Successful Nordic School Leadership

Abstract

With the starting point in the 'International Successful School Principal Project' that looked into how success had been sustained over a 5-year period, we found that the governing structures of schools, the definitions of quality, the methods to measure quality and the criteria of success had changed to a certain degree. On the basis of a set of accountability categories (marketplace, managerial, public, professional and ethical categories), we analyse the cases from Denmark, Norway and Sweden and compare them with cases from UK, US and other Anglo-American educational systems. In this analysis we look for similarities and differences between school leadership in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. We find strong indication of a Nordic idea of democracy and democratic schooling. We see an ongoing struggle between local and national governance with more weight on local (municipality and schools) than on state governance. When we compare this Nordic image with analyses of the Anglo-American cases, we see that in high-stakes educational systems, school principals tend to use more direct power/influences, while the Nordic make more use of negotiations and reciprocal influences.