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EDUCATION

Foreign students set to lose housing guarantee

International students should not be given top priority for student housing in Oslo at the expense of first-year students from other parts of Norway, a student council has ruled.

Published: 30 August 2012 15:11 CEST
Foreign students set to lose housing guarantee
Grunerløkka student apartments (Photo: SiO/Stein J. Bjørge)

Until now, international students moving to the Norwegian capital have gained an automatic place at the top of the queue for student accommodation managed by the student welfare organization for Oslo and Akershus (SiO).

This week, however, the region’s Welfare Council (Velferdstinget – VT) ruled that domestic first-year college students from outside the Oslo area should be given the same housing opportunities as their international counterparts, student newspaper Universitas reports.

If SiO’s governing committee votes to approve the move, the new rules will come into effect on January 1st 2013.

”We think it’s right to prioritize international students in the queue, but not in unlimited numbers and not to the total detriment of other first-year students,” said Welfare Council chief Birgit Skarstein.

The council instead wants individual universities and colleges to assume responsibility for finding accommodation for students from abroad.

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EDUCATION

Sweden’s Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

Sweden's opposition Social Democrats have called for a total ban on the establishment of new profit-making free schools, in a sign the party may be toughening its policies on profit-making in the welfare sector.

Published: 18 April 2024 16:09 CEST
Sweden's Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

“We want the state to slam on the emergency brakes and bring in a ban on establishing [new schools],” the party’s leader, Magdalena Andersson, said at a press conference.

“We think the Swedish people should be making the decisions on the Swedish school system, and not big school corporations whose main driver is making a profit.” 

Almost a fifth of pupils in Sweden attend one of the country’s 3,900 primary and secondary “free schools”, first introduced in the country in the early 1990s. 

Even though three quarters of the schools are run by private companies on a for-profit basis, they are 100 percent state funded, with schools given money for each pupil. 

This system has come in for criticism in recent years, with profit-making schools blamed for increasing segregation, contributing to declining educational standards and for grade inflation. 

In the run-up to the 2022 election, Andersson called for a ban on the companies being able to distribute profits to their owners in the form of dividends, calling for all profits to be reinvested in the school system.  

READ ALSO: Sweden’s pioneering for-profit ‘free schools’ under fire 

Andersson said that the new ban on establishing free schools could be achieved by extending a law banning the establishment of religious free schools, brought in while they were in power, to cover all free schools. 

“It’s possible to use that legislation as a base and so develop this new law quite rapidly,” Andersson said, adding that this law would be the first step along the way to a total ban on profit-making schools in Sweden. 

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