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New Public Management (NPM) reforms has affected the Swedish school system and its administration over the last 20 years. User choices and competition create new context to promote quality management which are not completely applicable on public services. This paper focus on the growing use of quality management in primary education and on processes at different levels, how processes can be supported either by professionals or/and ICT to improve educational quality. This paper investigates meanings of quality in education by analysing data from Swedish public schools and the municipal administration. Case studies in five municipalities have been conducted, varying in size and thereby also by numbers of schools and structures of quality management. Based on this multi-case study we discuss four implications. First, there is a need to clarify the roles and obligations of the different levels and actors in the education sectors. Second, there is a need to support and develop roles that can strengthen quality in public schools no matter of the size of the municipality administration. Thirdly, such support can be implemented by certain services as quality coordinators in a community of practice. Implementation of ICT to support quality is an another opportunity; people in virtual community of practice collaborate online, share experiences and support each other in legislative matters, human resources etc. Fourthly, there is need to elaborate on the meanings of quality management in public settings and also open up the meanings of quality in relation to education in particular and public services in general.

Problem based teaching has been on the agenda in higher education for at least the last twenty years and is embedded in professional educations often to prepare students for real life problem solving. However, in when higher education rather aim to provide deeper theoretical and reflective competences promoting the students capacities to address unpredictable challenges in different contexts, there might be other ways of applying and using problem based educational tools. In this paper we describe and discuss our experiences of such attempts in three different higher educational programs. The three educational settings are a Master of European and International relations, teacher-training courses on master level and Master of Political Science. The work on our new curriculums and pedagogical approaches has taken place within a development project and we have shared ideas and experiences throughout the project. The approach has been differently designed into the three programs but the common focus has been that we do not take off in the problem, but the students have to find the problem and explain how it fits to the theories they learn. We conclude, so far, that a key for success is to present and introduce the students to the model of teaching to be successful.

We herein outline the rationale for a Swedish cohort consortium, aiming to facilitate greater use of Swedish cohorts for world-class research. Coordination of all Swedish prospective population-based cohorts in a common infrastructure would enable more precise research findings and facilitate research on rare exposures and outcomes, leading to better utilization of study participants' data, better return of funders' investments, and higher benefit to patients and populations. We motivate the proposed infrastructure partly by lessons learned from a pilot study encompassing data from 21 cohorts. We envisage a standing Swedish cohort consortium that would drive development of epidemiological research methods and strengthen the Swedish as well as international epidemiological competence, community, and competitiveness. ; Special issue