During the last 40 years, many countries have launched radical reforms
of their public education systems in a neoliberal direction that
emphasises a mixed economy of schooling. The reforms have been
accompanied by discourses of ‘a crisis’ of the public sector, and shared
broadly similar elements of varying degrees of decentralisation and new
public management (NPM), choice, competition and the introduction of
private actors and interests in public education. Much social policy and
education research on marketisation reforms has focused on Anglo-Saxon
countries, where institutional changes towards more choice and
competition have led to a similar dismantling of the welfare state. This
has included turning citizens (students, parents) into customers, with
all the resulting implications for ethnically and socio-economically
based differentiation (Cahill & Hall, 2014; Campbell et al., 2009;
Clarke et al., 2007; Roda & Stuart Wells, 2013). However, despite
the numerous similarities in the direction of education reforms, the
existing literature on marketisation does not capture the peculiarities
of the Nordic education policy settings, where choice and competition
coexist with a strong sense of education as a public good.