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Swedish reading skills fell in 2021 despite decision to keep schools open

The reading ability of year four students in Sweden dropped slightly more in the five years leading up to the end of 2021 than the average for other EU and OECD countries, despite the country's decision to keep schools open in the pandemic.

Swedish reading skills fell in 2021 despite decision to keep schools open
Skolverket Director General Peter Fredriksson presents the results of the Pirls reading comparison study. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

In latest Pirls reading comparison study, carried out in 2021, Swedish year four pupils scored a total of just 544 points, a sharp drop from the 555 points the country received in 2016 and only a little above the country’s worst ever result in 2011. 

But Sweden’s 12-point fall was only slightly worse than the 10-point fall seen in the other 65 EU and OECD countries which took part, with Swedish pupils as a whole still scoring above the EU and OECD average of 529 points, and even slightly above the 542 average for students in Denmark, Norway and Finland. 

At a press conference held to announce the result, Peter Fredriksson, the director-general of the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket), put the fall in Swedish students’ reading skills down both to the impact of the pandemic and to an increase in the number of pupils who do not speak Swedish at home. 

“We have said previously that the pandemic affects learning most for the students with the lowest level of resources,” he said.

In the agency’s interpretation of the results, it said that it was impossible to measure the exact impact of the pandemic as all countries were affected. 

However, it said that as different countries had taken different measures that impacted on the education system in different ways, “the effect of the pandemic effect on the education systems of the different participating countries has probably not been the same”. 

Although Sweden kept schools open for the youngest students, education was severely affected for two months or more in about one in every three schools, with either short-term closures or widespread absences due to sickness. 

What Fredriksson said was for him “the most striking” element of the report, however, was the fall in the performance of the students with the most challenging backgrounds. 

These were responsible for almost all of Sweden’s fall in reading performance, with the students who received the highest results still reading at the same level as in 2001, when Sweden topped the Pirls ranking. 

“The number [of pupils] that are at the lowest level has never been higher and that is worrying,” he said. 

There was a 91 point difference between the pupils judged as having the highest level of resources at home and those judged as having the lowest level of resources, up from 73 in 2016. 

“We are concerned at the Swedish National Agency for Education that we have a segregated school system and shortcomings when it comes to equality between schools,” he said in a press statement. “This study confirms the picture we had earlier and even strengthens it.” 

Sweden remains above average when it comes to reading ability, coming seventh equal with Taiwan out of the 65 countries in the study, behind Singapore on 587, Hong Kong on 573, Russia on 567, England on 558, and Finland and Poland on 549. 

Sweden also beat Denmark and Norway, which both scored 539 points. 

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FAMILY

‘Will they pass as British?’: The challenges of raising bilingual kids in Sweden

Twelve years into bringing up his bilingual children in Sweden, Richard Orange wonders if they will ever feel or come across as wholly British.

'Will they pass as British?': The challenges of raising bilingual kids in Sweden

We’re twelve years into raising our bilingual Swedish-British children and the outcome remains uncertain.

My ten-year-old son speaks with an almost comically English accent, like a diminutive Hugh Grant, while my twelve-year-old girl has absorbed an American twang, adopting the YouTube English used by her the rest of her girl gang.

Both still occasionally trip up on phrasal verbs, which often use different prepositions in Swedish from: they might “look on the TV”, for instance. When they were younger, they would create hybrid words, mixing the English “milk” and the Swedish “mjölk” into “myilk”.   

But of the children I know living in Sweden with one British and one Swedish parent, my own probably closest to passing for British.

This is entirely by accident.

When our eldest was born, I was 37 and had only been in Sweden six months, so could barely speak a word of the language, and like many people who start learning a language in middle age, I’m still far from fluent. My Swedish wife, on the other hand, attended American and international schools between the ages of six and seventeen, so for her speaking English comes as naturally as Swedish.

As a result, English has been our main language: in the home, when we’re out and about and very often, when we’re socialising, as we’ve made friends with other families with one English-speaking parent. 

My wife usually speaks Swedish with the children when she’s alone with them, but not always, and if I’m in the room, she’ll often switch subconsciously to English. When the children speak alone with one another, I’m not sure if they have a preference, but if anything English is slightly dominant. 

The only person who suffers from the amount of English spoken at home is me. I’ve tried to switch our evening meals to Swedish to help improve my fluency, but it’s never stuck. 

School and society

My wife’s parents had to work hard to stop her and her brother speaking English at home when they were growing up in Africa, so she sometimes feels guilty that English is so dominant for us. 

She needn’t worry, though, as no Swede talking to our children would ever suspect them of being anything other than Swedish. She insisted on their going to the local municipal school, rather than to an international school, so school and after-school – where they spend roughly half their waking lives – has been almost entirely in Swedish.

I say “almost entirely” as my daughter, in particular, speaks English with her friends, who have parents from Ghana and Cameroon. Sweden’s system of mother-tongue tuition also means that all the English-speaking children in the school are brought together once a week for a lesson. I’m not sure how much the teaching helps their English reading and writing, but it certainly helps bring them together. 

More recently, I’ve been surprised to discover that even my children’s schoolfriends with two Swedish parents are starting to speak English when they hang out. Indeed, the level of English spoken by my daughter’s classmates is rapidly catching up with her own.

For Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes, English is so dominant, almost everyone absorbs it in the end. 

Passing for British

That’s why for me, it’s not really enough for my children to be bilingual in Swedish and English, as that more or less goes for practically everyone their age growing up in Sweden. I want people from the UK who meet them to think of them as British. 

It came as a shock when I first realised this might not happen.

My daughter was still a toddler, and I was interviewing an Australian in Sweden about taking parental leave for an Australian newspaper. When I spoke to his children, then seven and nine, their English was heavily accented and quite limited. I then discovered that a couple of our adult Swedish friends, both of whom spoke English with a definite Swedish accent, had grown up with a British father.  

I was surprised how upset it made me that my daughter started speaking with an American accent, just as I’ve been surprised at how important it is to me that they like Marmite, the bitter salty yeast spread beloved of Brits. I tried to laugh the accent off when we returned to the UK to meet my family and my daughter, understandably, took this badly. A couple of years later, she still resents me for it.

The main thing I’ve done to try and make them pass for British is to return to the UK and stay with my brother and his three similarly aged daughters over Easter and Christmas as often as I can. They are quite close to their cousins, and for me it’s an important link to home.  

From the start, I’ve tried to expand their vocabulary by reading them English children’s books every night, and a few years ago, we started ordering The Beano, a venerable British children’s comic which has been going since 1938. It’s been a surprise hit. For the last two years, they have competed weekly over who gets the first chance to read it. Both read it from cover to cover. 

What to do next? 

For my children to pass as British or even to feel British, will, I suspect, require an extended stay in the UK in their teens or early 20s: a term at a sixth-form college, a semester or more at university, or, like so many of their Swedish colleagues, a few months working in a shop or pub somewhere in the UK. 

It might not work. I’ve heard of half-British children who have gone to the UK to study or work and felt very far from home.

If that happens, if they come back feeling less British than they did before they went, will it matter?

Right now, I feel it will. I will feel like I’ve failed to pass on something important, that they’ve lost a part of their identity I wanted them to have. But with any luck if it does, by that time, I will myself have become too Swedish to care. 

What’s your experience raising a bilingual child in Sweden? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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