

Hogan, A. & Thompson G. (eds) (2021). Privatisation and Commercialisation in Public Education. How the Public Nature of Schooling is Changing. Abingdon: Routledge.

Wilkinson, J, Niesche, R. & Eacott, S. (eds) (2019). Challenges for public education: Reconceptualising educational leadership, policy and social justice as resources for hope. Abingdon: Routledge.

Scandinavian politics and welfare – beyond education

We would also like to invite the reader to explore Scandinavian politics and welfare in times of reform and marketization more generally. One way to do this is from the disciplinary perspective of Political Science. It may serve as a way of contextualizing education as a part of wider political and socio-cultural trajectory and history, and we would like to refer the reader to the following publications: 

Nedergaard, P(Ed.) (2017). The Nordic Models in Political Science: Challenged, but Still Viable? Bergen: Fagbokforlaget.

In this more general political context, it is also important to highlight issues of citizenship in times of neoliberal reform, perhaps, we suggest, by critically engaging with issues and notions of ‘active citizenship’. We direct the reader to an open access book as a possible starting point:

Sivesind K. H. & Saglie, J. (eds.) (2017). Promoting Active Citizenship. Markets and Choice in Scandinavian Welfare. Palgrave Macmillan.

This publication is available at: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319553801.

Enacting education policy at school level

Policies create circumstances in which the range of options available in deciding what to do are narrowed or changed, or particular goals or outcomes are set. Putting policies into practice is a creative and complex process and policy-making at all levels and all sites involves negotiation and struggle between different groups. As such, policy is always a process of becoming. We recommend the following resources to get you started.

Ball, S, Maguire, M. & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy. Policy enactments in secondary schools. London and New York: Routledge.

This book explores how the schools enact rather than implement policy; i.e. how schools and teachers do policy. We invite you to think about how this notion of policy enactment can offer challenges and/or opportunities for critical reflection and action in school leadership. Are there ways to defend education as a public good be though the agency of school leadership in the context of policy enactment?

Educational leadership and making sense of democracy

The democratic roles that principals may play are historically and cultural contingent. Moreover, as middle managers, principals mediate between values that prevail in local contexts and those that weigh on them from afar. We offer a contribution based on comparing the ways in which principals make sense of the relationship between education and democracy in a liberal democracy with a medium level of welfare distribution, the San Francisco Bay Area, and in a social democracy with a high level of welfare distribution, Norway.

Trujillo, T., Møller, J. et al., (2021). Images of Educational Leadership: How Principals Make Sense of Democracy and Social Justice in Two Distinct Policy Contexts. Educational Administration Quarterly, (will be published online January 2021).

The findings show for example how elements of the principals’ macro- and micro-level settings, for some may delimit their sphere of influence in unexpected ways. For others, they may expand these boundaries. We invite you to reflect on conditions that contribute to shaping democratic schools.

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