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important questions like segregation and creaming. But it is possible
to indicate some tendencies.
According to motives it is not surprising that what seems to be the
most important motive is the school profile on either religion or
education. Thereafter parents are concerned that schools, which their
children attend are characterized with a positive sense of value. The
meaning of value parents hold, are to infuse human interaction
between adults and children as well as between the children at
schools. The next important motive parents hold is what they
understand to be their children’s needs. Needs includes the school
environment and milieu and what parents understand to be a good
milieu for learning. Some children have a health problem and parents
are concerned about that. Some parents have an experience with their
children being bullied and mocked at the public school they attended
previously, other parents expects such thing to happen in public
schools in contrast to private schools. That they assume private
schools to be safer than public schools motivate their choice. With
learning milieu parents think of diverse things such as intellectual
challenges, adjusted learning, no marks, smaller schools and classes,
and possibilities for undisturbed work.
The meanings parents hold on the unitary school system also
motivates them when it comes to school choice. They may support the
form of the unitary school system which implies that all children with
different socioeconomic and ethnic background are supposed to attend
the same neighbourhood school. Thus, they do not support its
objective that these children are also supposed to learn the same things
similarly. They are not motivated by what they think is a badly
supported public school, but partly by what they think are schools and
classes that are too big. Parents are also motivated by having made
negative experiences with the unitary school system. Discontentment
is experienced both with municipal school administration and with
single schools. Parents are not motivated from wanting to have an
influence on the education which their children receive. They do,
however, experience influence on schooldays and school management.
This influence they take into use and they involve themselves in
the schools of their children. They also experience teachers and school
leaders to be responsive. The responsiveness empowers parents in
their choice.
Parents are neither motivated by the thought of having a more
practical daily life, nor by wanting to signal social belonging to a
special group of people. Parents hold that the information they get is
NIBR-rapport 2003:8