Nine foreign teachers who had worked at or were still working for schools run by Internationella Engelska Skolan (International English School – IES, one of Sweden’s largest free school, or charter school, chains), have claimed they were made to grade students despite having little training, that they were pressured not to fail students and that the grades given by teachers were then adjusted by management. 

One of the teachers said she had come to feel that the school exploited the fact that many of its teachers were fresh graduates from universities in English-speaking countries who had never been taught how grading works in the Swedish system. 

“They have a really high turnover rate, and from the outside, that seems like a bad thing. But that’s how they like it, because the longer you’re there, the more problems you start to see with the system,” she said. “So when teachers don’t know that you can even fail a student in Sweden, they like that. They don’t want you to know, because then you’re going to fight against it.” 

There are large discrepancies at some IES schools between the grade awarded to students by the teachers and the grades students get in their written national tests, standardised tests issued by the National Agency of Education to help teachers assess students fairly. Under Swedish rules, teachers are allowed to give their students a higher or lower overall grade, but they are usually in line with the national tests.

Grade inflation is not exclusively an IES phenomenon, and the government in December 2021 ordered the Swedish Schools Inspectorate to examine how schools assess their students, to help promote equality in grading.

Jonas Vlachos, an economics professor at Stockholm University who researches Swedish schools, found in a 2018 study that IES schools, together with those from the Kunskapsskolan chain, showed the biggest difference between pupils’ grades, as decided on by teachers, and the grades they got in national tests, after adjusting the figures. 

“Kunskapsskolan and IES stand out enormously,” he told The Local. “There are indications that they are generous on average, and that they are particularly generous in grade setting when it’s easy to hide the fact that they are being so.”

He estimated that fully two-thirds of grade advantage IES had over municipal schools can be explained by more generous grading from teachers.

The testimony of teachers at the school explains some of the ways this comes about.  

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• Why The Local’s IES story has caused such a stir in Sweden

Inadequate training in grade-setting from management

Teachers working at IES complained that they were made to grade their pupils without the school giving them proper information on how Sweden’s grading system works.

“A lot of international staff think it’s a Swedish thing to not fail students. And then they find out later, after they’ve been there for years and talked to Swedish people, that it’s actually an IES thing,” reports an American teacher who teaches at a school in Stockholm. 

Another said that as a newly arrived teacher she had been made responsible for grading a whole class of 32 16-year-old students, as her head of department was off sick with Covid-19.

“I gave the tests and graded them myself, which feels wild since I had no formal training other than my department chair trying to explain it to me,” she said. “In retrospect, I feel like I inflated grades, but I honestly don’t know because I had nothing to compare it to.”

New teachers arriving in Sweden are usually briefed on the country’s grading system in their first induction week, but the US teacher at a Stockholm school said this came as part of an overwhelming deluge of new information. Another teacher from the US claimed to have effectively received “little to no training in the Swedish grading system”. 

A Swedish teacher who works together with IES teachers hired straight from university in English-speaking countries, agreed that her international colleagues were rarely if ever properly briefed on how to grade students.

“We have a lot of teachers from countries with different school systems, so they are not used to the Swedish system when it comes to grading,” she said. “They are very poorly taught. They need much more training.”

Teachers said that school management exploited new teachers’ ignorance to pressure them to give good grades, and in particular to not give students a failing “F” grade. 

“There are students who shouldn’t pass, and there’s definitely this level of pressure put on teachers to not only pass every student, but to give them grades that may be higher than what the teacher thinks they deserve,” says the teacher from a school in Stockholm. 

“I was actually called into a meeting with the principal. I had already put in all my grades, and I was brought in without any knowledge of what was going to be happening,” the teacher said.

“And I had to sit with the principal and the academic coordinator alone, without my head of department or anyone from the union to support me, and I had to go through every single grade I had given my year-nine students and explain them.” 

The teacher said that the headteacher had then pushed her to raise the poorer grades.

“I was told about one student whose grade had dropped, and that was because they had just not turned in any work at all. But I was given a backstory about the student how they had had a hard time at home, which of course, tugged at my heart. But then I said, ‘But I can’t change the grade based on their personal experience’. And they were like, ‘well, can you think of anything? Have you had any conversations in the hallway, or in the lunchroom that you could base the grade on so that we could push it up a bit?'” 

An investigative article by The Local into what it's like to work as a foreign teacher at Sweden's largest free school chain, IES, has raised eyebrows and sparked much debate. Here's why it is such a controversial issue – and why its impact goes beyond… https://t.co/N2jsRFXnob

— The Local Sweden (@TheLocalSweden) January 21, 2022

Using paperwork as a disincentive 

A teacher at a school in southern Sweden reported that after showing scant interest in struggling students throughout the term, school management would then pile bureaucratic paperwork onto teachers if they said they intended to fail a student.

“You’ve seen them almost every day or every week with their class, and you know that they are not capable of passing your class. And at the very end, admin will give you so much paperwork saying, ‘Have you done this? Have you done this? Do you have documentation on this?’ You have been with a student for months, and they only come in at the end saying, ‘but why are they failing?'”

She said that when she had stood her ground and insisted that a student deserved to fail, she had been hit by a barrage of questions.

“They question you a lot to make sure that you’re making the right call in failing the student. They would never do that for a student that has a C or a D.”

Like the teacher in Stockholm, she was then asked to use any justification she could find to raise the grades of students.

“I have definitely have been encouraged to like ‘grade the whole student’, every little thing that happens. So, like, if they tanked in a speaking assessment but one day in the cafeteria, they just randomly told me this fact, then I could use that to grade them.”

Academic coordinators improving grades

Several teachers said that the academic coordinators and academic managers at their schools had at times gone over the heads of teachers completely and improved students’ grades. 

At the school in Stockholm, a student who had been failed was called into a classroom by the academic coordinator at the end of term and sat down for an hour. 

A former teacher at a school in southern Sweden claimed that the academic coordinator at their school had adjusted grades without even requiring additional work.  

“At the end of last year, the academic coordinator edited some of the teachers’ grades without talking to the teachers to make them look better,” he said.

Jonas Vlachos, an economics professor at Stockholm University, said that school management is not supposed to change students’ grades without giving their teacher the final decision. 

“They’re not allowed to do that,” he said. “The teacher in charge of teaching the class is the one in charge of grading. The idea is that the teacher is the most well-informed about student performance.” 

Kirk Johansson asserted that the group’s management would take immediate action if it suspected that academic coordinators or principals were abusing the process in this way. 

“There are legal criteria that teachers have to follow in order to set a grade of F. The teachers in a Swedish school have the legal right to set grades, called exercise of authority (myndighetsutövning) and there are strict rules attached to this process that must be followed. Any signals that the grading process has not been followed correctly, would lead to a thorough investigation from our side.” 

She said that IES welcomed the push by Sweden’s government and the Swedish Schools Inspectorate to increase equality in grading: “Grading integrity is very important to us so that our students go to further education with grades that reflect their true knowledge.”

This is a follow-up to The Local’s investigative article about what it’s like to work as a foreign teacher at IES in Sweden. Many thanks to everyone who has got in touch with us to share their story.