Mitigating inequality in educational outcomes: Evidence from Early Childhood Policy Reforms: Norway case study report

In this report we focus on the reform Free core time in kindergarten, in Norway and how
it is related to social inequality in school, especially in the immigrant population it was
first targeted at. The reform was an arrangement where children in families with low
income could get 20 hours of free kindergarten a week if they applied for this. We focus
on both quantitative measurements of the effects of the reform on educational results
12 and 13 years after, qualitative retrospective evaluations from policymakers and
analyses of media coverage in the time of the implementations of the reform. The
reform was first directed at the low socioeconomic background (SES) part of the
immigrant population in Oslo in 2006 but from 2010 it was expanded to the rest of the
country, with a larger focus on SES.

Educational results are in this chapter measured as children’s grade point average
(GPA) in the last year of lower secondary school and dropout in the first year of upper
secondary school in the quantitative analyses, and more generally in the qualitative
parts. Socio-economic status is measured quantitatively both as parents’ level of
education and parents’ income and is seen in relation to immigrant background and
gender. In the qualitative parts social inequality is seen in relationship to how it is
understood among the people interviewed or those writing articles in the media.