As discussed in Chapter 4, Norwegian social democrats and conservative German Christian democrats both managed to decisively shape the outcomes of comprehensive school reform attempts. Chapter 5 explores in more detail how they managed to convince large parts of the population to consent to their education policy agendas and how they successfully forged reform packages that appealed to different groups. To this end, the chapter analyzes five dimensions of education politics, which highly engaged at least some parts of the population: struggles over religion, centralization, language, anti-communism, and gender. It becomes clear that especially the center-periphery and rural-urban cleavages shaped Norwegian school politics during the postwar reform period. For the most part, this facilitated coalitions between the rural periphery and the Labor Party. In North Rhine–Westphalia, the state-church cleavage and the communist-socialist cleavage stood in the way of similar coalitions and instead stabilized the internal cross-interest coalition of the CDU.

This chapter summarises the findings of a mixed methods research project carried out with 639 young women from across Rajasthan, India, in 2014. We examine the experiences of young women who progressed to tertiary level education despite having parents with little or no formal education. We classify this cohort as the ‘College’ group. We compare their experiences with other girls, matched by age, location and parental education level, who dropped out during lower secondary school. We identify the triggers of educational success, paying particular attention to how the two groups differ in individual and family characteristics. The College group reported higher perceived levels of emotional support from one or both parents, more flexible familial attitudes towards marriage arrangements, as well as some reductions in expectations for household work. In addition, the College group were more than two times less likely to have grandparents or extended family that strongly disapproved of their continuing education than their non-College counterparts. Despite parental engagement, the College group reported experiencing acute financial strain and difficulties navigating the educational system in areas such as institution and subject choice. These challenges were exacerbated by a lack of formal institutional supports for these first-generation learners.

Recent studies show that many women around the globe remain far outside the circle of equality, particularly when it comes to access to education. Educating girls means decreasing their exclusion from the labor market and inviting them into the formal economy, thereby spurring a country’s economic growth. Thus, the importance of educating girls is considered not solely as a gender and human rights issue, but also as a development issue. This chapter focuses on Ghana as a case study in promoting women’s empowerment through educational resources. Examining the colonialist legacies that contribute to persistent gaps between educational access and completion for males and females, it explores sociocultural and school-related barriers, as well as those connected to public perceptions of education for women. In the process, proposals are considered to address these systemic gaps in ways that serve as a model for expanding educational opportunities for girls and young women around the world.