While Nordic countries are generally at the forefront of legislation and welfare to improve LGBTI+ rights, school environments are witnessing regression and a rise of hate speech and violence.

Vulnerable LGBTI+ children and young people, particularly where living in small rural communities where specialist care is generally unavailable, are disproportionately impacted by greater homogeneity and intersectional issues.

This Nordic collaboration will contribute to the greater success of LGBTI+ students by giving teachers and school staff access to education to combat student prejudice, exclusion, and marginalisation.

It provides an information forum to increase knowledge, attend courses, gain counselling, share news, and access material from a database of videos, electronic courses, podcasts, discussions on closed websites and advice. It enables connection with other school professionals in Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Sweden, and the resulting online toolkit will be a lasting legacy.

The organisations behind this project are troubled by the increasingly harsh climate in society where alarming reports about the vulnerability of girls in the school environment and elsewhere in the public space are becoming progressively commonplace. Regardless of in which country sexual harassment occurs, it implies consequences for young women’s health, participation in the democratic process and overall room to manoeuvre in life.

This project has created a knowledge base and to strengthen the public opinion in the Nordic countries with respect to girls’ rights, gender equality, equal treatment and sustainable health. The aim is to strengthen the public opinion and to shed light on injustices from a Nordic perspective, make room for the situation of girls in the political agenda and demand responsible policy work. The project has also provided training for key persons involved in the implementation of these policies, as well as persons working within organisations that deal with young women’s issues.

The issue of gender equality in schools and preschools has received a lot of attention in recent years, especially in the Nordic countries. One reason for this is that the national gender equality and discrimination laws have been expanded to cover also the school systems.

The legislative changes make it necessary to develop the equality and diversity work performed in the school environment, which in turn requires carefully planned staff training for educational professionals and other school personnel.

This project aimed to provide such training by developing a tool for e-learning. The training was provided via an online platform utilising a participatory approach, and was based on the results of a previous project titled Nordic Gender Equality Certification in Education, which identified and explored successful gender equality practices in the education sector.

In April 2014, the Nordic Council issued a recommendation to introduce gender equality certification of Nordic schools and preschools. In connection with this, a project titled Mapping Promising Nordic Practices in Gender Equality Promotion at Basic Education and Kindergartens set out to stimulate discussion and cooperation regarding the implications of the recommendation for schools and preschools. The aim of the project was to create a forum for sharing of best practice.

The project resulted in a report proposing concrete certification criteria and presenting examples of successful work, which also facilitated further development of existing efforts.

The Nordic sharing of experiences yielded great value and the project continued after the publishing of the report in 2015 with the development of a tool for e-learning.

The project was launched to address the need for a gender equality focus in work with children and adolescents. At a seminar at the Nordic Forum in Malmö 2014, organisations from the Nordic and Baltic regions talked about how girls’ and boys’ group meetings can prevent violence and promote democracy and gender equality.

The organisations behind the project are having great success with the so-called girl and boy group method in the Nordic countries, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region. The seminar gathered the different actors to exchange experiences and discuss how to jointly spread, develop and ensure a high quality of the method.

The method is based on a democratic and non-hierarchical dialogue between a small group of adolescents and their leader. The underlying idea is always the same: to strengthen the adolescents’ integrity, self-esteem and ability to cooperate and at the same time give them tools to question norms and handle conflicts. The network has continued to collaborate around the methods since the project ended.