Norway: Education System and Policy Priorities Prior to March 2020

Norway is a prosperous country with around 5.3 million inhabitants, and a GDP per capita of €43,900 (Ursin et al., 2020). To understand the Norwegian response to the pandemic, it is necessary to outline some key characteristics of the Norwegian school system and how it compares to other countries. Since the end of World War II, equal opportunity for all has been a cornerstone of the Nordic model for education, which is internationally known to emphasize features that are critical for high-quality education (Klette, 2018). All children in Norway have a legal right to 13 years of free education, starting the year a child turns 6. Unlike many other countries, public school is the preferred choice for most parents, and a vast majority of students (96%) attend public school rather than private (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2020). Norway does not allow private school owners to profit from their educational activities, and establishing a private school requires the school to follow an alternative pedagogy (e.g., Montessori schools or Waldorf schools) or to be a religious school. Additionally, the few private schools that exist in Norway still must follow the same national curriculum as public schools (Klette, 2018).

The Norwegian compulsory school system is divided into two parts: primary school and secondary school. Primary school consists of the lower primary level (grades 1–4, ages 6–10), the intermediate level (grades 5–7, ages 10–12), and lower secondary school (grades 8–10, ages 13–16). The school year starts in August and ends in June. Students receive only formative feedback until grade 8, when they begin receiving grades. As in the other Nordic countries, the school system is considered a key approach to ensure a fair and equal society supporting democracy, participation, welfare, and lifelong learning for all—regardless of social, economic, and geographical background (Klette, 2018).

In terms of academic performance, Norwegian students are still performing at or above the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average in science, reading, and mathematics. Regarding equity, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results show little variation in test scores compared with other countries, which suggests that Norwegian schools are “broadly able to offer an equitable education to pupils from different backgrounds and that the vast majority of schools have pupils performing at different proficiency levels” (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2020, p. 35). No country in the world could claim that it has successfully eliminated socioeconomic inequalities in education; however, egalitarian Scandinavian countries have higher levels of social mobility than countries with higher levels of inequality (OECD, 2018). Ethnic diversity has increased in recent decades, with 18% of all students in compulsory education in 2019 having an immigrant background. These students generally perform well in the Norwegian education system, although their grades are slightly lower than those of other students (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2020).

The national curriculum covers all grades in compulsory school and consists of two parts: a core curriculum describing key values of education and subject-specific curricula describing competencies teachers should aim to teach their students. The descriptions of core values includes elaborations on how the following values should permeate the Norwegian school system: human dignity; identity and cultural diversity; critical thinking and ethical awareness; the joy of creating, engagement, and the urge to explore; respect for nature and environmental awareness; and democracy and participation. The descriptions of principles for the school’s practice emphasize the importance of an inclusive learning environment, differentiated instruction, and cooperation with the home (Ministry of Education, 2019). Regarding teaching and differentiated instruction, the core curriculum states that “pupils come to school with different experiences, prior knowledge, attitudes and needs. School must give all pupils equal opportunities to learn and develop, regardless of their background and aptitudes” (Ministry of Education, 2019, p. 17).

While the national curriculum provides some guidance in the form of competency descriptions that students should have at different stages of their education (for example, after grade 4, after grade 7, and after grade 10) in each subject, teachers in Norway also have great autonomy in deciding how to adapt the curriculum and how to teach their subjects. In other words, the national curriculum is an overall framework indicating thematic areas and goals rather than how specific subjects should be taught (Mølstad & Karseth, 2016; Sivesind & Wahlström, 2016). All teachers and schools are thus expected to make deliberate interpretations of the curriculum, such as determining their pedagogical methods and deciding which resources (e.g., books, apps, and software) to include, as well as adapting them to the local context of each municipality. Mausethagen and Mølstad (2015) summarized Norwegian teachers’ autonomy by pointing to three important factors: (1) pedagogical freedom and absence of control, (2) the will and capacity to justify practices, and (3) local responsibility (municipalities as school owners). The lack of national high-stakes control, such as teacher evaluation and national high-stakes testing and exit exams, fosters a high degree of both autonomy and responsibility for Norwegian teachers (Hatch, 2013; Hatch et al., 2020). As I will show in the next section, the combination of high teacher autonomy and high responsibility for assessing their own students became more challenging than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic. The long tradition of teacher autonomy also offers some possible answers as to why the Norwegian educational authorities did so little to ensure equity on a national level during the period of school closures.

