Helene Ratner puts the spotlight on the Folkeskole management
PhD student Helene Ratner has been awarded the Tuborg Foundation Business Economics Award of DKK 150,000. The money is to be spent on a stay at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. She will be working at the Institute of Science, Innovation and Society, which works interdisciplinarily with organisation, science studies, sociology, innovation, management and futures studies.

- The interdisciplinary approach questions the way in which knowledge and technology shape society, organisation and the individual, and it may help me answer important questions about the organisation of the welfare society in the future, in this case the Folkeskole, from an entirely different point of view, says Helene Ratner.

The mobile Folkeskole task force
The mobile Folkeskole task force (Skolens Rejsehold), which has been established by the government, has recently conducted a 360-degree review of the Folkeskole and on that basis, it has come up with ten recommendations. Helene Ratner believes that the recommendations contain useful elements.

- Especially the ideas about extra support and resource centres for students with difficulties and more freedom for schools and municipalities correspond with my research, says Helene Ratner.

Necessary to include meetings in the schedule
She is worried, however, that detailed learning objectives and management by objectives will mean increased control and documentation that counteract the much wanted freedom and flexibility. Other researchers have shown that more tests and greater focus on results do not necessarily provide for better and more flexible teaching. The consequence is rather a standardisation of teaching with the objective of passing the numerous tests.

She also points to the paradoxical situation of wanting to get funding for the numerous new measures by spending more of the teachers' time on teaching and less on meetings and planning activities. But if you want to create more quality through better coordination and flexibility, it is necessary to allocate resources for the planning of said task.

’A’ and ’B’ schools
Helene Ratner is also sceptical of the recommendation that test and result contracts be made public. She believes that it could bring about an unfortunate development in the Danish Folkeskole.

- I believe that it can be downright detrimental to the Folkeskole, where we already now see an 'A' and 'B' school tendency as a consequence of open enrolment. If we want a Folkeskole where children of all societal classes can meet and learn from one another, we have to do something about this current tendency, she says.