International ratings have plummeted and inequality is growing after raft of changes including introduction of voucher system

Gustav Fridolin, Sweden’s rather youthful education minister, emerges from behind his desk in a pleasant office in central Stockholm wearing what looks like a pair of Vans and the open, fresh-faced smile of a newly qualified teacher.



The smile falters when he begins to describe the plight of Sweden’s schools and the scale of the challenge that lies ahead. Fridolin, it turns out, is the man in charge of rescuing a school system in crisis.

Sweden, once regarded as a byword for high-quality education – free preschool, formal school at seven, no fee-paying private schools, no selection – has seen its scores in Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) assessments plummet in recent years.

Fridolin acknowledges the sense of shame and embarrassment felt in Sweden. “The problem is that this embarrassment is carried by the teachers. But this embarrassment should be carried by us politicians. We were the ones who created the system. It’s a political failure,” he says.



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Observers in the UK may well be vexed upon reading about Sweden’s problems, since its friskolor policy – privately run schools funded by public money – was one of the key inspirations behind the introduction of free schools in England under the coalition government.



Prior to the 2010 election, Tory politicians including Michael Gove, who went on to become education secretary, visited Sweden to see the free-school revolution in action.

“If we had Swedish-style reforms there is every reason to believe that we would have up to 3,000 new schools, all of them high quality and with an independent ethos,” Gove enthused in 2008. “The example of Sweden shows that it is not a distant utopia, it is a deliverable reform.”

And so it came to pass. Under the coalition government, 254 free schools opened, and the new Tory administration is promising 500 more in the coming parliament.

Pisa is the modern measure of a nation’s educational success and between 2000 and 2012 Sweden’s Pisa scores dropped more sharply than those of any other participating country, from close to average to significantly below average.

In the most recent Pisa assessment, in 2012, Sweden’s 15-year-olds ranked 28th out of 34 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries in maths, and 27th in both reading and science, significantly below their Nordic neighbours.

Morale among teachers is low, there are concerns about unqualified teaching staff, discipline in some schools is poor and according to a damning report published by the OECD last month, the system is in need of “urgent change”.

Fridolin, who has a degree in teaching, says not only have scores in international tests gone down, inequality in the Swedish system has gone up. “This used to be the great success story of the Swedish system,” he said. “We could offer every child, regardless of their background, a really good education. The parents’ educational background is showing more and more in their grades.

“Instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not.”

Gustav Fridolin (front left) with his prime minister, Stefan Lofven, and cabinet colleagues in October 2014. Photograph: TT/Reuters

Sweden’s decline follows a raft of changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s that transformed the educational landscape. A system that had been largely centralised was devolved to municipalities, teacher training was changed, exams and grades changed, and a voucher system was introduced giving parents the power to choose which school to send their child to. Each child was funded by the state, and if the child chose to go do a different school, the money would follow.

Since then, almost 800 publicly funded private schools – or free schools – have been set up across Sweden, many of them by companies who are allowed to make a profit. In England, the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, has ruled out allowing free schools to be run for profit. This is one of key concerns in the current education debate in Sweden.

Critics on the left in Sweden blame the voucher system for declining results, saying it has opened the door for schools more interested in making a profit than providing education. Conservatives who support free choice say students have been given too much influence in the classroom, undermining the authority of teachers.

Fridolin’s line is that it was not one single change that caused the problems, but a combination that helped create a “fragmentary school system” which lacked steering and sowed the seeds for growing inequality.



“The school system is not a market where everyone has the same possibilities and the same information. It becomes that some parents, the educated parents with strong resources, use the possibility to choose schools.”

His government’s aim, he says, is to make sure that public money spent in schools stays in schools. But it will not be easy. “It’s a genie-in-the-bottle situation. How do we change a system that has gone on so long in allowing quite big profit in schools?”

Fridolin has a fight on his hands. On the opposing side is Barbara Bergström, founder and chair of Internationella Engelska Skolan (IES), one of the largest providers of free schools in Sweden. IES currently educates 20,000 pupils in 30 schools across Sweden. Its success is such that a further 94,000 children are on its waiting lists, some as young as three weeks have their names down for a place.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barbara Bergström, founder and chair of Internationella Engelska Skolan. Photograph: Arni Torfason/Demotix

We meet in the polished corridors of the first IES school to open, in Enskede, a suburb of Stockholm. It’s almost the end of term and many of the children are going to visit museums around the city. The school is orderly, the pupils courteous – the regime is stricter than in many of Sweden’s state schools – and results are strong, exceeding those of neighbouring municipal schools.

“This is more organised than my last school,” says one 12-year-old girl. “It was all relaxing on the table there.”

“In my last school they were really messy,” says her friend. “They didn’t really listen to the teachers. Here it’s more respectful.”

When Gove visited this school he liked what he saw, and when Bergström met him in London later he asked her: “How many schools are you going to open in the UK? A hundred, 200?”

In fact IES has opened just one, IES Breckland, in Brandon, Suffolk, which was placed in special measures by Ofsted but is now making “reasonable progress”. Bergström, a former science teacher from Buffalo, New York, says there will be no more schools in England for the time being.

She has had meetings with Fridolin. “There’s an awful lot of rhetoric about for-profit companies. If we were not for profit we would not be where were we are today. There’s no way we would be able to do what we are doing in our schools without the security of a solid financial base.”

Ulla Hamilton, chief executive of the Swedish Association for Independent Schools, agrees. “The market is working,” she says. The theory is that competition forces flagging schools to up their game.

She says the decline in Sweden’s schools has nothing to do with the introduction of free choice or the emergence of independent schools. Hamilton quotes research by the IFAU, the Swedish Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, which suggests that results had started to drop even before the changes. “The free schools are not the cause,” she says.

But as the postmortem continues into what has gone wrong in Sweden’s education system, the free school movement is faltering. Because of the uncertainty about the future, fewer companies are coming forward to open new schools, banks are afraid to provide loans, and the numbers being approved to set up schools is going down. Meanwhile, waiting lists for places in many of Sweden’s independent schools are going up.

Like Bergström, Hamilton is in favour of profit. “You need to be able to make a margin otherwise people will not be interested in setting up,” she says. She adds that the payback for shareholders is tiny compared with public preconceptions.

There are no profits at Frejaskolan, a state school in Gnesta, just south of Stockholm. There’s a happy, informal atmosphere (uniforms are unheard of in Sweden, in any school) but in the last two years a small number of parents have chosen to take their children out and put them in an independent school 25 miles away.

“The parents know about the school,” says one of the teachers. “It stands up quite well. There’s good marketing. When they go, we lose the money we get from the state. I’m a parent myself and I’m a little bit worried.

“My youngest is 10 years old. Will she have teachers who are really qualified? We don’t really know how it will be.”

The Guardian asked Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills, what lessons the UK might learn from the Swedish experience. He said: “When establishing school autonomy and choice, the Swedish system did not strengthen oversight and intervention functions (which were traditionally weak in Sweden). So the system had no means to learn from successful schools and scale their success, and it had no means to detect and address educational underperformance.

“I think the UK needs to watch out for that as well, unless it is willing and able to upscale Ofsted by dimensions. Successful school systems are more than a collection of independent schools.”