Latest news with #SwedishSchoolsInspectorate
Local Sweden
10-04-2025
- Business
- Local Sweden
How far-reaching are the government's proposals to reform free schools?
Sweden's education minister Johan Pehrson has promised that the reforms to the free school system announced this week will see "stock market wheeler-dealers" being "thrown head first" out of the education sector. How far-reaching are the reforms really? Advertisement What's the background to the free school inquiry? The inquiry was initially launched in June 2022 by the former Social Democrat government, which appointed Johan Ernestam, a former research officer for the Swedish Teacher's union, as chair. The initial remit was to "ensure that tax money that is apportioned to schools is used for what the funds are intended for, for example financing the operations of the school". Advertisement But the current Moderate-led government in July 2023 changed the inquiry's remit from investigating a ban on extracting profits (vinstförbud) to investigating ways to limit the extraction of profits (vinstbegränsning). To do this, it recommended that the inquiry investigate "increased checks on owners and leaderships", "certain bans on withdrawing profits", and "stricter sanctions". In February this year the government replaced Ernestam with Joakim Stymne, a veteran Moderate party official and civil servant. What did Stymne recommend? The report of the inquiry into stricter requirements for the school sector is extremely detailed, containing more than 30 proposals and weighing 1.2 kilograms. It recommended, among other measures: requiring companies running schools to maintain separate accounts, särredovisning, for each individual school or preschool, to make it easier for regulators and the public to track how the municipal money provided per pupil (skolpeng) is used for each individual school or preschool, to make it easier for regulators and the public to track how the municipal money provided per pupil (skolpeng) is used banning companies who launch a new school or buy an existing one from withdrawing profits for the first five years empowering the state to require, if it chooses, schools to prove they have not distributed profits to their owners in the previous year if they want to be eligible for a targeted government grant to increase quality, and also to require that schools account for how such grant money is used empowering the Swedish Schools Inspectorate to impose a ban on those operating a free school from withdrawing profits from a school (värdeöverföringsförbud) if it identifies "one or more deficiencies that seriously hinder the students' ability to achieve educational goals". Advertisement What did the inquiry chief and Sweden's education minister say at the launch? In a debate article in the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, Stymne said that he believed the proposals, if enacted, would increase the quality of the free school sector, driving out the more unscrupulous profit-seekers. "I believe that there will continue to be a variety of operators who want to run schools. Making a profit will not be prohibited," he said. "However, running school operations will not be attractive to those who primarily want to pocket the school fees." Education minister Johan Pehrson decried the "the widespread naivety around free schools", which he said had even come from within his own party, and declared that "stock market wheeler-dealers" would be "thrown head first" out of the education sector. What did the free schools say? The companies running free schools have expressed outrage, with Andreas Mörck, director of the trade group Almega Utbildning, saying the proposals were a "witch-hunt" which he said threatened the continued existence of free schools. He said the bans on extracting profits in the three listed situations would "hit small schools which already have thin margins particularly hard", and argued the proposal that schools receiving state grants should not be able to extract profits "in practice meant the forced shutdown" of some small schools, which depended on such grants for 10 percent of their income. The Internationella Engelska Skolan chain's head of public affairs, Linda Öholm, complained that the accounting requirements would make it hard to cross-subsidise schools in less wealthy municipalities, meaning well-functioning schools would be "cut off at the knees'. Advertisement What did critics of free schools say? Opposition parties and campaigners against the free school system were also critical. The Centre Party's Niels Paarup-Petersen said he believed the free school companies' criticisms were part play-acting. "I don't think it's very real," he told The Local. "The part about them getting less government funding is real because that will be detrimental to their overall budget. But the rest of it shouldn't be a big problem for the big companies. Most of it will hardly have any effect at all." The Social Democrats' education spokesperson, Åsa Westlund, also said she didn't expect it to transform the sector. "Even with these proposals, it will still be possible to use school money for waffle stalls instead of for students' education. So it is far from enough to address the profiteering in Swedish schools," she told the Altinget news site. "The school companies are benefiting both because they are not proposing a total ban on extracting profits, but also because it will be harder to start schools, which will mean fewer new competitors." Marcus Larsson, a campaigner against free schools with the think-tank Balans, said that while many of the proposals were positive, they did not go far enough. "This is like filling in some of the cracks with plaster rather than renovating the whole system," he said. "It's still going to be a market and there are still going to be participants in this market who are there to take advantage of the potential for over-compensation which the state allows in Sweden. So this doesn't change anything actually when it comes to incentives for companies."
Local Sweden
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Local Sweden
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
