How Vouchers Work in Sweden

John Crace of the Education Guardian visited Sweden recently to study their school system and find out why it's so much better than the British model.

"...Compulsory education starts at seven - though almost all parents send their kids to kindergarten or make other childcare provision before that age - and runs through to 16. There are no standard schools. Some take students the whole way through their compulsory education, others for only a part of it. Neither is there a fixed syllabus or curriculum; instead, the state sets out various goals in 19 different subjects that students are expected to reach within a fixed number of hours and it's up to each school how they go about teaching the material....

"...[T]he main reason Sweden has come to people's notice is the way it's funded. Each student comes with his or her own price tag and the state - or rather the municipality (ie the local education authority) has to pay. Within a few practical parameters, students may choose which school they want to go to and what programme they want to study, and the municipality has to oblige....

"...And it is this that has skewed the system. When the new funding model was introduced in 1994, the idea was to rebalance the system by opening up competition and choice. Schools that were oversubscribed must be doing something right, so they were free to expand; those that found they were losing numbers had to sharpen up or shrink. What no one anticipated, though, was just how much competition there would be. Thirteen years ago, independent schools were rare. Now they are everywhere. In Stockholm, there are 29 municipal higher secondary schools and 54 independents, and while the ratio isn't quite what it may seem as the independents tend to be a lot smaller, nearly half the city's 16- to 19-year-olds are educated in private schools. And the percentage is growing year on year as more and more independent schools open." ...