Decision‐making in educations systems has become more complex: while decentralisation has moved the locus of power to lower governance levels, the central level still is held responsible for the quality of outcomes. As a consequence, new steering strategies have emerged that tend to apply softer modes of governance as opposed to harder ones in the past. This article aims at shedding empirical and conceptual light on these new developments. It compares two national examples for soft modes of governance with a supra‐national one (the EU's Open Method of Co‐ordination OMC) and argues that OMC might be both a useful analytical lens to categorise new steering mechanisms and a possibly promising policy strategy at the national level.