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NEW MODEL: The Minister of Education, Guri Melby (V), will define a model for the free choice of the school in which the principle of the local school is eliminated. Photo: Jil Yngland / NTB
The principle of the local school will now be eliminated, says Education Minister Guri Melby (V).
– The government wants students to have a greater opportunity to choose which upper secondary school to start in than many have today, Melby says in a press release Sunday.
At the same time, county municipalities should be able to determine their own intake areas.
– This means that county municipalities can no longer have admission in accordance with a local school principle, the press release states.
Last fall, the government sent two free school choice templates for your review, and received many comments in return. From them, a new model will now be created, which the Directorate of Education has been in charge of preparing in close dialogue with KS and the county municipalities.
– The Directorate of Education will also analyze the consequences that a freer choice of school will have for, among other things, transportation costs, the need for student accommodation and the school structure, says Melby, who aims to nail the model in the spring. It can be ordered from autumn 2022 at the earliest.
The Directorate of Education is charged with creating the new model.
Free choice of school is debated
In January, researchers claimed that the free choice of the school gave the greatest segregation in Oslo, the largest differences in the capital, and opposition in the Storting has been highly critical of the introduction of the scheme in other parts of the country.
– Most of the people who use the free school option are parents and privileged students, and they get along well. Teachers say one school is getting more and more brown, another is getting whiter and whiter, said professor and researcher Cecilie Rønning Haugen in 2019 about the report saying that free choice of school leads to bigger differences.
Both Vestland and Vestfold and Telemark have recently adopted a local school principle, so admission is not based on grades alone. Other counties that have adopted a local school principle form are Viken, Agder, Innlandet, Nordland, Trøndelag, Vestland, as well as Troms and Finnmark.
