What Sweden’s teacher shortage says about privatizing education
STOCKHOLM — For tourists who want to explore the northern reaches of Sweden, Kiruna is a mandatory stop. The city is both the country’s northernmost municipality, just below the Arctic Circle, and also the largest, covering an area similar in size to Slovenia and Wales.
Home to the world’s largest mineKiruna made international headlines a few years ago when the city started move entire neighborhoods following the spread of fractured formations caused by mining operations.
But there is another disturbing reality behind the winter hinterland: the city shows, unlike any other, the growing teacher shortage Sweden is confronted with and all its consequences.
In October, more than 200 middle school students within the municipality were obliged to stay at homea preventive measure the authorities were forced to implement because they had not been able to recruit qualified teaching staff.
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In an interview with The Express, Carina Lidberg, the local representative of the Teachers’ Union emphasized the seriousness of the situation: “If no other solution to the problem can be found, the emergency brake must be pulled. I believe that this protection ban has sent out a signal to all municipalities. This is alarming. We must do something together.”
According to the association, there is currently 200 schools in Sweden that could potentially end up in the same situation and are forced to send students home due to teacher shortages.
The situation in Kiruna may be a wake-up call in a country where the education system has been steadily privatized and decentralized over the past 30 years, making teach a much less attractive profession.
As early as 1991, a leftist coalition led by the Social Democrats abolished the state school system, while a “free choice” voucher system inspired by a conservative American economist The Works of Milton Friedman was introduced by a new right-wing government a year later.
These two policies together led to a total overhaul of the Swedish school system. Each student’s family was free to choose which school to attend, including both public and private options. This affected the allocation of public funds, as schools would receive equal funding from the state for every student they admitted, regardless of their charter. Inevitably, municipalities began to fund private schools with public funds, making them very profitable.
“Welfare millionaires”
Consequently, a series of private actors emerged, which created a new social class in Sweden called the “welfare millionaires”. These are people who built their fortunes by investing in private companies in sectors that had traditionally been exclusively under state control, such as education or healthcare.
The best example of this development is probably Hans and Barbara Bergström, a couple who founded International English School, one of Sweden’s largest school companies that offers students a bilingual education in both English and Swedish. With an estimated wealth of 1.5 billion Swedish kronor (150 million euros)became Barbara Bergström the richest woman in Sweden through this school franchise and sell some of her shares to foreign investors.
More importantly, the Swedish experience over the past 30 years reveals the limits of this policy: Although free choice was supposed to make students and their families free, in reality it has created two parallel school systems within the same country that compete against each other . Other.
On the one hand, for-profit private schools can benefit from attracting students by receiving public funds, while the cost of schooling per student to municipalities naturally increases when public schools lose students.
This trend also reveals underlying socio-economic and geographic divides in Sweden, creating a vicious circle that favors the most privileged layers of Swedish society and leaves many behind. But it also affects the overall quality of education and academic performance, a paradox in a country that prides itself on having a so-called “knowledge economy”.
Fair schools
All this has meant that the Swedish school system has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, both at home and abroad. According to a survey before Sweden’s parliamentary elections in September last year, education was the fourth most important issue for Swedish voters.
Sweden’s increasingly poor results in the PISA study, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has become a source of shame for the Scandinavian nation. (Finland is one of the world’s
A few years ago Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD’s Education and Skills Directorate, even went so far as to say that “the Swedish school system seems to have lost its soul“.
However, a total overhaul of Swedish education policy is not yet expected. According to experts, that the national school system would take about 20 yearsrequires an additional 200,000 people to work for the system, and a transfer of SEK 200 billion (€20 billion) from the municipalities to the state.
In the meantime, the students are back at school in Kiruna, but the situation is still critical. Things seem to have gotten even worse. As Mikael Falk, a teacher at one of the affected schools pointed out in an interview for public TV SVT, “The staff that we were supposed to get and who came here have already almost disappeared. Out of 16 people in middle school, half may have quit by February, that’s how bad it is.”
To avoid having an empty school abandoned by teachers, various teachers’ organizations were recently started around Sweden a grassroots campaign called “the call of the school”. Its motto: “Life isn’t fair, but school should be.”
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