Ensuring all lower secondary schools have the strategies and capacity to support student motivation and improvement. However, from the analysis of the OECD-Norway Steering Group, it appears to be operating too much on the basis of shortterm, weakly connected projects to fix specific problems rather than with an overall strategy for systemic change. Valuable recent initiatives need to be related to one another more strategically. These include new programmes related to principal training and support, whole school improvement, the development of assessments, and improvements in school environments.