Conference Agenda

Questions of responsibility, autonomy, and involvement lie at the heart of education systems. Across Europe, educational reforms have increasingly redistributed decision-making power from central authorities to local actors, while simultaneously raising demands for accountability, standardization, and evidence-based governance (Altrichter, 2010; Lægreid & Christensen, 2007). In this context, teachers and school leaders are no longer mere implementers of policy, they actively interpret, adapt and enact policy in response to local needs, translating national goals into locally relevant practices (Møller, 2011; Priestley et al., 2021). Asking who governs education is thus central to understanding contemporary educational change and the production of knowledge in schools.

The concepts of government and governance provide a useful lens for examining these dynamics. Government is often associated with hierarchical, top-down action, exercised through formal rules and legal instruments. Governance, by contrast, emphasizes collaboration, networks, and the consent of multiple actors, highlighting that authority is co-constructed through interaction rather than imposed from above (Altrichter, 2010).

This symposium brings together three empirical studies that explore these dynamics in practice across different European contexts. The first study examines teacher involvement in Norway’s national curriculum reform (LK20), showing how teachers engage across multiple sites (Priestley et al., 2021; Alvunger et al., 2021), from national committees to classroom-level enactment, and actively shape curricular content and pedagogical practices. The second contribution investigates school leader autonomy in quality work in Norway and Sweden, highlighting how autonomy is relational and shaped by governance structures, professional norms, and shared leadership practices, and how leaders negotiate discretion and accountability (Schulte, 2023) within complex institutional settings. The third study focuses on school leader autonomy in inclusive education in Germany and Norway, demonstrating how school leaders navigate formal mandates, local conditions, and professional expectations (Scott, 2014) to enact governance in practice, bridging national policy and school-level implementation.

Taken together, these studies indicate that governing education is distributed across multiple actors, including school leaders and teachers. Yet governance is contingent on the interplay of formal regulations, institutional norms and structures, and professional actors’ influence. For example, teachers’ participation in curriculum reform, while formally encouraged, is constrained by ambiguous mandates and limited macro-level impact, showing that formal involvement does not necessarily translate into actual decision-making power. Still, these actors are expected to translate, interpret, and adapt policy directives within institutional frameworks, highlighting their mediating role between policy and practice. Negotiation and local adaptation shape collective practices, yet these processes occur within pre-defined boundaries that reflect ongoing tensions between professional discretion and regulatory expectations creating complex governance landscapes.

These comparative insights from Norway, Sweden, and Germany illustrate how governance models, historical trajectories, and professional cultures affect the distribution of influence and autonomy, producing both shared patterns and context-specific challenges. In this sense, the question “Who governs education?” is not only about formal responsibilities but also about the negotiated, contextually embedded enactments of policy, where authority is simultaneously distributed, constrained, and locally interpreted. These findings underline that understanding policy as enacted practice is essential: participatory and decentralized reforms may expand opportunities for engagement, but actual influence remains uneven, reminding researchers and policymakers to consider both institutional conditions and professional agency.

Participatory approaches to curriculum reform, in which teachers and other actors are involved, are increasingly common (Kneen et al., 2023; Kontovourki et al., 2018). Making use of teachers’ skills, knowledge and experience in reform has been identified as important (Alvunger et al., 2021), but the purpose of involving teachers in such efforts differ between countries, and the literature shows that participatory approaches to curriculum reform vary extensively based on context. This study examines how teachers were involved in the most recent national curriculum reform in Norway, the LK20. The starting point is the political aim and strategy of involving teachers in the reform efforts. In foundational policy documents of the reform, teachers are highlighted as central in three different curriculum reform activities: an online commentary process, national curriculum committees, and local curriculum work. These activities form the basis for investigation. The study is theoretically grounded in the work by Priestley et al. (2021), in which curriculum making and reform are understood as social practices involving a variety of activities and actors across the supra, macro, meso, micro and nano sites of the education system. The research question of the study is: How are teachers involved across sites of the LK20 curriculum reform, and to what extent are they able to influence the curriculum reform? Through document analyses and interviews, the study empirically investigates how teachers were involved in the LK20 reform across the macro (national) and micro (school) sites, and the extent to which they were able to influence the reform. The findings reveal a clear strategy for the involvement of teachers in the macro and micro sites, and teachers actively participated in reform activities across both sites. However, while teachers’ responsibilities in local curriculum work were clearly outlined in policy, their mandate as national curriculum makers was more ambiguous. The documents detailing their involvement were vague, offering little clarity on how teachers’ contributions would be reflected in the final LK20 curriculum documents. Furthermore, teachers seem to have had limited influence on the LK20 curriculum documents through macro site activities. In schools, teachers experienced freedom with regard to selecting subject matter and methods, thus influencing outcomes of the reform. However, these decisions were shaped by meso site activities and loyalty to the national curriculum.

