Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

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

Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson proposed the ban on establishing new free schools at a press conference on Thursday. Photo: Samuel Steén/TT

“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.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.

Become a Member to leave a comment.

EXPLAINED: How radically does a new report aim to change Sweden's public broadcasters?

What is the Public Service inquiry?

On the face of it, there is nothing particularly alarming about a parliamentary inquiry into the regulation and funding of Sweden’s three public service broadcasters: television broadcaster SVT, radio broadcaster SR, and UR, which provides educational programming.

The committee, which included members from each party in parliament, was instructed to decide how the three broadcasters should be regulated between 2026 and 2033, its next remit period, and to make proposals which “create good conditions for public service organisations to maintain and protect their independence”.

Similar parliamentary inquiries provided their conclusions in 2012, under the centre-right Alliance government, and in 2016 under the centre-left Social Democrat-Green Party government.

In his report, the inquiry’s chair, former Christian Democrat leader Göran Hägglund, said the committee supported the idea that the public broadcasters should still have a broad remit, and also that their independence should continue to be protected.

So why the controversy?

The opposition parties are complaining that the committee, which started off working with cross-party consensus as its goal, had changed character at the last moment, with the three government parties and the far-right Sweden Democrats (together known as the Tidö parties after the palace where their collaboration started) suddenly pushing for the inclusion of previously undiscussed and radical changes.

“Very late in the work on the inquiry, major differences have arisen as a consequence of the Tidö parties’ internal negotiations, which explains the many reservations and the alternative proposal for allocation of funds that our parties propose,” the committee members for the Social Democrats, Green Party, Centre Party, and Left Party, said in an opinion piece published in the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

“We regret that the committee has not been able to unite behind the conclusions. At a late stage the Tidö parties chose to do their own thing, which is unusual. There has been a clear reluctance to look more widely for a solution,” the Social Democrats’ culture spokesperson, Lawen Redar, said at a press meeting.

Perhaps the most controversial of the changes include:

Stripping out a clause that requires the three broadcasters to ensure programmes reflect “equality” and “diversity”
Changing future funding so that the broadcasters get funding increased by just one percent annually between 2031-2033
Proposing a new inquiry into fusing the three broadcasters into a single national broadcaster
Pushing public service broadcasters to focus more on TV and radio, and less on the internet or social media

Is this a demolition of public service broadcasters?

Well, not really.

Sweden’s public service broadcasters have traditionally received an annual increase in funding of about 2 percent – in line with Sweden’s inflation target. This meant for a decade from 2010 until 2021, it saw a real rise in funding, but meant the broadcasters were hit hard by the inflation of over 8 percent in 2022 and nearly 6 percent in 2023, with many making layoffs.

The inquiry recommends increasing funding, which was a combined 9.1 billion kronor in 2024, by 3 percent in 2026, 2 percent between 2027 and 2030 and one percent between 2031 and 2033.

Cilla Benkö, the chief executive of SR, said that the funding reduction represented “a gradual downgrading” of SR, which would mean “fewer journalists and fewer programmes”, especially after the organisation had just carried out a series of layoffs.

“For eight years, we’re going to be short of 2 billion kronor, and we need to upgrade our property. We own Radiohuset in Stockholm, which is from the 60s, and we don’t have the money to do it. If we don’t get it, we will have to take money from journalism, which will affect the public and also affect civil defence.”

In their reservation from the report’s conclusions, the Social Democrats wrote that they believed that the government’s decision to reduce funding was “ideologically motivated”.

Is stripping out “equality” and “diversity” from programme goals a political move?

In the report, Hägglund made out that removing jämställdhet, meaning equality, and mångfald, meaning diversity, from the description of what the three broadcasters’ programmes should reflect was simply because they were redundant.

Broadcasters, he argued, are already required to do this under the Public Service Act.

But it’s clear that even if it might not have a large impact on the broadcaster’s output in practice, this fits in with the ideology of the far-right Sweden Democrats, for whom “diversity” and “ethnic diversity” in particular are not a fundamental part of “democratic principles”, as they have been seen within Sweden’s public broadcasters.

Whether this will have real impact or just be something the Sweden Democrats can use to impress their voters remains to be seen.

What about the inquiry into combining Sweden’s three broadcasters into a single entity?

When he presented the inquiry Hägglund said that Sweden was “strange” in having separate national broadcasters for TV, radio and eduction.

“We know that Sweden is strange in this respect. Nearly all counties have a single combined company,” he said at the press conference.

The committee has proposed that the government launch an inquiry into combining the three companies into a single entity, a proposal that the members for the Social Democrats, Centre Party, Green Party and Left Party did not support.

The wastefulness of running three separate public broadcasters is a longstanding criticism of Sweden’s system, however.

Websites should only be “complementary” to TV and radio, and changes to social media guidelines

The inquiry held back from calling for the three public broadcasters to reduce or limit the amount of content they publish on their websites, but said that text media should be only “complementary” to their core TV and radio output.

The inquiry also said that the demand that broadcasters be “non-partisan” and “factual”, should also cover what they publish on social media, with all publications, including those on social media open for examination by Sweden’s broadcasting regulator.

Finally, the inquiry said that the broadcasters’ own platforms should be their “priority distribution channels” on the internet, and that use of social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat should follow “an assessment of the risks and the potential consequences”.

So what happens now?

The inquiry is now being sent out for consultation, after which it is likely to return to the parliament’s culture committee before a new bill is drafted and sent to parliament for a vote.

The four centre-left parties who objected to many of the report’s conclusions have said they will continue working to get their positions into the final bill. However, as they don’t hold a majority in parliament, their leverage could be limited.

Url copied to clipboard!