Immediate Impact: How Did Norway Respond to the Crisis?

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak to be a global pandemic. Around the world, governments had to rapidly decide how to deal with the spread of the deadly virus. Like many countries, Norway introduced social distancing measures, which reduced the ability of many people to meet others and greatly limited the possibility of physically attending work, kindergartens, and schools. The Norwegian population exercises significant trust in the government, and Norway acted quickly to stem the spread of the virus (Ursin et al., 2020). The policy emphasis shifted from a main concern about economic impact, to support of specific vulnerable industries (e.g air travel, entertainment industry), to a later focus on the social impacts of different policies (Ursin et al., 2020). Regarding education, the main goal was to keep the school closed as little as possible—in many ways this could be considered a key part of the response. In March 2020, all Norwegian schools were closed and all students were abruptly transferred to an improvised remote education situation, drawing mainly on existing platforms and equipment. Most schools already used digital platforms, and those who did not rapidly started using them. The national lockdown did not last as long in Norway compared to many other countries; by mid-May 2020, after less than 2 months of national closure, all schools were officially able to reopen. However, the lack of a national closure does not mean that all schools were open from May 2020 onward. Throughout the stages of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, infection rates and virus mutations caused a number of (often repeated) local school closures. As a result, while some students in Norway were impacted to a small degree after the initial school closure, other schools had to partly close a number of times. In addition, different cohorts of students rotated between teaching at school and learning at home; and of course, all students and teachers who tested positive for COVID-19 had to stay in quarantine. Thus, neither 2020 nor 2021 could be labeled as a normal school year, which is also why all national exams were canceled for those 2 years. The following timeline shows key events in the Norwegian response (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1
A timeline depicts the key information about schools from 2020 to 2021. It starts with revoked attendance requirements on March 4, and ends with all national exams being cancelled in spring 2021.

Key information on school closure periods, press conferences for children, and cancellations of national exams in 2020 and 2021

Full size image

Different countries adopted different ways of ensuring that their students were still learning and attending school in some manner during periods of school closure. While many countries shared the ambition to limit the pandemic’s impact on education, the alternative measures that countries adopted to continue education varied greatly in content and scope. As Reimers (2022, p. 2) highlighted, these arrangements also “varied in their effectiveness, and reached students in different social circumstances with varied degrees of success.” This variation is what makes it crucial to dig into how each country responded and how this response impacted the educational offerings to different students in the short and longer term. Facing school closures, governments had to choose whether to maintain or adjust their curricula, for example, by teaching fewer concepts at greater depth or giving priority to specific subjects. In Norway, unlike in the other Nordic countries, no such national adjustments were made to the curriculum (OECD, 2021). The main national response was to keep and assess the entire curriculum but to move from in-person education at school to digital education overnight.

