How do schools and municipalities create conditions that ensure equal opportunities for all students, regardless of background? This is the core question driving the research of Ema Demir, Affiliated Researcher at the Stockholm School of Economics and part of the Center for Educational Leadership and Excellence (CELE).

On September 19, the Center for Educational Leadership and Excellence (CELE) hosted a seminar with Marja-Kristiina Lerkkanen from Jyväskylä University. She presented the EDUCA Flagship: Identifying research-based solutions for challenges in education, a large-scale initiative funded by the Research Council of Finland.

On September 12, the Center for Educational Leadership and Excellence (CELE) hosted a seminar with Hanne Knudsen from Aarhus University. She presented her ongoing research “Playful transformation? Investigating public-private synergies in education with LEGO and Danish University Colleges as the case.”

Do principals improve school results by promoting teacher collaboration?

The pre-summer workshop at the University of St Andrews brought together 30 scholars from across Europe for a full day of engaging presentations and lively academic exchange. Hosted in collaboration with the Stockholm School of Economics, the event fostered new connections and thoughtful discussion across management and education policy tracks.

Turns out, how you ban phones matters - a lot. A new master's student thesis from SSE shows big differences in how school smartphone rules affect students focus, friendships and sense of safety.

Yesterday at Skolriksdagen 2025, Ema Demir and Stefan Arora-Jonsson from the House of Governance and Public Policy (GaPP) at the Stockholm School of Economics presented new research on how to improve academic outcomes in schools with persistently low performance.

Researchers from the Stockholm School of Economics and Jönköping University are investigating the factors shaping school principals' managerial discretion in Sweden’s primary education system.

Research on school improvement shows multiple factors aid turnarounds at underperforming schools. Using qualitative comparative analysis of 77 Swedish schools over 12 years, no single solution was found. Instead, different factor combinations work, depending on the local context. This has implications for school improvement research and education policy.