Cases stories with analyses of school policy reform from Denmark, England, Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Chech Rep., Croatia are the material this is built on. We find similarities and differences in how national government produce policies and reforms.
Our setup is being very much in line with Bartlett & Vavrus (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017), who argue that cases used in comparisons should attend simultaneously to macro, meso, and micro dimensions. We do not see these dimensions as bounded, and thus setting fixed borders between levels, often preferring to see things slide from one level to other fields in ultracomplex contexts.
In taking this perspective, we recognize that influences often slide unnoticed into the minds and practices of agents, remaining hidden and the strategically important question here is whether this creates more homogenized school systems across Europe over time, or whether national recontextualization and contestation make a difference which is sufficient to maintain different trajectories in school policies across Europe (Ball & Junemann, 2012). One sign of sliding occurs when authorities shift their form of governance from the regulations and frameworks of hard governance towards the use of soft governance, which often means adapting to suit national particularities, as shown in the ten country case chapters (Moos, 2019).
The analyses show a two-sided sliding of agency in Europe: one is the transformation of decisions from state-level towards regional, municipal, and institutional levels – in the contemporary transnational discourse named ‘the move to autonomy’ (Lingard, 2000). The other involves a transformation of influence from classroom and school levels towards meta-state level, transnational level – named competence and performance and outcomes technologies (Krejsler & Moos, 2021). In short, we have also registered similarities within regions, most clearly in Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, where economy is in the forefront in all nation case-analyses. To some degree there are similarities in centralist state-construction in Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, founded in the communist eras, and in the relatively – and different - close relation to transnational, government-relations, new public management (NPM), in the Northwestern Europe, founded in the very close relations between the nations here (Normand, Moos, Min, & Tulowitzki, 2021).
