The Swedish Model - Education | Frontier Centre for Public Policy - 0 views
www.fcpp.org/...the-swedish-model-education
sweden swedish education free school independent school social reform scandinvian education ESTEkiv
shared by izz aty on 11 May 14
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Reforms that came into force in 1994 allow pretty much anyone who satisfies basic standards to open a new school and take in children at the state's expense
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local municipality must pay the school what it would have spent educating each child itself—a sum of SKr48,000-70,000 ($8,000-12,000) a year, depending on the child's age and the school's location
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Nothing extra can be charged for, but making a profit is fine
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In just 14 years the share of Swedish children educated privately has risen from a fraction of a percent to more than 10%
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What no one predicted was the emergence of chains of schools. Yet that is where much of the growth in independent education has come from
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He then broadens the analogy to hotels and airlines, which make money only if they are popular enough to maintain high occupancy rates.
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Youngsters spend 15 minutes each week with a tutor, reviewing the past week's progress and agreeing on goals and a timetable for the next one. This will include classes and lectures, but also a great deal of independent or small-group study
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Kunskapsporten allows each student to work at his own level, and spend less or more time on each subject, depending on his strengths and weakness
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Each subject is divided into 35 steps. Students who reach step 25 graduate with a pass; those who make it to step 30 or 35 gain, respectively, a merit or distinction
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Teachers update and add new material to the website during school holidays and get just seven weeks off each year, roughly the same as the average Swedish office worker
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“We do not mind being compared to McDonald's,” he says. “If we're religious about anything, it's standardisation. We tell our teachers it is more important to do things the same way than to do them well.
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Sweden's Independent Schools Association has ten members that run more than six schools, and five that run ten or more
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Each child's progress is reported each week in a logbook, and parents can follow what is being studied on the website.
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“Our aim is that by the time students finish school, they can set their own learning goals,” says Christian Wetell, head teacher at Kunskapsskolan Enskede. “Three or four students in each year may not manage this, but most will.”
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tracks the performance of individual teachers to see which ones do best as personal tutors or as subject teachers
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bonuses to particularly successful teachers and is considering paying extra to good ones from successful schools who are willing to move to underperforming ones
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preferred bidder to run two “academies”—state-funded schools run largely free from state control—in London
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run by a not-for-profit arm, since for-profit ventures are banned from Britain's academies programme
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The firm also hopes to open low-cost independent schools in Britain, where it can offer the full Kunskapsskolan experience, free of state meddling
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the returns are solid, rather than stellar: Mr Ledin quotes an average return on capital of 5-7% a year
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If a future government, hostile to school choice, changed the rules, that would be the end of this nascent market.
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The school reforms are popular with parents, he says, and politicians know they meddle with them at their peril. More plausible would be a change to the rules so that independent schools had to match the methods and curriculum of state schools more closely, or perhaps even a ban on profits
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The latter sounds bad, says Mr Stawström, but would not really amount to much: companies could split themselves into non-profit schools and a profit-making body that supplies services, such as teaching materials and consultancy