Over recent decades we have witnessed a growing emphasis on educational quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) around the globe. The trend, not only to intensify evaluative measurements, but also to publish school-specific indicators, has become visible also in the Nordic countries. In Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the governments have launched webportals, in which various indicators can be observed and compared at the school level. However in Finland, the data is published only at a general level.In this article we compare the discourses of educational experts on comprehensive school QAE policies and practices in four Nordic countries, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Our aim is to clarify how the discursive practices reflect the current evaluation and publication policies and how the discourses construct the rationales of educational governance. We have approached our data (58 interviews) from the framework of discursive institutionalism, which sees both the underlying ideas and beliefs, and the discursive practices as the dynamic factors behind institutional change.We argue, that in all the Nordic countries these discursive practices take place in a balancing discursive triad between global competence, neo-liberal accountability pressures and the traditions of the egalitarian Nordic comprehensive school-however with varying country-specific rationales on school accountability and transparency.
Throughout history educational leaders have looked to other countries and have attempted to learn by borrowing useful examples to implement in their own educational systems. As recent comparative policy research shows, processes of policy lending and borrowing have their own socio-historically defined dynamics. In this paper, the authors approach the use of reference countries through narratives of educational experts in Finland, Norway and Sweden. By comparing how international influences are used in stories about basic education, this research constructs a core narrative of a moving Nordic landscape. This landscape indicates both recognised and acknowledged policy borrowing relations in the past, as well as a changing orientation to preferred and avoided reference countries in the present. While new countryspecific performance indicators such as PISA have widened the landscape of reference countries at an official level, culturally mediated images seem to redefine how reference countries are observed in everyday semantics.
Horizontal Governance and Governance Discourses in Career Guidance and Counselling in Finland
In the 2000s, horizontal governance has become a growing mode of public sector governance. In this study, we examined horizontal governance in the context of career guidance and counselling in Finland. Our empirical research data consisted of ten (10) thematic interviews with public sector officials and other experts working in the governance of guidance at the national level. Our research aim was to scrutinize how the three ideal-types in public sector governance – bureaucratic (Weberian), new public management, and new public governance – were manifested in the informants’ discourses. Our results showed that ideologically, there was a shared understanding of the need to increase horizontal governance in guidance. However, in terms of legislation, finance or evaluation of guidance, existing rules and beliefs built in previous ideal-types tend to challenge the implementation of horizontal governance in practice.
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