One of the features of the Nordic welfare model has been the prioritization of a comprehensive public school model (Blossing, Imsen et al. 2014, Imsen and Volckmar 2014). However, for the last thirty years there has been increased support for private alternatives in several of the Nordic countries. This is also the case in Norway where the number of private schools and pupils attending them has more than doubled the last ten years (SSB, 2020). While private schools constituted 3,5 % of the comprehensive schools in 2003, it had increased to over 9 % in 2019 and from 2010 – 2020 the percentage of private schools had increased by 63%. In the same periode the percentage of pupils attending private schools have increased from 2,3% to 4,3% (SSB, 2020).

Within a nordic context Norway has been one of the countries that have been restrictive when it comes to privatsation and market-led policies (Wiborg 2013, Dovemark, Kosunen et al. 2018). Compared to Sweden and Denmark, Norway have had a restrictive legislation clearifying that private schools can only be established on the terms that it offer an alternative to and does not come in competition with the public school. In order to avoid segregation and commersialisation, school fees are kept low by public funding and it is prohibited to make profit on education (Sivesind 2016). However, even though Norway traditionally have stood out as restrictive when it comes to privatisation policies, the status and the balance between private and public schools are changing. Whereas this is related to how conservative governments over the last twenty years have fought to liberalise the private school legislation (and renamed it to ”the free school act”), it is also linked to other policies not directly regulating private education. In this context descentralisation policies, devolving economic responsibility from state to municipality level, have been central when private schools have replaced public schools in financially poor municipalities. While decentralisation and market-led reforms have been introduced simoultanously as privatisation policies (Bjordal & Haugen, 2021), we know little about how they interact and if and how the increased support for private alternatives are related to the development of the public school.

Inspired by a critical approach emphasising the need to investigate privatisation policies in a broader perspective and in relation to other policies, this paper examines how parents support for private schools are related to the development of the public school. Informed by research illuminating how neoliberal reforms in education can stimulate support for private alternatives (Ball & Youdell, 2008), our aim has been to study the ”process of privatisation” as related to a broader restructuring of the educational landcsape The aim is to illuminate processes and mechanisms that stimulate privatisation within education.

The paper is based on an ongoing research project about parental choice in the Norwegian school. Within this project 60 families in the region of Trondheim, the part of Norway with the highest concentration of private schools, have been interviewed about the process of choosing private schools for their children. Inspired by Bowe, Ball and Gewirtz (1994) sociological understanding of choice in education as something dependent on the chooser and the social and political context the choice is made within, our aim has been to “situate individual processes of decisions making within the multilayered context in which such decisions are made” (Bowe, Gewirtz, & Ball, 1994, p. 76). Building on their analytical concept of “landscape of choice” we have been interested in exploring choice and support for private schooling as something that is related to material and social circumstances and not something that can be reduced to individual preferences or individual and socially isolated processes of rational choice. In order to explore educational choice as a contextual phenomenon we have analyzed the process of choosing a school in relation to what Ball et al (2012) refers to as different contextual dimensions. This entails analyzing how the choice process is related to situated conditions like the different school’s history and intake, material conditions as staff, buildings, budgets and infrastructure, professional culture referring to values and teacher commitments and policy management in schools and external conditions like pressure and expectations from a broader policy context such as legal requirements, league table positions and responsibilities. By focusing on how parents process of choosing are related to these dimensions, the aim has been to answer the research question: How are parents' choice of private schools related to the educational context in which the choices are made?

Preliminary findings show that although parents’ choice of a private alternative is related to the private schools' profile and individual preferences, choice is also closely related to their own or their children experiences with the public school. In this context parents choose private because the public school as they see it, within its economic and structural conditions and political governance (informed by NPM and market-led reforms), is unable to deliver an education that can compete against what the private offer. This is related to getting special needs education, adapted teaching and an educational setting that is more child centered and where there are resources and infrastructure to be pedagogically creative. While these aspects and values traditionally have been prioritized within the public school, parents now experience they must go private to ensure their children these conditions. In short it may seem that the private schools represent a substitute more than a supplement to the public schools and that the restructuring and financial steering of the public school may stimulate to privatization. This resonates with Stephen Ball and Deborah Youdell (2008, p. 58) claim that privatization in education (manifested through NPM and market-led policies), “provides the possibilities for further policy moves towards forms of exogenous privatisation, or privatisation of education”.

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