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The educational transitions of Finnish youth of immigrant background are challenging. They confront more difficulties in a twofold manner: they have more difficulties in transitioning to upper secondary education and they seem to drop out of education more often than their Finnish-origin counterparts. This study aimed to accomplish a view of the complex intertwinement of attitudes and experiences with upper secondary education choices, gender and origin. We compared immigrant-origin students (n = 161) with Finnish-origin students (n = 156) in a survey conducted during the final year of comprehensive school. Our objectives were to analyse the variation in attitudes, experiences and aspirations concerning post-comprehensive transition in gender and origin of the youth, and to analyse the factors behind the indecisiveness of the transitions. We concluded that youth with immigrant origin in general, and boys in particular, share a contradiction we termed the 'paradox of immigrant schooling', which refers to the combination of a positivity toward education and difficulties in learning and studying. We also found an immigrant-related contradiction between determinant and quite high occupational aspirations, and uncertainty of upper secondary choices. Our outcomes indicate that the immigrant-origin youth confront the uppersecondary choices in a much more complex and multidimensional situation than their Finnish-origin counterparts.ARTICLE HISTORY

This article analyzes the ways in which the right to education and freedom of education are expressed in local school choice policies in Finland. We aim to discover the elements that form democratic iterations on the right to education and freedom of education by contrasting their manifestations in three local institutional spaces for parental school choice. We focus on different levels of structures and agents including national legislation, local spaces for school choice, municipal demographics, and the impact of socioeconomic status and institutional space for school choice on parental attitudes.

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The focus of this contribution is on the targeted transition practices of career guidance and on the opportunity structures they frame for young people with immigrant backgrounds and/or special educational needs. By analysing curricular documents and interviews with representatives from the local education authorities, such as administrators, principals, guidance counsellors and special education teachers (n = 16), we aim to examine critically the options provided for these groups of young people. We conclude that targeted transition practices do not recognise enough the heterogeneity of young people, and can therefore be limitative and exclusive.

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As one of the key elements of the Nordic welfare model, education systems are based on the idea of providing equal educational opportunities, regardless of gender, social class and geographic origin. Since the 1990s, Nordic welfare states have undergone a gradual but wide-ranging transformation towards a more market-based mode of public service delivery. Along this trajectory, the advent of school choice policy and the growing variation in the between-school achievement results have diversified the previously homogenous Nordic education systems.The aim of our paper is to analyse how Finnish and Swedish local education authorities comprehend and respond to the intertwinement of the market logic of school choice and the ideology of equality. The data consist of two sets of in-depth thematic interviews with staff from the local providers of education, municipal education authorities. The analysis discloses the ways in which national legislation has authorized municipal authorities to govern the provision of education.