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This paper describes and discusses the transformation of school governance in the era of digitalization in education. It focuses on how the production and use of big data at different levels affect policymaking and how big data-based policies have the consequences in education practices within the European education contexts and from the Swedish experiences. The datafication of education through digital technology gives rise to the digital governance of education that increasingly influences the organisation and management of the national education system, which is resulted in the structure shifts in education governance. On the one hand, big data derived from testing and surveys facilitates the comparison and creation of global benchmarks that impacts the governance of education systems to be more centralised at international and national level. And on the other hand, when data and information become more available at the local level, it enables organisational-level decision-making to break down hierarchical structures and become more distributed. Data based steering at different levels then puts considerable pressure on schools through the organised school inspection system, the strategy of self-monitoring, self-evaluation and self-formation that are closely related to managerial accountability or answerability of school governance.

This chapter aims to describe, illustrate, and discuss the rationale behind Swedish educational policy and the changing school management practices related to digital education. Based on a review of selected Swedish digital education policy documents and research literature, this chapter presents the transformation of digitalization that has taken place in Swedish schools during recent decades, the target formulations in policies, and the characteristics of school governance related to the international trends of adopting comparison of student performance on standard tests such as the PISA, as well as using big data for policy legitimation.

Since 1994 Sweden has carried out a number of initiatives funded by the government and other actors for integrating ICT into education. Huge amounts of money have been invested in developing infrastructure and raising teachers’ level of ICT knowledge and competence. However, it seems that there is still a gap between the claims for ICT use in education and the current practice of integrating ICT into the classroom. Some recent investigations indicate that a majority of Swedish teachers actually do not use computers in the classroom as much as they are expected to do. Knowledge about the use of ICT in teacher education is reported as being not good enough. This paper intends to describe the status quo of ICT integration in education in the Swedish context and discuss some critical issues on effective ICT practice in schools in relation to the demands on teachers and their professional development, and thus provide some backgrounds for suggesting models of Technology Enhanced Teacher Professional Development.

The purpose of this paper is to explore teachers’ (N=454) experiences and perceptions with regard to the use of a new web-based learning management system (LS) in home-school communication in Swedish schools. The results indicated a great dissatisfaction with its functional features among the teachers, which negatively impacted the attitudes and beliefs towards the usefulness and ease of use of LS for communication. This in turn prevented teachers’ and parents’ use of the LS and caused a general decrease in home-school communication in daily pr actices, especially for those disadvantaged parent.

In Sweden, along with the changing governing model in terms of centralization, decentralization, marketization, and privatization of education, as well as the performative turn in education (Lindblad, 2018), the overarching values of the Nordic model, such as social justice, equality, equal opportunities, integration, and democratic participation for all students irrespective of social and cultural background and abilities (Imsen, Blossing, & Moos, 2017; Lundahl, 2016), have been challenged. These challenges have also affected the relationship between home and school, and parents’ position in education. The aim of this presentation is to describe, analyze, and discuss how Swedish parents’ position in education has been constructed in educational policy and practices over time. This presentation addresses parents’ position regarding (a) how their role and responsibilities in education have been defined and argued for in the policy documents and (b) what their real position in education has been. The analysis is based on a review of selected central educational policy documents such as Education acts, the Government Official Reports series (SOU), national curricula from various periods since the 1960s, and relevant research literature in the Swedish education context. Preliminary analysis revealed that the rationales behind the policies are linked to the various phases of Swedish educational reforms. Since the decentralization, marketization, and privatization reforms, more demands have been placed on parents’ responsibility and ability to engage in education by themselves. Ideas about parents’ involvement have shifted more focus to parents’ supporting role in children’s learning outcomes and academic performance regarding the curriculum goals. There is a gap between the rhetoric of school–home partnership and collaboration and the reality of parental involvement and influence. The issues of segregation between different parent groups and parent exclusion due to different socioeconomic and cultural/linguistic conditions have increased.

Well-functioning home-school communication is seen as a fundamental prerequisite for improving parental involvement in school development and in children’s schooling. Traditionally, face-to-face, telephone and email contacts between teachers and parents have been the main pathways for home-school communication. Nowadays, almost all K-12 schools in Sweden have an integrated so-called learning management system (LMS) that enables the systematic management of school administration, teaching and learning, as well as internal and external information and communication. In spring 2015, one municipality in Sweden started to implement a new web-based LMS called Learning Space (LS) in all public schools. To evaluate its implementation process with regard to the teachers’ experiences, an online questionnaire was sent to all grade 1-12 teachers in the municipality. This study is part of the evaluation project. The purpose of this paper is to explore teachers’ (N=454) experiences and perceptions with regard to the use of LS in home-school communication. The utilisation of LMS framework developed by Asiri, Mahmud, Bakar and Ayub (2012) was adopted to identify critical factors for integrating new technology. The results indicated a great dissatisfaction with functional features of LS and the implementation process among the teachers, which negatively impacted the attitudes and beliefs towards the usefulness and ease of use of LS for communication between home and school. This in turn prevented teachers’ and parents’ use of LS, and caused a general decrease in home-school communication in daily practices, especially for those disadvantaged parents, according to the teachers. There is a need to reflect on the implementation process and to improve the system. A successful implementation of technology in education calls for policy commitment, quality features of the technical design, sufficient organisational support, and positive personal attitudes and efforts.

This is a study of changes in Chinese kindergarten education in the era of the post-Mao four modernisations. Based on fieldwork carried out in China in 1997, this thesis examined the changes of Chinese kindergarten education at two levels — changes in system (structural change) and changes in educational activities (curriculum and ideological change), especially for the period of the 1990s. Changes are described and discussed in a historical context, in which both changes in policy and in practice are examined.

Changes in education are closely linked to the social, political, economic and cultural context. The content, process and outcomes of reform in early childhood education in China have been affected by the national goals of reform, the social context of early educational institutions, their organizational characteristics, family structure, family policy, and the specific professional culture of teaching and learning. Recent structural reforms in early childhood education have been shaped by the foremost task of the nation - economic development. The previous welfare model of kindergarten, which was regarded as one of the outcomes of a socialist system, is being transformed into a new market competitive model to meet a political demand for the marketisation of society. The curricula of early educational program, teachers' attitudes to children, and their professional activities, therefore, have been re-shaped according to new ideas about the needs and abilities of children, new conceptions of child development and, not least, the new modernisation "knowledge" that gained ascendancy in China during the 1990s.