Educational leaders must often handle the state’s hybrid governance systems characterised by a hierarchical political model with top-down decision making and a bureaucratic model for municipality administration (Moos et al., 2016). Different national contexts and regimes of governance are considered to have strong influence on education leader autonomy through varying circumstances and requirements of governance (Ydesen 2023). Still, the “basic ‘grammar’ of schooling has been noted to remain remarkably stable over the decades” (Tyack & Tobin 1994). Further, Cuban has stated that “...school systems, individual schools, and teachers over the past century have absorbed and institutionalized efforts to end the grammar of schooling by incorporating reforms into each of these systems. And in doing so, each district, school, and classroom maintains stability by adopting incremental changes” (Cuban, 2020, p. 669) In this study we aim to explore and potentially challenge the perspective of how varying forms of governance impact education leadership autonomy and investigate what might be stable and consistent characteristics in education leadership autonomy across the two Nordic contexts of Norway and Sweden by asking: What consistencies in school leader autonomy can be observed in Norway and Sweden? Different local governance systems will have different impacts on a school leader’s autonomy, and studies have shown that perceived autonomy differ within the same municipality (Saarivirta & Kumpalainen, 2016, Nihlfors & Johansson, 2017). The country contexts of Norway and Sweden share historical traditions of schooling. However, their governance in the last decades is characterised by varied degrees of decentralisation and recentralisation. By comparing different solutions for similar issues, the study investigates how contextual factors impact the emergence of and relations between education leadership autonomy and organisational structures (Schriever 2017, 1999). The comparative study draws on data from a quantitative survey study responded by a total of 1300 school leaders in Norway and Sweden. The data has been analysed with a focus on consistencies between the data of the two country contexts as such an approach can give insights into important characteristics of education leadership autonomy and offers an opportunity to discuss whether there are certain core elements of educational leadership of today that can be considered consistent for leadership autonomy independent of country context.

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