Historical archive

Increasing completion rates at upper secondary schools

Historical archive

Published under: Solberg's Government

Publisher: Ministry of Education and Research

Too few students finish their upper secondary education, so it is a priority to get more of them to complete and pass their courses. One important step has been to establish a long-term collaboration between the central government, counties and municipalities in this area.

Illustrasjonsbilde
Credit: Sveinung Ystad

This was initially done through the “Ny GIV” project, which was set up in 2010. That project has now been brought to a close, but an even closer collaboration with the county authorities will be continued through the Programme for enhanced completion of Upper Secondary Education and Training.

“We have decided to opt for what we call incremental reform, based on evidence from research. We will build on experience from past programmes, and use research to develop new measures to increase completion rates at upper secondary schools. By systematically testing tools in pilot projects, we can see what works before deciding what to roll out across the whole country,” says Torbjørn Røe Isaksen.

The aim of the project is to increase completion rates at upper secondary schools by developing, communicating and implementing effective tools to prevent students from dropping out and to help them to return to school if they have.

There are two target groups: students at risk of not completing their upper secondary education and young people between the ages of 15 and 21 who are neither studying nor working.

The Ministry has worked with the counties to identify the critical transitions where support measures are particularly important, and to establish a framework for improving completion rates. The framework will help county authorities to be more systematic in their efforts to provide appropriate assistance to the target groups.

The Programme for enhanced completion of Upper Secondary Education and Training will include national, regional and local measures, and research will play an important role in identifying which ones work best. 

A national network with representatives from all of the county councils will also be established. This will build on the two previous networks in Ny GIV, which were known as the transition project and implementation project.

The presentations from the seminar on 6 October 2014 can be found at the following links:

The “Ny GIV” project was initiated in 2010 and ran until the end of 2013. Various material from that period can be found at the link below.