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School Reforms

Many significant Swedish school reforms in the last decades have been carried out in concert between the Left and the Right. How have these reforms affected schools, teachers, and pupils? A study of the effects of employment protection – in Sweden and in other countries. From 2022 is this project connected to the program Institutions, Markets and Enterprise.

Project manager

The view of the teaching profession has been a contributing factor in the convergence of the Left and the Right in recent decades. Both political camps have been skeptical of giving teachers too much influence and often regarded teachers as an obstacle to learning and pupils’ individual liberty. This view was behind the 1992 “free school” reform, which was carried out by a center-right coalition government and consolidated by consecutive Social Democratic governments. While one of the aims of this reform was to improve pupils’ academic achievement, its design paved the way for school competition between public and private providers in other dimensions than the quality of education, such as grading. This has, in turn, led to widespread grade inflation in Swedish schools. Another important change to the educational system, which was embraced by both the Left and the Right, and which was studied in this project studies, is the postmodern, social-constructive view of knowledge that became institutionalized in national curricula during the second half of the 20th century.