Schools in Europe are becoming increasingly multicultural and this poses hard challenges for educational policy. In several countries minority students demonstrate lower performance than natives, and language has been revealed as one of the factors associated with academic progress (Schulz et al. 2010). This finding has urged governments to transfer minority speaking schools to the majority language of tuition. Being a quite widespread worldwide practice it had besides purely educational reasons also political aspects such as building loyalty and promoting social integration after radical political regime change. All those reasons explain also school reforms in Latvia and Estonia, which aimed to introduce in Russian-speaking schools Estonian/Latvian as the language of tuition. By today both countries have already several years of reform “history” that includes also revisions, compromises and postponements of initial reform plan. One of the problems in both countries (although in different degree) has been reluctance of students, teachers and parents in Russian-speaking schools to accept the governmental plan.

According to recent debates in public policy literature, to make policy happen, it is important to regard citizens and stakeholders as co-producers of (educational) services (Newman 2010, Dickinson et al. 2013). Public policy studies typically focus on the policy making phase and seldom study stakeholders participation in the implementation of a particular policy reform. By investigating problem in the British health care reform Newman (2007) has found that government ideas did not reached patients and therefore some important reform aims have not been achieved. Empowerment means fundamental shift in power relations from paternalism to co-production and from professionally-led services to user-led models. In education, as in public services elsewhere, services should be responsive to the preferences and needs of students and teachers and take local circumstances into account.  

Majority of empowerment studies are in the area of health and care policies. In schooling and education the evidence on importance of stakeholders’ empowerment is much scarcer. A recent study on quality of education (Toots & Lauri 2015) has found that absence of strict regulations and participatory political culture (both in school and society) are most robust factors associated with the successful education. This result suggests that stakeholders’ empowerment may be an important factor in improving educational quality in any reform process.

Based on all these findings from various research areas we pose the hypothesis that empowerment of students, teachers and parents  can advance the hard reform of changing the language of tuition. The aim of the current paper is to analyse what evidence on empowerment of students and teachers in Russian-speaking schools can be found and what kind of factors explain its presence and characteristics. Since we are comparing Latvia and Estonia, we assume that broader political and socio-cultural context may also play a role here. More specifically we set three research questions:

1. Do students and teachers have feeling of belonging (positive attitude) to their own school?
2. Do students and teachers have real possibilities or practices to effect how the school life is organised?
3. What varieties in perceived and realised empowerment do exist and what factors are responsible for them?  

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