Danish upper secondary education: Management, administration and results

In recent years, upper secondary education in Denmark has made its mark as a significant item on the political agenda. The period since the start of the new millennium has seen the Danish government formulate ambitious goals for future policy in this area, most recently with a plan for the reform of vocational training at upper secondary level.

Despite this increasing interest, Danish upper secondary education still remains to some extent the ‘poor relation’ of the other educational levels (primary, lower secondary and tertiary) in terms of the attention devoted to it with respect to policy development, media awareness and research. This book seeks to remedy the last of these issues by addressing two broad research questions.

The first relates to quality. Are Danish upper secondary programmes capable of providing students with the knowledge and skills they need to enter the labour market or to go on to tertiary education? Quality is measured by examining the ability of institutions to retain the students who enrol in the programmes, the ability of institutions to raise the academic levels of their students, and the wages that graduates from the programmes can earn on the labour market.

The second broad research question relates to finance. Are Danish upper secondary programmes cost effective? That is to say, are the costs of the programmes reasonable in relation to the work they are intended to do, and to the quality of education that they supply?

The book also tackles a number of related topics such as trends over time in the allocation of resources, the perception of bureaucracy among school managers and other staff, conditions of employment, management structure and style, and the relationships of managers and other staff to the workplace. In order to place the analyses in a broader perspective, the book includes international comparisons with relevant OECD countries with regard to cost efficiency and results achieved.