The arrival of guest workers in Denmark from the late 1960s meant new political questions of how to receive their children in school. During the 1970s, the heyday of welfare state reforms, a new area of welfare state politics and policy emerged concerning these children: an education politics of migrant pupils accompanied by knowledge being…

School autonomy with accountability (SAWA) reforms have developed in diverse forms in Northern Europe. Following processes of decentralization to the municipal and school levels, quality assurance and inspection became key to the test-based accountability agendas of Denmark and England respectively. With an abductive approach, we explore the…

Taking a point of departure in the paradoxical fact that the increase in educational knowledge leads to an increase in uncertainty for educational organisations, this article explores how uncertainty and contingency have increasingly become an integral part of school governance. The article draws on Niklas Luhmann's theory of 'World Society' as a…

This article explores how the development of mother-tongue instruction (MTI) policies in the Danish welfare state have created varying notions of difference and sameness in the schooling of migrant students and how they experience these notions locally in practice. Based on an analysis of MTI's policy history and oral history interviews with…

Since the 1990s, European school policy has been steered by management dreams that systematic monitoring and assessment would guide schools and society toward a future of greater quality, efficiency, and growth. This article, drawing on Jean Baudrillard, explores whether it makes sense to rearticulate this dream of optimization by assessment in…

Purpose: In the domain of shadow education (private supplementary tutoring), Denmark and China may be placed at opposite ends of a spectrum. Denmark has a recently emerged, small, and high-cost sector that mostly serves low achievers, while China has a more industrialized sector with a long history and economies of scale. The paper juxtaposes the…

Strategic government interventions in public education have shifted and blurred the boundaries between state, market and civil society modes of governance. Within this matrix of interdependent relations, schools operate under increasingly hybrid accountability arrangements in which public accountability can both complement and compete with market…

Antiracist pedagogies have long been conceptualized and developed by scholars, public intellectuals, teachers and pedagogues in Danish education contexts. By analysing Danish knowledge production on antiracist education from the 1980s to the present, this article traces changing understandings of race and racism in Danish education, as well as…

Purpose: This article investigates the role of private supplementary tutoring in Denmark in light of the country's pedagogical traditions in schools and leisure spheres. Design/Approach/Methods: Although tutoring activities are increasing, the phenomenon is not as prevalent in Denmark as in many other countries. In this article, we look into the…

This study focuses on the politics of time in education by analysing 'The Future School' reports published by Nordic state authorities between 2010 and 2015. Building on a system-theoretical understanding of social time, steering and second-order observations, we investigate how temporal political communication frames the future of Nordic basic…

This open access book presents an in-depth analysis of data from ICCS. An international group of scholars critically address the state of civic and citizenship education in the four Nordic countries that participated in the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) in 2009 and 2016. The findings are of particular relevance to…

The aim of this article is to present a Nordic curriculum perspective on drama and theatre in education ranging from preschool to upper secondary education and cultural schools. Underlined in the Nordic welfare model is an equity, inclusive and democracy perspective, which guarantees free access to compulsory education and to upper secondary…

The Nordic Education Model was an important part of the social democratic welfare state for many years in the second half of the 20th century. Since the millennium, transnational agencies have drawn education from the realm of politics into a global market place by advocating strategies such as efficiency, competition, decentralisation, governing…

Modern welfare states emerged as a response to the social question and were crafted through the educationalisation of society engendering a need for a variety of professionals who could take care of citizens of concern. This article revisits the social question in a post-1970 Danish context of a growing non-western immigrant and refugee population…

Particularly after the Danish political system changed to parliamentarism in 1901, a growing interest in, and expanded meaning of, culture as a pedagogical category developed in relation to state schooling, on the road to a comprehensive school system for "the whole population". This article elaborates on the role played by theological…