This report aims to provide insight into the realities faced by higher education academic staff at a time of fast-moving change and increasing societal demand. Fluctuating student numbers, new funding and steering mechanisms are among the features of today's European higher education landscape, but not enough is known about how academic staff are…

The purpose of this study is to investigate school district administrators' perspectives concerning the professional activities and influence of special educators in Norway (n?=?266) and Sweden (n?=?290). We examine three themes drawn from a survey of practices and policies in each country: (a) the organisational arrangements in which special…

Understanding the role of social policies in intergenerational transfers from old to young people is especially important in times of population aging. This paper focuses on the influences of social expenditures and social services on financial support and on practical help from older parents to their adult children based on the first two waves…

Drawing on the distinction between absent and present presences, this article contributes to our understanding of how new managerial and performative discourses are played out in a secondary school context in Sweden. The consequences of numerous educational reforms during the last 20 years include a surge of new independent schools and increased…

This article explores the upper secondary (or post-16) school market. The study on which it is based, funded by the Swedish Research Council, was entitled "Upper-secondary education as a market". Empirical data include official statistics, policy documents, school publications, company reports and school visits. Printed and other news…

This paper provides evidence on the sources of differences in inequality in educational scores and their evolution over time in four European countries. Using Programme for International Student Assessment data from the 2000 and the 2006 waves, the paper shows that inequality decreased in Germany and Spain (two "decentralised" schooling…

This article focuses on the relationship between higher education, employability of graduates and students' satisfaction with their studies, drawing on European statistics, as well as on data collected at national and/or institutional level in Portugal and Sweden. Employability has been understood as a measure of higher education quality and one…

Recent research suggests that youths interpret parental control and that this may have implications for how control affects youths' adjustment. In this study, we propose that youths' feelings about being over-controlled by parents and feeling connected to parents are intermediary processes linking parental control and youths' adjustment. We used…

Background: The risk of developing a negative attitude to communication as a consequence of having a speech disorder has been in focus for decades in research concerning fluency disorders in relation to both children and adults. The Communication Attitude Test (CAT), which was created to measure children's attitudes towards their own…

The purpose of the study is to investigate the predictive validity of criterion- and norm-referenced grades and the Swedish Scholastic Aptitude Test (SweSAT) and, in particular, possible differences in the prediction of achievement in higher education across academic programs. The analyses were based on credit points obtained by 164,106 Swedish…

When studying different types of returns to education, educational reforms are commonly used in the economics literature as a source of exogenous variation in education. The Swedish compulsory school reform is one example; the reform extended compulsory education throughout the country, in different municipalities at different points in time. Such…