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EDUCATION

‘Swedish kids should be graded from age ten’

The Swedish government said on Monday that Swedish school children should be graded from year four when students are around ten years old, cutting the current grading norm by two years.

Published: 24 March 2014 14:56 CET
'Swedish kids should be graded from age ten'
File photo: Leif R Jansson/TT
Education Minister Jan Björklund said that lowering the age at which Swedish kids get graded for the first time would set students on the right track from earlier in their schooling. 
 
"This gives an increased focus on results in school work which is important," he told the TT news agency.
 
"There are several advantages when it comes to grading. It offers clear information to the parents about how students are doing."
 
The minister stressed that Sweden needs to improve its teaching approach to improve pupils' knowledge early. The news comes soon after Sweden was slammed in December's Pisa rankings when it dropped below the OECD average in maths, reading comprehension, and natural sciences.
 
Currently, Swedish students start getting graded in the sixth grade when the children are aged 12 to 13.
 
Compared to the other 33 OECD countries, Sweden is third from the bottom when it comes to the age students are first graded. Northern Ireland, the UK, and New Zealand are at the top of the list with pupils there getting graded from the ages of four and five. The US joins the majority of countries on the list with grades from six years old and upwards.
 
Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt acknowledged that the old method of allowing the years to pass before grading "has not worked very well".
 
The proposal suggested that the results would be sent home to the parents rather than being given out in school, as is the system today.
 
"Students standing around in class and comparing their scores isn't desirable," Björklund explained. 
 
The proposal also said that the failing "F" grade would be reformulated to say that the student has "not yet passed". 
 
While the proposal could become a reality as early as autumn, Monday's reform would be introduced in 2017.
 
The news comes just days after Björklund announced that Sweden will inject 1.7 billion kronor ($250 million) into improving Swedish language courses for school students who have immigrant parents or who came to Sweden after schooling began. Students with Swedish parents pass school at a rate of 91 percent compared to 52 percent for children with immigrant parents.

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EDUCATION

Why Sweden should protect its fantastic popular education organisations

When the computer programming class Richard Orange's son had loved was cancelled, he got in touch with the local branch of ABF, a Swedish public education organisation, and started it up on his own.

Published: 5 October 2023 11:31 CEST
Updated: 6 October 2023 14:21 CEST
Why Sweden should protect its fantastic popular education organisations

The course in Scratch, a block-based computer programming language for children, was the only extracurricular activity I’d ever found that my son had shown any enthusiasm for and I was disappointed it had been cancelled.

The Covid-19 pandemic had bankrupted CoolMinds, the company that ran it, and the course was called off half-way through. I collected the email and phone number of Fabian, the teacher, and also of some of the other parents, but a plan to move the course to the offices of a parent who ran a startup went nowhere.

Months later, I wandered on impulse into my local branch of ABF, the non-profit organisation founded more than 100 years ago to educate workers, knocked on the office door and found the people there immediately willing to help.

Yes, they could host a course teaching computer programming to children. Yes, they had a computer room upstairs with 10 PCs and a projector. No, I didn’t need to pay anything to rent the room.

All I had to do was start a so-called “study circle” and do a short online course to become a so-called “circle leader”.

After asking around among the parents of my children’s classmates and making a few posts on neighbourhood Facebook groups, I soon had the 10 children I needed, and the course started a week later. 

ABF, launched in Stockholm in 1912 by the Social Democrat party and unions, is just one of Sweden’s studieförbund, or popular education organisations.

There is also Vuxenskolan, which was started in 1968 by a fusion of the Liberal Party’s Liberala studieförbundet (founded 1948) and the Centre Party’s Svenska landsbygdens studieförbund (SLS), founded in 1930.

And finally, there is Medborgarskolan, founded in 1948, by members of what became today’s Moderate Party. 

ABF remains the biggest, according to Statistics Sweden, with some 83,000 study circles run across the country in 2022, compared to 74,234 at Vuxenskolan and 30,169 at Medborgarskolan. 

They are all fantastic resources for foreigners. 

Some 42,871 people born abroad took part in events organised by Sweden’s study circles last year. 

At the same time as my computer course, the ABF centre in Malmö gives Swedish lessons to a group of Ukrainians, and ABF centres across Sweden have since 2015 been teaching Swedish to refugees who do not yet have access to Swedish For Immigrants (SFI) courses. 

Worryingly, Sweden’s study organisations are struggling. The government is reducing state funding for them by some 250 million kronor next year, 350 million the year after, and 500 million in 2026, cutting their funding by about a third.

At the same time, participation has still yet to fully recover from the pandemic. 

Below is a graph showing the total number of people partipating in study organisations, study circles and other types of popular education. 

Source: Statistics Sweden

As a foreigner who has come to the country and been impressed by its strong tradition of free adult education and self-improvement, I feel it would be a terrible shame if the studieförbund began to be dissolved. 

I found ABF such a help in setting up my children’s computing course.   

Once I had the personal numbers of the children and their parents, I loaded them up onto the ABF web portal for circle leaders, and could then tick off whether they attended or not.

When I realised the course was going to be too time consuming to teach myself, I got back in touch with Fabian, whose teaching at CoolMinds my son had liked so much. 

All Fabian had to do was report the hours he taught and his rate. ABF’s administrators then divided the total between each parent and, once I’d signed off that the course was over, sent each of them a bill. Neither Fabian nor I have ever had to deal with any of that ourselves.

The course is now well into its second year and is – given that it’s basically an extra school lesson – surprisingly popular with the children. We’ve started two more courses, one where Fabian teaches Java programming to older children and another teaching a new group Beginner’s Scratch. 

The Local has used ABF’s free podcast studio several times. Photo: ABF

It’s not the only way I use ABF. 

When the studio The Local usually uses to record our podcast in Malmö is booked, we use theirs. ABF used to host the choir my daughter is in. 

Alongside all this, there are all the eclectic events like Tai Chi, embroidery, or even on how to cook Finnish pirogi pies.  

But what is best about Sweden’s studieförbund system is that if there’s something you as a foreigner want to learn about or do, some event or activity you think should exist, all you need to do is get in touch and they will help make it happen. 

Long may they last. 

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