This article offers new empirical evidence regarding the limits of the premises of educational privatisation policies. Educational markets rely on the assumption that private participation has the potential to boost school diversification and open new educational opportunities for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Svensk politik saknar visioner om hur skolan skulle kunna organiseras och styras till samhällets och demokratins bästa – bortom skolmarknadens destruktiva spiral mot avgrunden, skriver Gunnlaugur Magnússon, docent i pedagogik vid Uppsala universitet.

Det svenska skolsystemet med fria skolval, möjlighet till ekonomisk vinst för friskolor, omfattande nationella prov och skolinspektion, har en betydande påverkan på alla lärarnas arbete och autonomi, skriver Wieland Wermke och Gabriella Höstfelt.

This study examined the frames the parents of a four-year-old child use to justify the selection of a private ECEC centre for their child. The data comprised qualitative interviews with eight Finnish parents.

In this article, we analyse overarching patterns of social stratification in, and quality differences between, Swedish preschools.

This article sheds light on governance mechanisms at work when decentralised implementation of national educational and welfare policies encounters a heterogeneous sector of private service provider organisations.

This study explores the different ways in which Swedish municipalities act as quasi-market organisers in the preschool setting. Following organisational theory, we analyse their market shaping activities in translating national regulations in efforts to influence, support and control their local preschool quasi-market.

In this context, this study examines how the growth of the private education industry within the education system has influenced preschool principals’ work in Iceland. Our critical theoretical perspective aims to explore how educational trends grounded in neoliberalism have shaped the work of preschool principals.

This article examines how public welfare institutions in Denmark are reconfigured into knowledge factories. Since the 1990s, Denmark has sought to export “welfare” solutions as a way of extracting knowledge on social practices already happening in institutions of the welfare state for economic purposes.

This study targets hitherto largely understudied empirical processes and activities through which certain ideas and imaginaries are being commercialised and used by corporate actors in the global Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) industry. The aim is to analyse and critically discuss representations of the Scandinavian ECEC regime in the context of ECEC export.