The 2021 OECD report entitled “The State of School Education—One Year into the COVID Pandemic” showed that many countries have made major efforts to mitigate the impact of school closures for learners and teachers, often paying particular attention to those in the most marginalized groups. Children who would have been home alone (for example, if their parents were working in the medical sector) and some children in very vulnerable situations (e.g known unstable home situation) were offered the chance to attend school in person; however, the educational offer for other marginalized groups (for example students with special needs) was not prioritized by the Norwegian government. The OECD (2021) also showed how many countries prioritized implementing new channels to facilitate communication between students, families, teachers, and school authorities; however, Norway made no such national effort. Each school had the autonomy to make all decisions about the organization of remote schooling. The only national decision concerning all students was that all national final exams (normally held in May) were canceled for 2020 and 2021. The mandate for teachers in Norway to plan, deliver, and assess the learning of each student—and the class as a whole (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2020)—was never questioned by the national educational authorities during the pandemic. The authorities made no national efforts to support teachers in reaching all students digitally or to supplement the education of marginalized students who needed extra support. An exception to the claim that the authorities did very little other than reopening schools as soon as possible is the aforementioned fact that some vulnerable students—mostly students with parents in critical professions who needed someone to provide childcare—were allowed to physically attend school. Despite this concession, the numbers are clear: while 5.8% of schoolchildren were given educational opportunities in a physical school setting during school closures, less than half of this group (2.1%) were vulnerable students or students at risk and 1.3% were students with individual education plans (Caspersen et al., 2021). Thus, most students with special needs or those who became vulnerable during the pandemic did not receive any national attention or extra support.

Furthermore, no national measures were in place to compensate for the discrepancy between students who had access to their parents at home during remote teaching and those who did not (Blikstad-Balas et al., 2022). This does not mean that individual teachers were not following up with their students, but it does mean that there were no national guidelines or support to make sure such help was consistent. When comparing Norway’s response to several other countries, it becomes clear that the Norwegian government did very little on a national level to ensure equity in education for all students during the time of school lockdown. This is particularly concerning when we consider that while the national, synchronous school closure lasted for a short time (less than 2 months), there were numerous local outbreaks that caused schools to close or enact a hybrid learning model on and off for almost 2 years. The critique of the Norwegian response in this chapter concerns the lack of targeted efforts to provide equal educational opportunities for all during remote teaching periods, while also acknowledging that the national closure of schools was among the shortest in the world.

What Were the Consequences of Norway’s Immediate Policy Response?

While Norway responded rapidly to the pandemic in terms of establishing clear and strict rules for social distancing and vaccination, the response for school students has been heavily criticized. Norway’s early educational response to the pandemic relied on pre-existing resources, such as a solid digital infrastructure and teachers’ ongoing responsibility to assess their students locally (OECD, 2020). In March 2020, all teachers were supposed to perform their teaching from home through digital devices and remote teaching.Footnote 1 As in other countries, Norwegian teachers and school leaders were not prepared to go digital overnight despite good technological infrastructure and a curriculum that explicitly emphasizes the importance of digital competence across subjects. There is a significant difference between planned online education and an emergency transition from traditional learning to digital learning (Misirli & Ergulec, 2021). The Norwegian response has been criticized because teachers were not supported in this transition on a national level and because they were expected to provide the same educational opportunities for their students that they would have provided when not in a temporary emergency situation.

A range of studies have indicated that teachers were not able to provide the same kind of instruction, support, and assessment for their students during the crisis as they normally would have. Three aspects of remote learning were problematic. First, teachers received minimal and insufficient guidance on how to teach and assess their students digitally. Second, students received very traditional instruction that relied heavily on their individual completion of a large number of tasks. Finally, vulnerable students who needed extra support for various reasons were not sufficiently cared for. In the following sections, I will delve deeper into the documented deficiencies with this remote teaching and their consequences for equity; however, these observations are not intended to place blame on teachers. On the contrary, we know that teachers around the world were in an extremely demanding situation where they had to enact significant and rapid changes to their instructional models with varied support (Audrain et al., 2022; Hamilton & Ercikan, 2022; Reimers, 2022)—and they all deserve recognition for their attempts to meet the crisis.

