Over the past 10 years, the number of people with an immigrant background living in Norway increased. Whereas nearly 1.1 million people with an immigrant background lived in Norway in 2014, this number had increased to nearly 1.5 million as of 2024. Of these, first generation immigrants was, by far, the largest group, counting 930,000 people. The second largest group was people born in Norway with one parent born abroad, followed by inhabitants born in Norway with two parents born abroad. Immigration to the Nordics Norway is not the only Nordic country with increasing immigration. Immigration has increased in each Nordic country from 2000 and onwards, with Sweden leading immigration until being taken over by Denmark in 2022. Sweden has taken in a comparatively high number of refugees, but most immigrants to the Nordics are from other European countries, such as in Finland. Population challenges in the Nordics Over time, the fertility rate has declined in each Nordic country, and as of 2022, Iceland had the highest fertility rate in the region with only 1.6 children born per woman. Moreover, those aged 70 and older are increasingly making up larger portions of Nordic societies. These factors combined can create challenges as there are less workers available, making immigration an important factor in the Nordic labor markets.

This article explores which students–with regard to gender, socio-economic background and migration background–skip school in Germany, Japan, Sweden and the United Kingdom (UK) according to PISA data. Students who skip school are observed in many countries, but there is not much systematic research that studies this across countries. Comparable data is to a large extent missing. PISA data offers an opportunity to use comparable data. In PISA, students were asked in 2018, 2015 and 2012 whether they had skipped school a whole day in the last two weeks prior to their completion of the PISA student questionnaire. Patterns of how absence relates to sociodemographic factors vary in countries and school systems. In the comparison between the four countries the UK stands out as having a higher percentage of students who have reported that they have skipped school than in the other countries. This does not seem to be related to any specific group of students. Japan also stands out with a lower percentage of students who have reported that they have skipped school. According to PISA data, skipping school is more related to socio-economic background than any other of the variables studied. The socio-economic background seems to be related to skipping school in all three PISA studies in Sweden and the UK. Gender seems not to be an important factor in the four countries. In Sweden and Germany there is a lower percentage of non-immigrant students who report that they have skipped school than first-and second-generation immigrant students. In the UK the figures are more ambiguous. When the percentages of students skipping school are compared over time and in the countries, it is difficult to find any trends, but the data only covered three measurements during a period of six years, which may be too short a time span to see trends.