Eureka! Institutional Repository

In recent years, the changes in the formulation and implementation of educational policy have been increasingly focused on the role played by the executives of education. In the European continent during the last, at least 50, years of ferlations, reforms and changes in educational matters have been dramatic. The school of the 1970s shows very few similarities with the school of the 2020s. The guidelines of the European Union and the OECD, which have been, in general, theoretical and consultative, have changed over time. They have become more specific, practical and directional. Concepts such as decentralisation of the education system, strengthening of supporting institutions, cooperation, training and instructing, lifelong learning, competitive learning organisations, effective school administration, transformational leadership are being increasingly referred to in public, national and supranational documents in all the lengths and widths of the European continent. Arriving at the end of the second decade of the 21st century it is now more than imperative that the education executives left behind bureaucratic management models and sterile attitudes of the past and move forward in a dynamic way in reorganizing their school units with vision and will for change, introducing innovations and initiatives that will make them more effective. The present paper is a comparative study of how school units are in the three Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and Greece. The structure of this paper is divided into two parts: In the first part there is a detailed description of the educational system of each country in relation to the political, social and historical context into which it has evolved. There is also an extensive reference to the role played in educational matters over the years, by the stances of the European Union and the international organisations. The data was collected through the method of qualitative analysis of content from official documents of educational policy of the four countries, the European Union, the OECD and the foreign and Greek scientific bibliography. The second part reflects the methodological approach of the researcher in the effort to provide satisfactory answers to the research questions. Through the method of semi-structured interviews with 12 school directors of the prefecture of Thessaloniki, a qualitative research was carried out and followed by the indexing, the interpretation and the analysis of the data and finally the extraction of conclusions. The majority spoke of a tight bureaucratic system in which they are called upon to operate, of a need for greater flexibility in the way of administration, while reducing bureaucracy, but also of the difficulties of implementing the Scandinavian systems in Greece, due to the mentality of the involved institutions and the irregularities in the country's education system.