Lack of Support for Teachers, Leading to Variation in Instructional Quality

Several evaluations of teachers’ experiences during the pandemic have shown considerable variation in how much they knew about digital teaching. While we can assume that teachers responded quickly and tried to adapt to a demanding situation (Bubb & Jones, 2020; Federici & Vika, 2020; Gudmundsdottir & Hathaway, 2020), they had no room to reflect collectively on good digital practice. Digitalization was not at the teachers’ own pace or founded in pedagogical discussions; rather, it was a technological necessity to allow educators to keep teaching in an unprecedented situation. In addition, expectations for digital teaching were unclear. Each school owner, each school, and even each teacher could decide what a typical day of remote teaching should be like for their students. Lien et al. (2022) conducted a study on school principals’ experiences during COVID-19 in Norway. They found that while the educational sector had a very important role in upholding a sense of normalcy during the pandemic, few guidelines or procedures existed to determine how a school should be managed during school closures. As they explained, school principals were forced to improvise with limited or no guidance (Lien et al., 2022). Andersen et al. (2021) investigated how school ownersFootnote 2 placed different expectations on schools during periods of remote teaching. While some counties and municipalities expected schools to follow their normal timetables, this expectation was not a national norm. Interviews with school leaders revealed that even in the counties where such an expectation was formulated, it was impossible to fulfill due to teachers’ varied digital competence levels and their home situations. They summarized that there were “different interpretations of the national guidelines on which students should be offered physical teaching. Local variations in interpretations have necessarily led to large differences in the educational offer for students during the period with school closures” (Andersen et al., 2021, p. 7, my translation).

In addition to variations in the local expectations for remote teaching, the large gap in teachers’ digital competence also led to inequalities in teaching. Previous studies have revealed that teachers’ use of technology in Norwegian classrooms has been traditional, focusing on using software in transmissive ways (Blikstad-Balas & Klette, 2020; Kure et al., 2022). Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the most common way for teachers to develop their digital competence was their own “trying and failing” rather than more systematic efforts at the school level or structured forms of professional development (Fjørtoft, 2020). This resulted in large variations in teachers’ digital competence and use of technology in their instruction.

Early in the pandemic, one in five teachers said they received too little pedagogical support and support from school management during the period of school closure (Fjørtoft, 2020). This lack of support reinforced an existing inequality in teaching that drew on digital technology. This tendency toward increased differences in teaching quality has been found across studies with principals, teachers, and parents (Blikstad-Balas et al., 2022; Fjørtoft, 2020; Lien et al., 2022). In Lien et al.’s (2022) interviews with principals, they described the difference in teachers’ digital competence as an important challenge. While some teachers flexibly adapted to the digital format and shared best practices with their colleagues, others would pull back, become less accessible, and work less than before. Lien et al. (2022) noted, “In this way, the pandemic magnifies differences between those who handled the digital everyday life and those who did not” (n.p.). The main point here is that the variation in teachers’ digital competence, combined with unclear expectations, resulted in significant variations in what constituted a typical day of remote teaching. In Fjørtoft’s (2020) study, one teacher described the large differences between teachers that resulted in very different instruction for different students, even within the same school:

It has varied from full days of daily direct teaching through Teams in real-time (as if we were all in a classroom) to… a daily conversation with each student without any form of real-time teaching. The students are at the mercy of the teacher they have got. (p. 43, my translation)

As the quote shows, how much real-time teaching students got varied across teachers. Some students received synchronous, real-time teaching, while others communicated with their schools through asynchronous tasks (Blikstad-Balas et al., 2022). This variance is, of course, problematic in the short term and raises crucial questions about equity in education from a long-term perspective. This will be addressed in the final section of this chapter.

Traditional Teaching with Individual Tasks

Closely linked to the lack of support for how to teach digitally is the fact that remote teaching often meant very traditional teaching, where each student had to complete a large number of tasks that they would find on their learning platform. This point cannot be emphasized enough, as many technology enthusiasts would expect a digital learning environment to be a collaborative, flexible, and innovative endeavor.

