In their strategies for education, both the EU and the OECD argue that early intervention is seen as an important strategy to ensure an inclusive education for all (EU, 2006; OECD, 2012). Several countries have worked to implement early intervention in their educational system.  In Norway, intensive training was incorporated into the Norwegian Education Act in 2018 as part of the initiative on early intervention, and is described as:

"In grades 1 to 4, the municipality shall ensure that students who are at risk of not making expected progress in reading, writing, or arithmetic quickly receive appropriate intensive training. If it is best for the student, the intensive training can be given as one-on-one teaching for a short period" (Education Act, 2024, §11-3).

Intensive training is described to be a short-term and targeted effort by the school in reading, writing, and/or arithmetic for students in grades 1–4 who need it. The goal is to facilitate inclusive education, but the training can also be provided outside the regular classroom and as one-on-one instruction if deemed appropriate for the student (Education Act, 2024; White Paper 6 (2019-2020)). Beyond this, there are no guidelines from state level on how intensive training should be organized or facilitated in schools and pedagogic practices. However, a recent policy report proposes to increase the use of intensive small group instruction at all levels of primary education (Ministry of Education and research, 2024).

This study understands that educational policy also is created in the process of its implementation, referring to how schools enact policy, how it comes to life and is realized (or not) in practice (Ball et al., 2012, p.1). Thus, policy is a process that involves interpretation and translation, requiring response and action, and teachers play a central role in translating policy into pedagogical practice, as it is through their work that various intentions are interpreted, combined, and concretized. In other words, educational policy is recontextualized by the pedagogical community as discourses are combined into a specific pedagogical discourse and practice (Bernstein, 2000). The extent to which intensive training supports inclusive pedagogical practices is uncertain and may vary from school to school.

Several schools offer reading courses as part of their intensive training programs. As stated above, there are little guidelines as to how this skill based training are to be conducted. In this paper, we examine how intensive training is realized in the pedagogical recontextualization field (Bernstein, 2000) as reading courses, and we seek to provide characterizations of these pedagogical practices. Research question: How do teachers describe intensive education as reading courses in primary education at two schools in Norway? 

The paper draws on Basil Bernstein (1990, 2000) theoretical framework, and the concepts of classification (which describes power) and framing (which describes control) are central analytical tools to describe and give characteristics of forms of communication. Framing principles describe transmission context (Bernstein, 2000, p.109) and is therefore focus in our analysis. With framing as an analytical concept, one investigates control over communication in a pedagogic practice.

Framing refers to the nature of the control over: 

• the selection of the communication; 
• its sequencing (what comes first, what comes second); 
• its pacing (the rate of expected acquisition); 
• the criteria; and 
• the control over the social base which makes this transmission possible (Bernstein, 2000, p. 12-13) 

Bernstein (2000) describes how a pedagogic practice could be investigated from a perspective of control to unveil how the form of communication set premises for the pedagogic relations in a practice. Therefore, Bernstein’s theory on power and control in pedagogic relations could be an appropriate framework to inquire how intensive training takes form in schools.

This study is part of a larger research project which examines how intensive training is practiced and realized in various municipalities and schools in Norway. The study employs a qualitative research approach. This article is based on interviews with two teachers (grades 1-4) from two different schools in one rural municipality in Norway and investigates how intensive training is recontextualized in schools as reading courses. The individual semi-structured interviews include relatively open questions about their experience with early intervention and intensive training in schools. The questions further address descriptions of selecting students, teaching, and organizing intensive training in everyday school life. The interviews were conducted in 2023 and 2024. Ethical considerations are explained and reported to the national data protection services in Norway, and personal data are processed according to the approved notification form. Using Bernstein's concept of framing as an analytical tool, the study investigates control over communication in pedagogic practice (Bernstein, 1990, 2000). More specifically, our analysis focuses on the instructions in pedagogic practice (time, selection, pace), the evaluations related to these reading courses (criteria and tests), as well as the regulations concerning social base and expected behavior. Furthermore, Bernstein has developed two models that can be useful for analyzing how knowledge can be recontextualized in different ways: the competence model and the performance model. These pedagogical models are rooted in an ideological conflict between the new and old middle class (Bernstein, 2000).

The school is an arena for ideological and political struggle over what kind of knowledge and whose knowledge should be promoted. In the focus on early intervention, basic skills such as reading competence are clearly prioritized in terms of content. However, there are no guidelines on how this skill should be promoted through pedagogical facilitation. We have studied reading courses as part of intensive training in schools. Analysis is work-in-progress, so our findings are preliminary. The characteristics of the reading courses is analysed using faming and sequencing, criteria and regulating rules´ modalities (Bernstein, 2000). Within the same rural municipality we find that the realization of reading course as intensive training differs in their pedagogical orientation. Our study describes the characteristics in the variation between these realizations. Reading courses differ in their expectations to pupils' subject positions and identity. A question for discussion is further how these two reading courses understands and enact on the vision of intensive training as a mean to facilitate inclusive education. Using Bernstein's models for analyzing how knowledge can be recontextualized in different ways: the competence model and the performance model, we discuss these pedagogic practices in relation to an ideological conflict between the new and old middle class.

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