Legal Standards and Professional Judgment in Leadership
The project is designed to disentangle the complexity of legal standards and school leaders’ professional judgment. The legal standards in focus are students’ right to special needs education, adaptive education, and a good psychosocial environment conducive to learning.
Aim
Illustration: Colorbox
The aim is to examine the transformation of legal standards into school leaders’ professional actions, and how national inspections of local authorities attend to standards and warrant the students’ legal rights.
Background
In contemporary society, there is a growing tendency of juridification in the public services. In Norway, schools are regulated by more than 400 rules and regulations, and school leaders are expected to know the law to be able to attend to their role as civil servants.
Increasingly, users' rights are associated with laws and regulations, which simultaneously become targets of negotiation in strategic thinking and action, and which connect individuals in similar situations through social and digital networks.
Thus, local authorities and schools interact with users who may be well-informed and knowledgeable about their rights. This compels school leaders at all levels to be able to anchor and justify practices based on the law, such as administrative decisions in individual cases.
Project period
November 1, 2011 – March 31, 2015
The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway