Since the introduction in 1986 of a more decentralised system of financing and managing compulsory education in Norway, we have witnessed a dramatic wave of school closures in rural areas. As part of a relatively large scale project at Nesna University College and financed by the Norwegian Research Council, “Schooling and Growing up in Sparsely Populated Areas (SPA)”, a comprehensive survey was carried out 2005-2006 covering 142 SPA-municipalities and their around 500 compulsory (primary and lower secondary) schools. Questionnaire data were collected from municipal level (100 % return) and school level (82 % return). The municipal level data include details on the around 150 schools that have been closed during these twenty years, such as number of pupils the year of closure and distance to neighbouring school. The data also give information on the processes leading to the closure, and provide some information on the local mobilisation and struggle to save the school. In most cases a closed school had been under threat of closure for several years. In spite of the fact that the national level recommendations for the municipalities were not to close rural schools on financial grounds, budgetary concerns were the most frequently reported reason for the decision to close a school. The school level survey provides data on previous and present threats of being closed, on the degree of local resistance against such possible municipal level decisions, and on how the threat of being closed effects the daily life of the school.

These Norwegian findings seriously question whether schooling under threat of closure is compatible with the principle of equity in education. They also challenge more generally the decentralisation policies of the 1980s and 1990s in the light of national ambitions of rural survival and prosperity. More in-dept studies employing qualitative research approaches on these issues should be carried out. As the policies of decentralisation and the question of closures or amalgamations of rural schools are at present highly relevant also in a number of other European countries such as Sweden, Finland and United Kingdom, a comparative approach ought to be considered.