School leaders, teachers, and students who participated in an evaluation of remote teaching provided in upper secondary school all agreed that the initial phase of school closures in 2020 was mostly characterized by individual written tasks (Andersen et al., 2021). A similar situation existed for younger students in primary and lower secondary school (Blikstad-Balas et al., 2022; Caspersen et al., 2021; Fjørtoft, 2020). In a national survey of parents with children in grades 1–10, Blikstad-Balas et al. (2022) found that the most dominant educational activity across all grades during remote teaching was to let students complete tasks individually. The fact that many of these assignments were necessary for teachers to be able to grade their students reduced the possibilities students had to work collaboratively (Fjørtoft, 2020). This trend is highly problematic if one is concerned with equity in education and becomes particularly concerning when we consider the fact that many parents reported that they spent a lot of time supporting and reviewing their children’s schoolwork. In Fjørtoft’s study (2020), teachers expressed concern that the high need for parental involvement in schoolwork reinforced differences between students. Caspersen et al. (2021) raised similar concerns and demonstrated that students who normally had high parental involvement and support were better positioned to handle the individual tasks because the parents were still there, despite significantly lower teacher support than usual. Not all parents were able to provide qualified help, which brings me to the next trend in the immediate consequences of the pandemic in Norway: namely, that vulnerable students were not prioritized.

Vulnerable Students During a Pandemic: Time to Reconsider Who Counts as Vulnerable?

Principals and teachers alike were concerned about reaching vulnerable students during the period of remote teaching. Reaching those who needed schooling the most was a key concern for many, and much public debate centered on this issue. However, studies across Norway have agreed that students with special educational needs, from vulnerable family situations, and who benefit most from close collaboration with teachers suffered. Parents whose children had special educational needs were far less satisfied with guidance and support from the school (Caspersen et al., 2021). Parents in this group also reported a lack of real educational opportunities for their children and expressed that they often did not get the support they would normally have in a classroom environment (Blikstad-Balas et al., 2022). In a national survey, only 27% of teachers in primary and lower secondary schools and 23% of teachers in upper secondary schools confirmed that they were able to follow up with vulnerable students who needed special support during this period (Federici & Vika, 2020). Teacher interviews also showed that teachers worried about specific groups of students, particularly immigrants or refugees who had recently moved to Norway (Andersen et al., 2021).

Mælan et al.’s (2021) study on student engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic found that it was harder for low-achieving students to maintain engagement and motivation during the period of remote schooling compared to regular school. They also found that students experienced less support from their teachers and concluded that there was reason to be concerned for low-achieving students in particular, as well as for the effects that home schooling may have on all students in general (Mælan et al., 2021).

The significant increase in individual tasks combined with less teacher support also raises the question of who the “vulnerable students” are during a pandemic. Dalland et al. (2021) found that in Norway, the two most important factors for ensuring equity during remote teaching were: (1) access to relevant equipment and (2) support at home with their schoolwork. This may mean that students who would traditionally not be labeled as vulnerable based on socioeconomic status or prior academic achievement may have become more vulnerable during long periods of individual work at home if their parents were not present due to, for example, their own work situation. In general, students were expected to be self-regulated and monitor their own learning. Previous studies from Scandinavia have shown that individualized teaching methods, where students must decide how and when to work with different individual tasks across subjects, may put too much burden on the students (Dalland & Klette, 2014, 2016; Klette, 2018). Results from the parent survey conducted by Blikstad-Balas et al. (2022) also suggested that some parents who would normally support their children were pressed at work during the pandemic in ways that made them unable to follow up as closely as they would have liked. This issue of what makes a student vulnerable may need reconsideration. In addition to groups that have been pre-defined as vulnerable (e.g., due to very low socioeconomic status, special needs, or other issues known by the school), the students’ need to be independent may have created a new kind of vulnerability. Students in this potential group would be those who normally do well in school with teacher support but who did not have the required high self-regulation skills or the presence of a parent to closely monitor their schoolwork.

How Can We Understand the Choices Made?

Compared with other countries, Norway did very little to ensure equal opportunities for all students during the pandemic (Blikstad-Balas et al., 2022; OECD, 2021). Where other countries rapidly changed their curriculum, adapted new online platforms and national TV broadcasts, or took measures to support teachers (Azevedo et al. 2022; Costa et al., 2022; Misirli & Ergulec, 2021; OECD, 2021), Norway relied heavily on pre-existing structures. As such, pre-existing inequalities were allowed to increase and even expand to new groups of students—something that has been debated politically to a limited degree. An essential question to ask is why these inequalities were allowed to increase in a country that prides itself on promoting ideals of equity in education for all, regardless of issues such as socioeconomic background (Klette, 2018). Of the several possible explanations, I will go deeper into three: the significant teacher autonomy, the variation in corona infection across municipalities and schools, and the general tendency to overestimate digital tools.

It is crucial to understand that teacher autonomy in Norway has a long tradition. An examination of the Norwegian assessment system may help illustrate the level of teacher autonomy present in the system. First, students do not receive any grades until they reach lower secondary school (grade 8, 13-year-old students), and all tests that are graded beyond that point are created or chosen by the teacher. No rules dictate how many tests or assessment situations each teacher needs to be able to grade a student in each subject, and there is local variation between schools in how they assess their students. On a normal secondary school diploma in Norway, a clear majority of all the final grades after 13 years of education have been set by the students’ local teachers, without any kind of external control or supervision. The few national exams that students take make up only a very small portion of their overall averages used to enter higher education. The new national curriculum also places great emphasis on the single teacher or group of local teachers (i.e., the professional collective of teachers) and their ability to choose what is best for their students (Ministry of Education, 2019), again reinforcing teacher autonomy. There is no tradition in Norway for interfering with how teachers should teach, and there is no tradition for external control or supervision. These facts must have played a role when the educational authorities decided that each school and each teacher was best equipped to decide what remote teaching should be. In hindsight, teachers may have benefitted from more guidance, clearer expectations, and more support during this particularly difficult time for teachers around the world (Audrain et al., 2022; Hamilton & Ercikan, 2022; Reimers, 2022). Other countries have shown that it would be possible to support teachers by offering common resources, broadcasting content, or making new platforms for collaboration (see Reimers, 2022, for country-specific examples).

Another aspect crucial to understanding the Norwegian response is that there was significant variation in the extent to which the coronavirus was spreading in different regions of the country. The goal of keeping schools open as much as possible led to differences between schools, as schools with more contamination would have to partially close more often. In some areas, such as the capital Oslo and other big cities, schools could be closed for longer stretches of time. The variation was also considerable across households and neighborhoods within cities. If someone in a student’s household tested positive for COVID-19, the student would normally have to stay at home for over a week. In some households, this situation could happen cyclically, reducing the student’s physical attendance at school. While many schools were closed, partially closed, or teaching with half the students absent in quarantine, schools in other regions were operating on an almost normal basis due to less contamination. Some schools remained open for the entire school year 2020 and 2021, except for the weeks that were included in the national closure in 2020. Thus, keeping all schools closed at the same time was not necessary, which may also explain why the inequalities were allowed to increase between schools.

Finally, there is ample evidence that the discourse around use of digital tools often revolves around acquisition of the tools rather than the actual use (Blikstad-Balas & Klette, 2020; Jewitt et al., 2007). It rapidly became evident that having access to platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Google Classroom was not enough to secure innovative and broad use of digital technologies. By telling all teachers that they should “keep teaching” over digital platforms rather than in a physical classroom, the Norwegian authorities failed to recognize the significant difference between planned online education and an emergency transition from traditional learning to digital learning (Misirli & Ergulec, 2021). This finding may suggest that the importance of access to relevant digital technology alone was overestimated—something that unfortunately has a longstanding tradition (e.g., Jewitt et al., 2007). Other countries, like Finland (see Chap. 4 by Salmela-Aro and Lavonen), appear to have been far better technically prepared than Norway was despite good technological infrastructure in both countries.