Alvunger, D., Soini, T., Philippou, S., & Priestley, M. (2021). Conclusions: Patterns and trends in curriculum making in Europe. In M. Priestley, D. Alvunger, S. Philippou, & T. Soini (Eds.), Curriculum Making in Europe: Policy and Practice Within and Across Diverse Contexts (pp. 273-293). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83867-735-020211013 Kneen, J., Breeze, T., Thayer, E., John, V., & Davies-Barnes, S. (2023). Pioneer teachers: How far can individual teachers achieve agency within curriculum development? Journal of Educational Change, 24(2), 243-264. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-021-09441-3 Kontovourki, S., Philippou, S., & Theodorou, E. (2018). Curriculum making as professionalism-in-context: the cases of two elementary school teachers amidst curriculum change in Cyprus. The Curriculum Journal, 29(2), 257-276. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2018.1447308 Priestley, M., Philippou, S., Alvunger, D., & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum Making: a conceptual framework. In Curriculum Making in Europe: Policy and Practice Within and Across Diverse Contexts (pp. 1-28). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83867-735-020211013

School leader autonomy is important in improving the quality of educational provision and in raising students’ learning outcomes (Cheng et al., 2016). As such, it has become pivotal in effectuating (inter)national aims and education policy in many countries (e.g. Pont, 2014), including in Scandinavia (e.g. Nordholm et al., 2025). School leader autonomy is, however, also associated with a series of paradoxes and dilemmas. For example, policy expectations and culturally bound expectations and norms from actors in and surrounding schools, can lead to dilemmas for school leaders in their enactment of decision-making authority and autonomy (Murphy & Ydesen, 2025; Wildy et al., 2004). Adopting a comparative case study approach (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) compared with a mixed-methods approach (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018), this study investigates how school leader autonomy is formed within the context of quality work in Norway and Sweden, focussing on policy expectations towards school leadership, school leaders’ experiences of governance and practices of shared leadership. The theoretical framework is grounded in systems theory and conceptualises autonomy as a relational and nested phenomenon within policy–practice nexuses where norms and rules are negotiated (Schulte, 2023). The study draws on rich data material, combining historical document analysis of school leader union magazines (2006–2021) from Norway and Sweden, interviews and survey data from Norwegian and Swedish school leaders, and ethnographic fieldwork. The two countries provide important contexts for comparison, as they share social-democratic traditions and decentralised governance, yet differ in their trajectories of accountability and leadership policy. The analysis shows that policy expectations form autonomy through framing leadership as either shared or individualised. Furthermore, school leaders’ experiences of governance in the two countries reveal contrasting dynamics. Where Norwegian school leaders navigate relational and multi-actor environments, Swedish school leaders operate within clearer, hierarchical structures, creating both opportunities and dilemmas for autonomy. Lastly, shared leadership practices can enhance collective capacity but also restrict individual leadership autonomy, depending on how roles and responsibilities are negotiated. Across both country contexts, autonomy is not a static attribute, but a dynamic process influenced by governance, professional norms, and organisational structures. Illuminating how autonomy is enacted and negotiated in different policy environments, this study offers empirical insights into the interplay between autonomy, accountability, and shared leadership, and underscores the need for nuanced policy approaches that balance professional discretion with collective responsibility in quality work.

Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Comparative Case Studies: An Innovative Approach. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1(1). Creswell, J. W., & Plano Clark, V. L. (2018). Designing and conducting mixed methods research (Third ed.). Sage. Murphy, M., & Ydesen, C. (2025). The moral grounding of changing educational assessment and accountability: a theoretically informed analysis of moral assemblages in Denmark. Oxford Review of Education, 51(2), 160–177. Nordholm, D., Jarl, M., & Wermke, W. (2025). School Leader Autonomy – a Systematic Review. Educational Administration Quarterly, 0(0). Pont, B. (2014). School Leadership: From Practice to Policy. International Journal of Educational Leadership and Management, 2(1), 4–28. Schulte, B. (2023). The Policy-Practice Nexus as 'Politics of Use': Professional Autonomy and the Teacher Agency in the Classroom. In T. Prøitz, P. Aasen, & W. Wermke (Eds.), From Education Policy to Education Practice: Unpacking the Nexus (pp. 39–57). Springer. Wildy, H., Forster, P., Louden, W., & Wallace, J. (2004). The international study of leadership in education : monitoring decision making by school leaders. Journal of Educational Administration, 42(4), 416–430.

This study examines school leaders as key actors within the governing of inclusive education in Germany and Norway, focusing on how school leader autonomy is shaped within different forms of governing inclusive education. Using inclusive education as a lens, the study explores how leadership autonomy is distributed and exercised, highlighting the negotiation between professional agency, responsibility, and formal regulatory demands (Hatch, 2013). School leaders are particularly important in the context of inclusive education because their autonomous decision-making is assumed to bridge the gap between national policy directives and local implementation ensuring equitable opportunities (Badstieber et al., 2018, Møller, 2011). Governing is understood as the interplay between hierarchical, rule-based government and local governance, where actors interpret and negotiate policy in response to local needs (Altrichter, 2010). School leader autonomy is conceptualized as a space for decision-making that balances answerability to externally defined goals with responsibility for local adaptation, (Hatch, 2013). The concepts of governing and autonomy are examined through Scott’s (2014) three pillars of institutions, focusing on regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive pillars, which together highlight how formal rules, social expectations, and shared interpretations shape school leaders’ autonomy. Using Bartlett and Vavrus’s (2017) comparative case study design, the study compares two historically distinct education systems that have recently introduced similar reforms granting school leaders greater local discretion (Wermke & Prøitz, 2021). Through the analysis of approximately 2 700 pages of legal documents, 38 articles from German and Norwegian school leadership magazines, and 23 interviews with school leaders from both countries, combined as cross-case comparison, the study shows that school leader autonomy is shaped by both institutional structures and local enactment. In the German case, leadership autonomy is largely exercised to bridge gaps in fragmented governing, whereas in the Norwegian case, school leaders operate within a more coherent institutional framework. Across both contexts, school leaders negotiate responsibilities dynamically, balancing formal mandates, professional norms, and local conditions. The study highlights the relational nature of governing, showing how school leaders act as intermediaries who translate, interpret, and at times extend policy to respond to the practical realities of inclusive education. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of “who governs education” in different national contexts, illustrating the interplay between formal authority and professional agency in shaping school leadership autonomy and the enactment of inclusive education policies. The study further offers insights for both policymakers and practitioners on balancing autonomy and accountability to foster inclusive schools.

Altrichter, H. (2010). Theory and evidence on governance: Conceptual and empirical strategies of research on governance in education. European Educational Research Journal, 9(2), 147–158. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2010.9.2.147 Badstieber, B., Köpfer, A., & Amrhein, B. (2018). Schulleitungen im Kontext inklusiver Bildungsreformen. In T. Sturm, & M. Wagner-Willi (Eds.), Handbuch schulische Inklusion (pp. 235–249). Barbara Budrich. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Comparative case studies: An innovative approach. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1(1). 5–17. https://doi.org/10.7577/njcie.1929 Hatch, T. (2013). Beneath the surface of accountability: Answerability, responsibility and capacity-building in recent education reforms in Norway. Journal of Educational Change, 14(2), 113–138. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-012-9206-1 Møller, J. (2011). Rektorers profesjonsforståelse - faglig autonomi og administrativ underordning. In E. Ottesen, & J. Møller (Eds.), Rektor som leder og sjef. Om styring, ledelse og kunnskapsutvikling i skolen (pp. 27–50). Universitetsforlaget. Scott, W. R. (2014). Institutions and organizations: Ideas, interests, and identities. Sage. Wermke, W., & Prøitz, T. S. (2021). Integration, fragmentation and complexity - governing of the teaching profession and the Nordic model. In J. E. Larsen, B. Schulte, & F. W. Thue (Eds.), Schoolteachers and the Nordic model: Comparative and historical perspectives (pp. 216–228). Routledge.