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Collaboration between schools and parents has become increasingly prominent on the political agenda in Norway. Schools are obliged to promote parent-school cooperation in accordance with parents' rights as stakeholders in education. This article explores the governing strategies of seven primary or lower-secondary schools that have taken initiatives to improve parent-school collaboration. The main intention is to explore how New Public Management (NPM) measures (such as market values, decentralization, competition, and output control) and New Public Service (NPS) tools (including coalition building and citizens' involvement) are reproduced at the local level when parent-school collaboration is put on the agenda. The analysis shows that street-level discretion at school level implies considerable uncertainty around the achievement of policy objectives. Different opinions on parents as a target group seem prominent in explaining how frontline workers act and strategize. Two distinct collaboration strategies are identified: serving and steering. The serving strategy is based on a linear partnership by making use of local knowledge in order to reach parents and enable their participation. The steering strategy is characterized by non-linear relationships with parents and certain steering mechanisms by routinizing collaboration activities, modifying goals for parent-school collaboration and rationing school services to parents.

Across Europe, governments, education institutions and relevant practitioners often view student progress to tertiary level studying as the primary evidence of successful education transitions, with engagement in the labour market as also a positive outcome. If students complete upper secondary education, and move on to either further study or employment, this is seen as a success, while other outcomes are often seen as failures. Even though this is a rather narrow and limited view of transitions, it has underpinned national and European level policies, programmes and interventions that aim at supporting young people in their movements within the various stages of schooling, towards tertiary education, or the labour market. Particular attention is also given to the early school leaving (ESL) that is seen as a considerable challenge for society and for individuals. This Special Issue focuses on such policies and programmes across a number of European national contexts, and aims to explore transitions, their rationales, mechanisms, and structures – but also, how they are experienced by participants who engage in them. Our aim in this article is to provide a context for the empirical work presented in the issue, and to theoretically frame the articles that address and problematise various aspects of student trajectories across Europe. We argue that transitions need to be understood not merely as outcomes for students, but as processes found in the intersection between education, social and labour market policies, core constituents of welfare states. The nature of the links between these different but interconnected policy areas, shape both what kinds of transition policies are considered as possible, but also what kinds of outcomes are seen as successful.

Low completion rate in upper secondary education is seen as a big problem in the Nordic countries. School failure has shown to dramatically increase the risks for unemployment and labour market exclusion with severe consequences for both society and the young person. This paper analyses national policy measures to combat low upper secondary education completion rates in Norway and Sweden, often regarded as representing a social democratic welfare model and a universalistic transition regime. The analysis demonstrates that although this issue has received extensive political attention, the two countries display somewhat different policy designs. The Norwegian approach is proactive and targeted while the Swedish policy is more general and directed towards reforming organisational structures in upper-secondary education. In sum, our analysis demonstrates that national governance structures shape and influence policy design in the context of an increasingly diversified Nordic social democratic welfare state regime.

The main question raised in this article is how educational reforms reflect convergence or divergence between the English, the Norwegian and the Swedish educational systems. We claim that the answer depends on how convergence is conceptualised. At the level of decisions on tools, the countries seem more similar than two decades ago. However, to explain policy changes our analytical perspective must be broadened. We demonstrate how values based on different welfare state models, political economies and different types of institutional evolution can explain processes of change in education over the last decades. In paying attention to broader processes of change, a certain degree of variation occurs. The countries seem to develop according to nationally specific trajectories: England has strengthened the liberal and elitist values of education while social democratic values of comprehensiveness and equality have impact on the aims and effects of policy tools in Norway and Sweden.