print this pageFrom the President: Their past is our future - lessons from Swedish schools
More than 20 years ago, a misguided “progressive” Swedish government looked at the highly marketised school system in Chile, established under the notorious dictator Pinochet, and decided that was the way of the future for education. Today, the Swedish school system has suffered more than two decades of the ravages of marketisation and paid a horrendous price.
During the last school term, I had the privilege of travelling to Sweden and the UK to study the impacts of school autonomy movements, now some two decades old in both nations. The “free school” policies of Sweden have evolved into a school system that has crushed student outcomes, segregated students and schools and diminished teaching and learning conditions.
Marketisation is the process by which the free market is allowed to own, run and profit from the operation of public institutions funded by tax revenue. In the case of Swedish schools, this process began as a red-tape reduction process, which developed into a free choice of schools for students and their families and finally offered freedom to build and operate a school whenever and wherever they wish (free school establishment).
Free schools are not private schools in the sense of the non-government sector in Queensland. In fact, there are only two private schools in Sweden, and “for profit” schools are not permitted. Sweden is a federation of local municipalities (some 300) whose responsibilities include the management and funding of education. Swedish education policy allows any entity to establish a school and the local authority must fund the operation of the school and provide teaching staff to the school.
At its height, marketisation resulted in laws being passed that removed all “barriers” to teacher employment, i.e. anyone could be employed as a teacher regardless of qualifications. This retrograde step has since been reversed and qualifications-dependent teacher “licensing” is now the norm once again.
Swedish schools now operate in a system without restrictions on class sizes or working hours and without fixed salaries. Teachers negotiate most of these conditions on an individual basis. While some collective agreements apply to large corporate employers, they provide only average conditions that are varied by managers across the company according to individual employee circumstances. For example, maths/science and early childhood teachers are paid significantly higher salaries than general primary or secondary teachers.
All Swedish schools operate from buildings that they must rent from the local municipalities or on the commercial market. We will see a similar model implemented in Queensland now the Queensland Training Assets Management Authority has taken over all TAFE Queensland assets and TAFE colleges are required to pay market rent for the buildings they previously owned.
Our study group visited pre-schools, primary schools and a "gymnasium" or upper secondary school (post-compulsory). The vast majority of schools in Sweden remain government schools, covering 85 per cent of students in years F to 9. In spite of this, the impact of the “free schools” is universal. The impacts acknowledged within Sweden include: no improvement in educational outcomes or the “quality” of education; cost blow-outs for government; and segregation based on ethnicity, socio-economic status, school location and parental attitudes to education.
The public debate is dominated by “PISA shock”, a reference to the shocking slump in PISA results that has seen Swedish students drop from the top 10 to around the mid-twenties in international test rankings. On the back of these results, the same “progressive” political parties that instigated the movement to “free schools” are now leading the push to “unscramble the egg”. Interestingly, and in sharp contrast to the Australian experience, the public debate in Sweden has focused on the failure of government policy and has not blamed teachers for the poor standing of education.
Australia seems set to repeat these mistakes. The QTU, unlike the education unions in Sweden, must not be lured into supporting the marketisation agenda: for the good of students, teachers and our proud history of public education.
Kevin Bates
President
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 119 No 5, 18 July 2014, p7
