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Best schools in Sweden’s far north: survey

Six towns in northern Sweden ranked among the top ten municipalities with the best schools in the country, according to a ranking by the Swedish Teachers' Union (Lärarförbundet).

Published: 8 September 2010 09:25 CEST

Best schools in Sweden's far north: survey

Arvidsjaur, a town with 6,000 residents west of Luleå, topped this year’s ranking.

“This is an effect of long-term work – we focus on student welfare and children with special needs. It is paying off,” Arvidsjaur school director Annette Rydén told the TT news agency.

According to Rydén, Arvidsjaur’s small size also helps by making it easier to enforce a positive sense of social control.

Two more communities in the north followed in second and third place: Piteå, south of Luleå, and Vindeln in Västerbotten northwest of Umeå. Another three municipalities from the northern part of the country ranked in the top 10 of Sweden’s 290 municipalities: Luleå in fifth, Pajala in eighth and Norsjö in 10th.

“Obvious investments on resources, the proportion of trained teachers and a high staffing ratio has paid off,” union chairwoman Eva-Lis Sirén said in a statement.

Last year’s top two municipalities, Lomma and Lund, which are both in southern Skåne, slipped to sixth and fourth respectively.

Separately, the most improved school this year was Ödeshög in central Sweden, northeast of Jönköping.

The municipality climbed to 72nd from 272nd place. Arvidsjaur advanced from 40th place last year.

The union has ranked Sweden’s best school communities since 2002.

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Schools in Sweden discriminate against parents with Arabic names: study

In one of the largest discrimination experiments ever carried out in the country, 3,430 primary schools were contacted via email by a false parent who wanted to know more about the school. The parent left information about their name and profession.

In the email, the false parent stated that they were interested in placing their child at the school, and questions were asked about the school’s profile, queue length, and how the application process worked. The parent was either low-educated (nursing assistant) or highly educated (dentist). Some parents gave Swedish names and others gave “Arabic-sounding” names.

The report’s author, Jonas Larsson Taghizadeh said that the study had demonstrated “relatively large and statistically significant negative effects” for the fictional Arabic parents.

“Our results show that responses to emails signed with Arabic names from school principals are less friendly, are less likely to indicate that there are open slots, and are less likely to contain positive information about the school,” he told The Local.

READ ALSO: Men with foreign names face job discrimination in Sweden: study

The email responses received by the fictional Arabic parents were rated five percent less friendly than those received by the fictional Swedish parents, schools were 3.2 percentage points less likely to tell Arabic parents that there were open slots at the school, and were 3.9 percentage points less likely to include positive information about the municipality or the school.

There was no statistically significant difference in the response rate and number of questions answered by schools to Swedish or Arabic-sounding parents.

Taghizadeh said that there was more discrimination against those with a low social-economic status job than against those with an Arabic name, with the worst affected group being those who combined the two.

“For socioeconomic discrimination, the results are similar, however, here the discrimination effects are somewhat larger,” he told The Local.

Having a high economic status profession tended to cancel out the negative effects of having an Arabic name.

“The discrimination effects are substantially important, as they could potentially indirectly influence parents’ school choice decision,” Taghizadeh said.

“Investigating socioeconomic discrimination is also important in itself, as discrimination is seldom studied and as explicit discrimination legislation that bans class-based discrimination is rare in Western countries including Sweden, in contrast to laws against ethnic discrimination.”

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