Norway - Preprimary & Primary Education

Kindergartens have come into popularity in Norway only recently. The number of children in kindergartens more than doubled in the 1980s, and there still are not enough schools. The dramatic increase seems to be due to a high rate of female employment outside of the home, the increase of single-parent families, and a demand by the public for more focus on basic instruction. About a third of eligible children attend kindergartens, and half of these children attend private kindergartens. The kindergarten in Norway is intended to serve both the educational and the social development of children. Consequently, kindergartens are run by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and Administration, not the Ministry of Church and Education. In 1999, a total of 189,382 children were enrolled in kindergarten. The 5,991 kindergartens in Norway employ 52,898 people. Of these kindergartens, 3,013 of them are state schools.

As of 1997, compulsory education begins at the age of six. Typically, compulsory education begins with six years of primary school. A class teacher model is usual, and classes are generally held together through compulsory schooling. Moreover, it is typical for a student to have the same primary teacher for the first three years, and many have the same primary teacher for their first six years. No students repeat grades. Teachers are given materials that help them respond to different ability levels in their classrooms, but students are never divided at this level based on ability. No examinations or grades are given in primary school, although both are prevalent in lower secondary school. Parents are given a report about their child's progress at least twice a year. Primary school is followed by three years of lower secondary school, and usually all nine compulsory grades are located in a single school building.

In lower secondary school, classes are still kept together, but for some subjects, especially in the eighth and ninth grades, students are divided into three levels for courses, such as Norwegian, English, German, and mathematics, based on the students' ability in each of these areas. Parents and students are involved in the placement of students into these courses. The goal though, as determined by the Parliament, is to keep classes of students together as much as possible throughout their comprehensive school years. As in primary school, students do not repeat grades in lower secondary school. However, students do receive marks at this level and, at the end of the ninth grade year, take a formal examination.

Norway has about 3,500 compulsory schools, resulting in an average school size of 150 students. By mandate of the Parliament, no compulsory school has more than 450 students. Some schools are quite small and occasionally must accommodate more than one grade in a single class. All compulsory schools are operated by local municipalities, although they are subject to the framework and regulations of the central government. The national plan allows for numerous variations and even encourages innovations at the local level. Locally initiated and registered development projects number over 3,000. Class size is also mandated by the Parliament. In primary school, the maximum class size is 28, and for the lower secondary school, it is 30. The average class size is much lower than these mandates. For primary and lower secondary schools, the average class size was 20.2 students per class in the 2000 to 2001 school year. From 1991 to 2000, the number of students per class rose from 19.2 to 20.2. In compulsory education, the student to teacher ratio is 12.5 in full-time teacher equivalents. In 1998, school expectancy for five-year-old Norwegian girls was 18.1 years and for boys, it was 17.2 years. More than 90 percent of students go on to upper secondary school after completing their compulsory schooling.

In autumn of 2000, approximately 590,000 pupils populated Norway's primary and lower secondary schools. From the 1991 to 1992 to the 2000 to 2001 school years, the number of pupils in primary and lower secondary schools increased by a total of 117,000. Much of this change can be explained by the lowering of starting school age from six to seven years old in 1997. At the beginning of the 2000 to 2001 school year, there were 12 fewer primary schools than at the beginning of the previous school year and 150 fewer schools than there were in 1991. A wide variation in the number of primary and lower secondary schools in the various counties exists. Hordaland is the county with the most schools (350), and Nordland, More og Romsdal, Akershus, and Rogaland have more than 200 schools. The counties with the smallest number of schools are Aust-Agder (80) and Finnmark (100). Interestingly, the number of students in Nordland and More og Romsdal counties is relatively small, about half the number of students in the most populated county, yet these two counties have a large number of schools because of differences in demography and settlement patterns. While quality of primary and lower secondary schools are similar, their distribution and size is quite diverse.