During the last 40 years, many countries have launched radical reforms of their public education systems in a neoliberal direction that emphasises a mixed economy of schooling. The reforms have been accompanied by discourses of ‘a crisis’ of the public sector, and shared broadly similar elements of varying degrees of decentralisation and new public management (NPM), choice, competition and the introduction of private actors and interests in public education. Much social policy and education research on marketisation reforms has focused on Anglo-Saxon countries, where institutional changes towards more choice and competition have led to a similar dismantling of the welfare state. This has included turning citizens (students, parents) into customers, with all the resulting implications for ethnically and socio-economically based differentiation (Cahill & Hall, 2014; Campbell et al., 2009; Clarke et al., 2007; Roda & Stuart Wells, 2013). However, despite the numerous similarities in the direction of education reforms, the existing literature on marketisation does not capture the peculiarities of the Nordic education policy settings, where choice and competition coexist with a strong sense of education as a public good.