08-04-2025
Will Sweden's new free school inquiry disarm the issue before the election?
Profit-making by free schools is potentially a killer campaign issue for Sweden's Social Democrat opposition.
Well over two thirds (68 percent) of Swedish voters support stopping companies from earning money from running state-funded free schools, and that even includes a slim majority (53 percent) of those who consider themselves "somewhat to the right" politically.
But the Social Democrats have never capitalised on it.
When they were in power between 2015 and 2022, they launched inquiries which proposed, among other things, limiting the allowed profit margin for companies running schools, making free schools use a lottery system to stop them cherry picking the best pupils, and giving free schools less money per pupil than municipal schools. None of these proposals made it into the statute books.
So it was little surprise that when the party campaigned in the 2022 election for a total ban on companies extracting profits from free schools, few believed they could pull it off.
In their defence, the government lacked a majority from 2014-2018 and was dependent on the pro-free school Centre and Liberal Parties for their majority from January 2019. Many of these proposals were put to the parliament and voted down.
Advertisement
The position of the Centre Party has since changed, altering the calculus.
In 2023, its leader Muharrem Demirok began to call for companies to be temporarily stripped of their right to extract profits from schools they run if they are judged to be performing poorly.
This, in theory, has made pledges from the opposition parties, and the Social Democrats in particular, to drive through free school reform look more credible.
Or it would have, if the right-wing parties hadn't got there first.
On Monday, Sweden's education minister, Johan Pehrson, received the conclusions of the government's own inquiry, which he boasted would end up with "stock market wheeler-dealers" being "thrown head first" out of the education sector.
He decried "the widespread naivety around free schools" and claimed the "Social Democrats have talked about free schools for at least 25 years without doing anything about it."
The inquiry recommended banning companies who launch a new school or buy an existing one from taking out profits for the first five years. It recommended giving the Swedish Schools Inspectorate the power to ban schools from taking out profits if they are performing poorly.
It recommended limiting the extent to which free school companies can divert funding from the state (rather than from municipalities) for profit. It even recommended requiring all individual schools to have accounts so that it is possible to document how much of the money they receive per pupil goes to running the school.
Depending on whether they are also required to make this public information, this could make it harder to take out profits or cross-subsidise other schools owned by the same company.
READ ALSO: How will Sweden's school phone ban work?
Advertisement
Free schools and their lobby organisations expressed outrage, with Andreas Mörck, director of the trade group Almega Utbildning, decrying the proposals as a "witch-hunt" which threatens the continued existence of free schools, and the Internationella Engelska Skolan chain claiming that well-functioning schools would be "cut off at the knees".
But for Niels Paarup-Petersen, the education spokesperson for the Centre Party, this was just play-acting.
"The bit about them getting less government funding is an actual change because it could be detrimental to the overall budget. But the rest of this shouldn't be a big problem for the big companies," he told The Local. "Most of it will not have any effect at all."
What it might do, he conceded, would muddy the waters to make it harder for today's opposition parties to campaign in the 2026 election on free school reform.
"Perhaps," he said. "But it might also be so that the government will not be able to push this through parliament before the election. I don't think all the parties in government see the same solutions on this issue."
READ ALSO: Parents slam IES Stockholm free school closure
