About ULF

Why ULF?

According to the Education Act, education must be “based on scientific knowledge and proven experience” (Chapter 1, Section 5). In practice, this means that teachers, preschool teachers, and school leaders should ground their professional practice in relevant knowledge. It also means that teaching should be permeated by a scientific approach.

For schools to be truly based on scientific knowledge, there must be educational research that is grounded in schools’ needs and that provides professionals with a basis for their work. This in turn requires long-term collaboration between schools and academia, linking theory and practice, with researchers, teachers, and other professionals working closely together. ULF establishes ground-breaking national structures that make such collaboration possible.

The Goal of ULF

The goal is to build a sustainable national infrastructure for robust collaboration between academia and schools – at local, node, and national levels – in order to enable high-quality practice-oriented research. This benefits both pupils and student teachers. When theory and practice are more closely intertwined, both school education and teacher education are strengthened – partly through a more relevant research base, and partly through greater opportunities for student teachers to take part in schools’ research and development environments.

Another goal is to gradually build up a shared knowledge base that is openly accessible both to researchers and to school professionals and decision-makers at various levels.

Responsibility and Nodes

Higher education institutions and school authorities are organised into five nodes – North, South, East, West, and Capital. The management groups of the nodes decide how funds are allocated and whether one or more research projects should be carried out jointly. The same applies to the allocation of infrastructure funding.

At each higher education institution there is a so-called Hub, which serves as a forum for ongoing dialogue between universities and school authorities. Research projects are formed based on current issues and may be conducted in different constellations, within and across hubs and nodes.

Members of the West Node

School authorities with ULF agreements

• Chalmers University of Technology
• University of Gothenburg
• University of Borås
• Jönköping University
• University West
• Karlstad University

The nodes mainly work with collaboration models, overall operational planning, allocation of funds, and knowledge exchange within the node.