Language education in European countries is facing serious challenges. National language situations are becoming more and more diversified as number of languages spoken in these countries increase. While Finland has traditionally been a relatively homogeneous country linguistically, the situation is also changing in Finland with increases in immigration and in the number of languages spoken. The main guidelines for Finnish language education policy are drawn at the national level but the final language education decisions are made locally, i.e. in municipalities. This paper presents first results of a project dealing with realizations of language education policies at the local level. The study is carried out at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä. Our aim is to analyze how national language education goals are realized in local policy actions, and where the educational policy powers are when decisions concerning language education are made. Our intention is also to further explore the relationship of national educational policy, language education policy and local implementations of that policy. Our research questions are: • How does education policy in general, and language education policy in particular, appear in the local elections? • What kinds of values about education are reflected in the election talk at the new municipalities? • Are local educational policies redefined before and during the local elections in local newspapers or by the election candidates? • How do local election candidates, elected council members and local authorities relate to languages, language education and its development in the municipalities? As we will be using different kinds of data, we will be focussing on the situations where official policies and local practises meet, creating different kinds of tensions. Consequently, in the meeting places of national and local needs and interests, national language education policy is ”recontextualised” (Iedema & Wodak 1999) in European societies which are becoming increasingly diversified (Blackledge 2005). We timed our study to coincide with two incidents or developments in the lives of the municipalities in question; i.e. Jyväskylä (in Central Finland) and Salo (in Southwestern Finland). The first was the consolidation of municipalities in the beginning of the year 2009. In the Jyväskylä area, three municipalities were consolidated; in the Salo area ten. This provided a good opportunity for a case study as also arrangements for primary and secondary education were being rethought and reorganized in the new municipalities due to the consolidations. ++continues in References

We collected four kinds of data for the study: 1. an e-questionnaire for local election candidates 2. local election programmes of the parties 3. newspaper articles dealing with education 4. interviews with elected local council members The aim of the questionnaire was to find out what the candidates think about languages, language education, the potential effects consolidations of municipalities will have on language education and language education of immigrants. The questionnaire was sent out, shortly before the elections, to 834 candidates and 296 of them answered it. The local election programmes, drafted nationally by the perties, were analyzed discursively, as meanings and connotations of instances dealing with language education were analyzed. Six local newspapers from the Jyväskylä and Salo area (two with national visibility) were analysed similarly, with special emphasis on language education in the municipalities. ++++ continues in References

The key issue concerning language education turned out to be language education of immigrants. This was the case particularly in the municipal election programs of the parties and in the questionnaire. Newspapers, in turn, concentrated more on the infrastructure of education(school buildings, renovations etc.) rather than the contents of education. Currently, the interviews are only being conducted, so we have no preliminary results from them. Even these preliminary results, however, prompt the question: where is education policy and language education policy conducted locally? From the point of view of language education policies, our findings challenge the possibilities of nationally set goals and policies. They also challenge the Finnish democratic tradition of education policy: as local authorities and communities have become more autonomous in policy making, also the contexts(political, economic, migrant situation etc.) for language education policy making in different parts of the country are affected, creating possibilities for(language) educational inequality.