Current Policy Concerns

From the very beginning of the pandemic, there was a general concern about students learning less due to a lack of in-person teaching. Around the world, students’ education has been disrupted, and some have predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic will result in a “learning inequality catastrophe” (Azevedo et al., 2020, 2022). Politicians in Norway have also been concerned about learning loss, and a national task force group was appointed in 2021 specifically to suggest measures to remedy the consequences of the pandemic for children, young people, and adults in school, giving them the opportunity to make up for lost academic and social learning. In their report, the task force emphasized the difficulty of establishing what learning has been “lost” and suggesting ways to remediate this problem (National Task Force on Learning Loss, 2021). Their main recommendations revolved around monitoring each student closely in their local school context while relying on existing support structures. The task force expressed that it is unlikely to find a “quick fix” solution that would work well for all students, as they have had very different learning trajectories, different supports, and different assessments.

It is not easy to determine and evaluate what a student should or could know compared to the competence they have developed at any given time. In Norway, it may be even harder than in other countries to establish or estimate the learning losses. Since all national exams for 2020 and 2021 were canceled all grading of students was left to the discretion of their local teachers. The available data from these local assessments do not suggest any learning loss compared to previous years, but we also know that teachers did what they could to provide assessment in accordance with the teaching they had provided (Andersen et al., 2021). In other words, areas that may not have been taught at all due to the pandemic have not been assessed either. We also know that many parents actively helped their children with written assessments that did play a role in the final grading (Blikstad-Balas et al., 2022; Caspersen et al., 2021; Fjørtoft, 2020). Thus, Norway lacks reliable, comparable data on student outcomes to inform debates about the long-term consequences of the varied educational opportunities students received in 2020 and 2021. We can expect an increased spread in the future national exam results compared to those pre-COVID-19, and it could be expected that these differences would be related to the variation in education in 2020 and 2021.

One probable expectation is that transitions between different school types (e.g., kindergarten to first grade, lower secondary to upper secondary, and upper secondary to university) may become more difficult for students affected by COVID-19. These transitions could be harder because the next level in the system often takes for granted that all students have the competencies they are supposed to have from the prior level, which is now more uncertain than before. We already know that those who transitioned from one school level to another during a period with many local school closures and strict cohorts may have suffered emotional and social losses. The National Task Force on Learning Loss (2021) expressed an explicit concern about the lack of belonging many students now experience in a school context due to the long periods with abnormal attendance and organization. Another connected concern is that many students now entering higher education have very limited experience with exams or more formal assessments, and most of their grades have been set by their teachers in formative and flexible assessment situations. This may lead to unfair comparisons in entering higher education between students who did not have to take a national exam and those who did because they graduated before or after 2020 and 2021.

In summary, the Norwegian response was limited on a national level, and the distribution of authority on all remote teaching matters to the local school level—and, in some cases, the individual teacher level—resulted in increased inequality in education. In addition to all the vulnerable students who did not get the education they had a legal right to during the period of school closures, there may be severe learning loss, social loss, and emotional loss for individual students who would normally not be considered vulnerable. Once again, teachers are tasked with a very demanding challenge: namely, mapping how different students experienced the pandemic, determining what knowledge and competencies these students possibly lack, and monitoring each one individually.

Silver Linings in Hindsight: What Have We Learned from the Pandemic?

When discussing the unequal opportunities students had to learn in Norway during the period of remote teaching, it is easy to focus on the fact that many students had a worse education and that they suffered in different ways. Still, there are also some silver linings.

First, many parents were involved in their children’s education in an unprecedented way. Several studies have found that parents reported increased involvement (Caspersen et al., 2021; Dalland et al., 2021; Fjørtoft, 2020), which could have positive educational and developmental outcomes. In a survey, Blikstad-Balas et al. (2022) asked parents to describe in their own words what they considered beneficial with remote teaching. The most common responses revolved around better insight into what today’s students are expected to be able to do, how they work across subjects, and what kinds of competencies schools actually value. This finding indicated that many parents valued getting closer to their children’s everyday lives at school. Even though parents found it demanding to spend so much time assisting their children with schooling, they also gained new insights into their own child and the school. The fact that so many parents expressed that more insight into their own children’s schooling was the key benefit of remote teaching suggests that parents have the potential to be more involved than they already are in traditional schooling. Policymakers should consider this fact while also considering that not all students have access to parents who want to or are able to take on a more active role.

