Mika Risku

University of Jyväskylä | JYU · Department of Education

This chapter presents the conceptual evolvement of Finnish pedagogical leadership in the international setting. There are three main scopes. First, we discuss the historical evolvement of school leadership in Finland. This started in the 1950s with the first initiatives towards pedagogical leadership. Then, we describe the findings of the studies o...

This chapter investigates the educational policy and governance, and also leadership in educational contexts in Finland from the 1950s into today’s on-going reforms. The investigation continues the debates of several Finnish researchers on past Finnish educational policy and administration. In addition, it follows the recent research on how school...

This chapter aims to investigate the professional development of educational leadership based on the need to define and develop leadership in educational organisations that are in the middle of complex challenges and changing operational environments. The data of this study were collected through interviews and project descriptions of the key actor...

This volume was inspired by the observation that over the past 20 years, the educational system and public administration in general have changed enormously due to ideological, political and structural transformation. In practice, the mode of operation in educational organisations is characterised by a complex interplay between political and admini...

This chapter provides the Finnish scope on cultural and social foundations of ethical educational leadership. Finland is often seen as an outlier. Predominant transnational trends are recognized but they tend to reach Finland with a delay and manifest themselves somewhat differently from the mainstream. There are contextual reasons for the deviance...

The main purpose of this chapter is to examine how Finland is developing its educational governance to meet the challenges of its changing operational environment. For our examination, we applied two theoretical frameworks on education policy development. The one constructed in the Comparative Analysis of Dynamics in Education Politics Project (CAD...

Bridging curriculum research with educational leadership, we examined the 2014 Finnish curriculum reform compilation and enactment process through the lens of distributed leadership. As a tool for the examination, we used the resource–agency duality model of distributed leadership. It explicates how organizational members create resources and enact...

School superintendents are coupled hierarchically with the top apex of municipality organization through their membership of leadership teams and through personal ties to the top municipal manager, which provides opportunities to take part in strategic decision-making processes beyond the educational sector. Superintendents are also vertically link...

Education is of fundamental value for a society; to raise and foster a new generation of citizens in a global and local multicultural context. It is therefore crucial to identify the competences that are needed for multiple actors in the school governance chain, with the aim of achieving this mission in different contexts over time. An underlying q...

Public education governance is currently subject to change in the Nordic countries because regulations, norms and values are changing. This in turn has transformed structures and positions and has thus compelled agents to change their behaviour, mindset and identity. In this chapter we explore the ways in which influences, decisions and ideas are b...

The core assumption in this chapter is that political actors and civil servants on the municipal level share in the common societal responsibility for the education and upbringing of the next generation. Using a filter of five core public-governance logics in the analysis of our data – the marketplace logic, the managerial, the public, the professi...

This thematic chapter analyses both similarities and differences between the political cultures of the participating Nordic countries. It has been demonstrated that a country’s specific political culture has a great impact on the way its schooling system is organised. This view was centred on national cultures. In the Nordic countries, with their t...

When one considers Finland’s education system through the 10-year curriculum reform cycle, slogans of trust and mild evaluation or results from international surveys on learning outcomes, one may think that Finnish superintendents’ operational environment is placid and serene. The truth, however, is very different. For historical reasons, Finnish s...

The presentation of principalship in Finland begins by giving an overall description of the Finnish education system and of the formal position of principals in Finland. The more detailed examination of the Finnish principal comprises two main sources. Both sources are reviews on research on principals in Finland in 2000–2010. The first one was con...

This article provides a meta-analysis of research conducted on distributed leadership from 2002 to 2013. It continues the review of distributed leadership commissioned by the English National College for School Leadership (NCSL) (Distributed Leadership: A Desk Study, Bennett et al., 2003), which identified two gaps in the research during the 1996-2...

Finland’s education system is regarded as one of the most effective in the world. Shared values of the Finnish welfare society continue to influence national education policies that determine how education is organized, governed, and led. Findings from a national study of the superintendency, however, suggest recent demographic and financial change...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the superintendent position, its relation to the local political system and the function as superior of principals in the school district in order to illuminate important district-level conditions for student learning. Influences from historical legacies and policy cultures are investigated by means...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a symbolic-interpretative research on the leadership culture and its subcultures in one unified comprehensive school in Finland. Design/methodology/approach – The research is a phenomenological, qualitative case study. Its methodology is based on triangulation. Findings – The leadership culture o...

In today’s global societal development, Finland in many ways seems to be an outlier relying on policies, the goals, contents and enactment of which differ from those of many other countries. Furthermore, the policies Finland relies on appear to provide outlying results concerning both the education system and the society (Risku M, Ital J Sociol Edu...

Quality assurance or accountability, as we use the term, refers to when an actor, in virtue of contractual obligations, has the right to hold another actor responsible to a set of standards, to judge whether the standards have been met and to impose sanctions if the standards are deemed unfulfilled. In this chapter, we compare how (and if) these ri...

Our research problem deals with what happens when national educational policies meet structures of implementation at the school district and school level. Our focus is on the position that is directly subordinate to a municipal committee or board and with responsibility for education. This position we refer to as superintendent. By focusing on this...

Quality assurance or accountability, as we use the term, refers to when an actor, in virtue of contractual obligations, has the right to hold another actor responsible to a set of standards, to judge whether the standards have been met and to impose sanctions if the standards are deemed unfulfilled. In this chapter, we compare how (and if) these ri...

The research presented in this article is a description of the symbolic leadership and leadership culture in one unified comprehensive school in Finland. The study is a phenomenological qualitative case study based on triangulation. Leadership is studied through its functional, verbal and material dimensions. Leadership culture is regarded as one o...

This article provides insight into the nature and scope of home–school cooperation in Finland. Situating the study is a brief overview of the Finnish education system and a discussion of the Programme for International Student Assessment reports that place Finnish student outcomes at the top of rankings among industrialized nations for the past dec...