The evaluation trend in the global education field implies new professional challenges for school principals. The purpose of this article is to describe and analyse Swedish school principals' experiences of prevailing evaluations and the implications for the profession. Specifically, we examine: a) how principals respond to evaluations and their consequences in their schools; and b) the implications of the evaluations for the profession in light of professional responsibility and accountability. The interviewed principals are ascribed huge evaluation responsibilities and are in this respect key actors but to some extent are also 'victims' of external pressures. All schools are embedded in a web of evaluation systems. They share the view that evaluations that are useful for improving teaching, student achievement and everyday school life are those conducted close to practice, and involve teachers. Most of them are also aware of the risks for the reduction of the broad goals of schooling and for work overload. The principals express a desire to protect the fundamental values of professional responsibility but the total demands of the local evaluation web have involved a shift in their professional role towards professional accountability.

Today's evaluation society makes teachers participate in a stream of external evaluations. How teachers experience evaluation in school and how this affects their work and professionalism is the focus of this article. Teachers' views of external and internal evaluations and of the consequences for school practice are described and analysed. The interviewed teachers emphasised the importance of internal evaluations performed close to daily teaching practice and jointly with students and colleagues. These evaluations are generally overlooked in evaluation and school-policy research and seldom attended to or appreciated by school providers. Further, teachers were critical of and reported several negative consequences of accountability and external evaluations, but still generally complied by participating in them. The present results are discussed in relation to professional responsibility and accountability as well as to possible constitutive effects. By emphasising that their daily informal evaluations represent their efforts to improve teaching, teachers are describing parts of their professional responsibility. However, the negative consequences of external evaluations signal constitutive effects on teachers' work, described as making it less creative, discretionary and autonomous as well as increasing mistrust, meaning that more tests are required in order to legitimate student grades.

This article concerns gender equality work, that is, those educational and workplace activities that involve the promotion of gender equality. It is based on research conducted in Sweden and Finland, and focuses on the period during which the public sector has become more market-oriented and project-based all over the Nordic countries. The consequences of this development on gender equality work have not yet been thoroughly analysed. Our joint empirical analysis is based on discourse-analytic methodology and two previous empirical studies. By analysing interviews conducted with people involved in gender equality work, this article emphasises the effects of market-oriented and project-based gender equality work in education and working life in Sweden and in Finland. The findings highlight an alliance between projectisation and heteronormativity that acts to regulate how gender equality ought to be talked about in order for its issues to be heard. A persistently constructed 'remedy' to 'the gender equality problem' is that girls and women are positioned as 'needing' to change more than boys and men, by adopting more traditionally 'masculine manners' and choosing to work Edström and Brunila Troubling gender equality in more 'masculine sectors'. The findings also show that the constitutive forces of these discourses provide little leeway for critical perspectives.

As many countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have developed more universal provision for early childhood education during the last decades, preschool increasingly has become a central policy arena. Gender politics, especially with an aim to promote female labour market participation, but also policies addressing children and preschool staff, constitute one vital aspect. This article analyses staff responsibilities for promoting gender equality in preschool in Sweden and Scotland. These countries represent different welfare regimes, but also display common features, both influenced by tradition and recent transnational policies and discourses. Based on national policy documents from 1970 to the early 2000s, this study shows that gender equality has continuously been brought up in the Swedish context since the 1970s, but entered the Scottish context at a later stage. Since the late 1990s, such questions have been addressed in both countries. In both cases, teachers are constructed as role models who should promote certain gender values and provide children with opportunities. The Swedish curriculum places more emphasis on similarities between girls and boys, while the Scottish counterpart tends to emphasize difference more, paying attention to boys and the need for male role models. Scottish gender policies are influenced by the travelling discourse of ‘the boys' underachievement crisis’, whereas Swedish gender policies in preschool demonstrate little of this.

This is a small-scale qualitative study of gender equality discourses as constructed and employed by pedagogues in three Swedish preschools. The aim of the study is to describe and analyse the preschool pedagogues' constructions of work on children's gender equality, while also examining local variations and the influence of societal discourses and structures on the more localised discourses used in the particular preschool settings. The goal is to highlight how the pedagogues, through statements and discussions in interviews and documents, construct and position themselves and the children in relation to different discourses and current norms. The study is based on interviews with nine pedagogues from three preschools and an analysis of documentation from these preschools. The pedagogues' constructions of gender equality in interviews and documents mainly relate to preschool pedagogy, although there is also some consideration of the future labour market. The pedagogues position themselves as 'lead characters', and children as 'recipients' or as 'girls' and 'boys' who are to be treated either as unique individuals or as two uniform opposing groups. Gender-equal girls are positioned as strong(er), brave(r) and (more) independent, whilst gender-equal boys as (more) socially and linguistically competent. Although there are some differences between the preschools, in line with heteronormative masculinity the primary focus is on 'redoing' the girls, especially traditional 'girly' girls.