A second silver lining lies in knowing that digital technology alone will not lead to more innovative education. When all teachers were simultaneously forced to move to remote instruction, this live experiment showed very clearly that transmissive teaching was the norm; specifically, students were asked to spend long hours alone working on individual written tasks. They were seldom asked to collaborate, create, or communicate. A lesson learned, hopefully once and for all, is that technology itself is not a guarantee of educational change. If teachers are going to implement technology well, they need time and support. One could imagine that this kind of shock-digitalization would greatly increase teachers’ digital skills, but the evidence from research so far has pointed to very limited digital teaching repertoires and limited use of technology for collaboration, creative tasks, and real-time communication.

Third, while technology in itself will never lead to better learning, some teachers may still use it in innovative ways that are, in fact, an improvement. This possibility became evident during the pandemic, particularly when it came to the potential of real-time formative assessment. While most teachers had less contact with their students and provided less support than in a traditional teaching situation, some teachers experienced the power of digital tools to really monitor students’ learning in real time. These teachers were able to access the learning processes of students, for example, through collaborative work on platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Google Docs, where they could see who was working well, who needed more support, and who needed specific advice. As one teacher in grade 8 explained:

As a teacher, I am up to speed with all feedback on work that [students] are doing every single day. I experience that I have better one-to-one contact with the students than before. I also note that I have a better overview of all the students’ capacity for schoolwork, because I see every day what they are doing. (Blikstad-Balas, 2021, p. 121)

While this kind of use was not the norm, there is a silver lining in the fact that some teachers and school leaders experienced what many hold to be the greatest advantage of technology in education: the possibility to track students’ work while it is happening and to offer support when they need it, rather than hours, days, or even weeks later. In terms of developing twenty-first-century skills, the potential of providing such digital feedback is evident. When students communicate with others to improve their work, they emphasize process over product, experience the value of collaboration, and learn ways to use digital tools that will also be relevant to their future education and work life. The potential of digital, real-time feedback is high, both in regular school and in blended learning, raising the question of what can be done to promote more use of formative digital assessment in appropriate situations. Some teachers and school leaders who have experienced the power of real-time digital feedback have expressed that they will continue using this format in traditional classroom situations (Blikstad-Balas, 2021).

Finally, for a small group of students, the period with remote teaching was better than with normal schooling. For students who cannot normally attend school due to chronic illnesses, students who struggle with being bullied or lack a social network at school, and students who received better help at home and flourished academically during the school closures, the period was a very positive experience (Blikstad-Balas et al., 2022; Fjørtoft, 2020). These students may be few, but their experiences are still real and impactful.

Current Educational Landscape: Some Conclusions

For Norwegian society at large, the period of school closure was a powerful reminder of the importance of school, not only as a place where students acquire certain academic skills but also as the heart of students’ social and emotional development. Closing down schools reminded us of how much face-to-face interaction means, how much friendships mean, and how much “other stuff” that is important in young people’s lives takes place within the school building every single day.

While we know that the pandemic resulted in learning loss and increased social inequalities, there are no concrete plans on how to mitigate these effects other than trusting each school and each teacher to do the best they can with students who may have an even more diverse school background now—due to the pandemic experience—than before. This fact is particularly concerning when considering the teacher shortage in Norway and acknowledging that many people who have a full teacher education have left schools to work somewhere else. These people once wanted to work in schools, but they found the working conditions to be unacceptable. The pandemic reinforced this tendency, especially when the government did not prioritize teachers when deciding who should get vaccinated first. Perhaps great teacher autonomy is not only a gift, but also a burden, when the system around each teacher fails to offer sufficient support for what many of us consider the most important job in the world.