Session Information
23 SES 13 A, Interpreting and Enacting Reform: National and Local
Paper Session
Contribution
Since 1980s, numerous education reforms over the Europe have sought to dismantle centralised bureaucracies and replace them with devolved systems of schooling emphasising parental choice and competition between increasingly diversified types of schools. In decentralised operational environments, new education policy initiatives have been implemented and adapted in very different and even contrary means on the sub-national level. These changes in local–central relations have produced a shared repertoire of structural and relational changes including deregulation, decentralisation and devolution, along with marketisation and consumer choice and individualisation (Ozga et al. 2011).
The very broad aim of this paper is to investigate how aforementioned cross-national trends and tendencies in compulsory education provision are transferred and transformed at national and local levels. To illustrate these changes from a specific – but still very significant perspective – the paper elaborates how the provision of elementary education has been governed by demarcated geographical coordinates (i.e. school districts) in Finland.
The case of Finland is extremely interesting for this purpose: during the 1990s the Finnish education system shifted from one of the most centralised to one of the most decentralised (Eurydice 2004; Varjo et al. 2011). Policies and practices concerning the provision of basic education are very much in the hands of municipal authorities, and the governance of education forms an exceptional twofold system, where the nation-state and municipalities – all 336 of them – are the main actors in education policy (Kauko & Varjo 2008).
In 1898, the decree on school districts set four principles that enabled state authorities to control and govern the construction of the folk school system: 1) each municipality shall divide the area under their jurisdiction into school districts; 2) the area of a school district shall not be too extensive – the maximum distance between pupil’s home and a school is in ordinary circumstances five kilometres; 3) school premises shall be prepared into each district – if there are enough school-aged children at the district; 4) the borders of a school district are fixed – municipal decisions to arrange geographical coordinates of a district shall be submitted to state authorities. These principles have proved to be very constant – they remained in force in legislation concerning the provision of elementary education until 1990s.
Since the mid-1980s, the whole wave of administrative reforms, based on principles of decentralisation and deregulation, reduced direct national control and allowed more space for municipalities to determine their own government and the ways in which to produce the services of which they are in charge. The 1999 basic education act obligates municipalities only to assign to a child of elementary school age a neighbourhood school or some other appropriate place where education is given. As a result, municipalities have developed distinctive policies and practices concerning local models of selection and admission (with various potential to exercise parental choice), specialisation and diversification of schools, competition between schools and principles of local allocation of resources, among others.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Eurydice. 2004. Evaluation of Schools Providing Compulsory Education in Europe. Brussels: European Commission. Directorate-General for Education and Culture. Kauko, J. & Varjo, J. 2008. Age of Indicators – Changes in the Finnish Education Policy Agenda. European Educational Research Journal 7 (2), 219–231. Ozga, J., Simola, H., Varjo, J., Segerholm, C. and Pitkänen, H. 2011. Central–local relations of governance. In Ozga, J., Dahler-Larsen, P. ja Simola, H. (eds.) Fabricating quality in education: Data and governance in Europe. London: Routledge. Taylor, S., Rizvi, F., Lingard, B., & Henry, M. 1997. Educational Policy and the Politics of Change. London: Routledge. Varjo, J., Simola, H., Rinne, R., Pitkänen, H. & Kauko, J. 2011. Perusopetuksen arvioinnin totuudet – mukautumista vai omaperäisyyttä [The Truths Concerning the Evaluation of Basic Education – Adjustment or Originality]? In Rinne, R., Jauhiainen, A., Tähtinen, J. & Broberg, M. (eds.) Koulutuspolitiikan käytännöt kansallisessa ja ylikansallisessa kehyksessä [Practices of Education Policy in National and Supranational Contexts]. Turku: Finnish Educational Research Association.
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