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SCHOOLS

Danish students amongst EU’s best for school grades

Amongst the 28 EU member states, as well as five other countries, Denmark takes a solid fourth place when it comes to school leavers’ skills in reading, mathematics and science.

Published: 8 January 2019 15:56 CET
Danish students amongst EU’s best for school grades
File photo: Anne Bæk/Ritzau Scanpix

The statistics are included in the European Commission’s annual status report on education, which draws on test results from Pisa and Eurostat, Politiken reports.

The Danish education system scores better than the average of EU countries on a number of key points – rising above its domestic reputation, says Lars Qvortrup, a professor at Aarhus University’s Danish School of Education (DPU).

“Pessimism towards education has spread in Denmark and it is not well-founded,” Qvortrup told Politiken.

Denmark is surpassed only by Estonia, Finland and Ireland in the EU report.

According to the Danish Union of Teachers (Danmarks Lærerforening, DL), the study is evidence that Danish state schools deserve more positivity in public debate.

“Throughout the last 15-20 years, we have seen that a negative picture has been painted of Danish students in elementary school,” said DL chairman Anders Bondo Christensen.

“We have here a study that shows a completely different picture. Therefore, it is important to use international assessments in a different way than we have up to now,” he added.

Students with lower overall outcomes also perform well above the EU average in Denmark, with just eight percent considered in the study to be struggling in all three areas: reading, mathematics and science.

15 percent find it difficult to read, 13.5 percent have difficulty with mathematics and 15.9 percent have problems with science. That represents an improvement since 2014.

The Danish education system performs well in virtually all parameters of the evaluation, which also measures various other aspects.

The report comes as the government is negotiating an adjustment of the so-called skolereformen (school reform), a 2014 update to education legislation which made changes including a longer school day and more inclusion of children with special educational needs in regular classes.

Minister of Education, Merete Riisager declined to comment on the EU report to Politiken.

Via email, Riisager told the newspaper that the purpose of the negotiations is not a new reform, but to ensure politicians cannot “sit on their hands” if there is no visible “progress towards the ambitious goals of the reform”.

There are also areas where the Danish system is lagging, the EU report points out. These include students with immigrant backgrounds lagging behind peers in terms of exam results and admittance to further education.

READ ALSO: Schools in Denmark favour rules on mobile phones

DISCRIMINATION

Schools in Sweden discriminate against parents with Arabic names: study

Parents with Arabic-sounding names get a less friendly response and less help when choosing schools in Sweden, according to a new study from the University of Uppsala.

Published: 6 April 2022 12:05 CEST
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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