Quasi-market regulation in kindergarten and schools: the Scandinavian “natural experiment”.

• In Event: Leadership, Governance and the Globalization of Education: Future Forming and Situated Analyses

Proposal

Education in Scandinavia is known for its strong emphasis on a unitary, publicly funded and regulated welfare system, designed to promote social mobility and equal access to high quality education. This purpose implied strong political coordination with a public trust within professional-bureaucratic regulations, where the state should both serve the nation and its citizens (Telhaug et al.,2004). While the welfare goals have remained more or less unchanged until the present, there are currently increasing divergences among the Scandinavian countries in the regulation of early childhood education and care and compulsory education. Both systems get public approval and funding, while simultaneously being regulated by quasi-market principles (Maroy, 2012). New contractual relationships allow for user choice models with simplified rules for establishment of private service units, and funding per user where more weight is put on individual responsibility for choosing services with the suitable profile and quality (Sivesind & Saglie, 2017).
Being a country in lead, during the nineties, Sweden adopted quasi-market principles and introduced a voucher system that allowed for-profit schools to compete with the public system. A goal was to create the best school system in Europe in terms of aggregated learning outcomes, but a drop in PISA results indicated a decline from the early 2000s and onwards. The reform did succeed however, in raising the share of students in private schools from 1 to 15 percent. This was a radical break with a social democratic policy of using public service provision to combat poverty and social inequality.
Norway on its side have a less liberal system for nonprofit private schools. In order to obtain public funding, private schools in Norway must offer established alternatives to the public school system in terms of pedagogies, religion, or an international dimension. Early childhood education and care is however, largely privatized. In Norway only 4 percent of the student population attends private schools, while as a much as 50 percent of the children attend early childhood education in contrast to a portion of 20 percent in Sweden.
This remarkable difference between countries and cases, invites for exploring a mix of welfare models as a “natural experiment”. Why have national governments in the two countries followed various paths towards education privatization and chosen opposite models for coordinating compulsory education and early childhood education differently by introducing post-bureaucratic principles?
The paper compare education systems in Norway and Sweden to assess the coordinative dimensions of the contractual relationships between private providers and public authorities. It reports from a large-scale comparative research project on the role of markets and choice in Scandinavian welfare systems that was based on a mixed-method approach (Sivesind & Saglie, 2017) and recent research on Private Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in five Nordic Countries (Trætteberg, Sivesind, Paananen, & Hrafnsdóttir, 2023).
Empirically, country-specific differences in terms of political, cultural and economic conditions have been subject for a cross-national comparison to explore the different paths towards marketization (Verger, Fontdevila, & Zancajo, 2017). The study uses official national statistics to document changes in enrolment in public, for-profit and non-profit education in the two countries (Sivesind & Saglie, 2017). By summarizing findings and interpretations that draw on register data and documentary sources (Halperin & Heath, 2020), the paper identifies historical events that encouraged shifts that moved the education policy in opposite directions, and that for each case implied various applications of post-bureaucratic modes of governance (Maroy, 2012)..
Liberal ideas about the rights of parents to choose schools with different content or better quality and to opt out of bad schools, serve as one explanation for the path towards marketization during the early 2000s (Arnesen and Lundahl 2006). Here, the coordination of the school system differed from the Norwegian, by introducing the principle of competition and the possibility of taking economical advantage of the business. Although liberal ideas enforced policy changes in the Norwegian education system, politicians reacted more pragmatically by decentralizing power by an evaluation state model that served to meet similar expectations. For Early Childhood Education and Care in Norway, the political acceptance of privatization based on a broad political agreement to warrant the right of each individual to access education from an early age. In Sweden a national public kindergarten system was in place already, In Norway, the politicians welcomed multiple providers to build up kindergartens, including private companies, to achieve the same goal. These providers were the next step capable to buy into the market of private schools in Sweden, which also demonstrates that marketization cannot be fully regulated by nation-states.
This paper argues that different implementations of choice and to what degree the public funded systems open for vouchers and competition, have important consequences for the degree of privatization as implications, not merely in terms of educational programs, but for the way parents, civil society organizations, public authorities, and owners interact. The Swedish case demonstrates that parents with high levels of social capital are more concerned about choosing schools with the best results, while others may be more concerned to associate with social networks (peer effects). This may in the next step lead to segregation different from the Norwegian case, where the state is in a situation to control the distribution of sources, since the national government by law does not allow free competition.
References
Halperin, S., & Heath, O. (2020). Political research: methods and practical skills: Oxford University Press
Maroy, C. (2012). Towards Post-Bureaucratic Modes of Governance. In G. Steiner-Khamsi and F. Waldow (Eds.), Policy Borrowing and Lending in Education (pp. 62-94). Routledge.
Sivesind, K. H., & Saglie, J. (Eds.). (2017). Promoting Active Citizenship. Markets and Choice in Scandinavian Welfare. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Trætteberg, H. S., Sivesind, K. H., Paananen, M., & Hrafnsdóttir, S. (2023). Privatization of Earlychildhood education and care in Nordic countries. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Verger, A., Fontdevila, C., & Zancajo, A. (2017). Multiple paths towards education privatization in a globalizing world: A cultural political economy review. Journal of Education Policy, 32(6), 757-787.

Authors

• Karl Henrik Svesind, Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway

• Håkon Solbu Trætteberg, Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway