Response to interpellation 2022/23:335 on schools providing incorrect information
Translated from Swedish by AI; the translation may contain errors. The Swedish text is the original.
Summary AI, written in advance
The debate concerns schools that provide incorrect information. L argues that school principals should compete on quality and that students and guardians should be able to trust the information 1. L wants stricter scrutiny of schools that lie and that Skolinspektionen should be given a larger mandate 2. L admits that fake grades are a systemic error 3 and advocates for a ban on profit distribution if quality criteria are not met 4. S argues that the profit interest creates deviations where schools use falsehoods in their marketing 5. S considers the profit interest to be a root cause of the problem 6 and that fake grades are unfair 6.
Written by AI in advance and may contain errors. The numbers lead to the speech a statement builds on; check against the text below.
Statsrådet Lotta Edholm (L)
Mr. Speaker! Linus Sköld has asked me what I intend to do to rectify the deviations that the profit interest in schools creates. He has also asked how I intend to act to ensure that the Swedish Schools Inspectorate, students, and parents have access to accurate and objective information regarding the schools' activities.
All providers within the school system – municipal and private, for-profit and non-profit – shall compete on the quality of their educations. Students and their guardians shall be able to rely on the information provided about different schools and their educations. This is a prerequisite for a functioning and informed choice of school.
According to Chapter 26, Section 25 of the Education Act (2010:800), a head of school shall provide such information to the Swedish National Agency for Education regarding the operations and such operational reporting as is needed for monitoring and evaluation. The information that the school heads provide to the Swedish National Agency for Education shall be correct and reflect the actual conditions. The Swedish National Agency for Education may order the person who is obligated to provide information to fulfill their obligation.
According to the Ordinance (2015:195) on a national information system for the school system, Skolverket shall make certain pieces of information about school units available to the public in a national information system. This concerns data at the school unit level regarding, among other things, the proportion of teachers with a teacher's license, teacher density and access to special educators, access to school libraries, orders from Skolinspektionen, results in user surveys, as well as result development in the form of grade results and throughput. Naturally, the statistics cover all schools, both municipal and independent. The information is provided in Utbildningsguiden on Skolverket's website.
The municipalities also have a legally regulated responsibility for information. According to Chapter 29, Section 19 of the Education Act, the municipality shall inform guardians and students about education in school forms for children and young people within the school system and about such pedagogical activities as referred to in Chapter 25 and which are offered in or by the municipality.
In order for students and guardians to be able to make a well-informed school choice, based on relevant and correct information about the different schools, such information must be easily accessible. Skolverket's Utbildningsguiden and the municipalities provide such information. The Government intends to introduce a clear regulatory framework based on a common and mandatory school choice, supported by better information to parents and students about what choice options are available. The work to move the issue forward is ongoing within the Government Offices.
In addition to this, I want to mention that the government has begun the most extensive reorganization of the independent school system since the system was introduced, which will entail a number of tightening measures for unserious and unsuitable actors, for example, profit distribution limits, the possibility of reclaiming school fees, stricter requirements for long-term ownership, as well as higher fines and sharper sanctions for both independent and municipal operators.
Linus Sköld (S)
Mr. Speaker! Thank you, Minister, for the answer!
Schools shall compete on quality, says the minister, and yet the following has occurred. At the end of April, Dagens Nyheter revealed that a school group which states on its website that it has no profit-driven requirements has distributed millions in profits to the owners in recent years. The same school group also writes in the communication on its own website that they use the school money to hire the best licensed teachers, with long experience and high pedagogical competence. According to Skolverket's statistics, Dagens Nyheter reveals, only 50 percent of the group's mathematics teachers have a license.
The group also states on its website that they assign grades based on the Swedish grading system. According to the Swedish Education Act, as is known, the national tests shall be given special weight in the grading. This group assigns grades that deviate significantly upwards compared to the national tests. They have even received criticism for this from the School Inspectorate.
The corporation is therefore lying when one has to describe its own activities.
In her response here today, Lotta Edholm creditably accounts for which rules apply to the head's obligation to provide information to Skolverket and for the agency's and the municipalities' obligation to inform guardians about the schools' activities. That is good, even though I think more is needed in this regard. The principle of public access should be introduced so that all information about all schools becomes public. I and the minister have debated this before, and in order not to revisit that debate, I will instead point out the obvious lack in the response that the minister has provided here today.
The incorrect information, that is to say the lies, that this school group has delivered are published on the group's own website. They have been exposed by DN through a comparison between what the group claims about its operations on its own website and what public statistics and documents published by authorities say about the same operations. Lotta Edholm's answer regarding the authorities' work and the obligation to provide information to the authorities is therefore partly irrelevant in this context. As long as there is money to be made from embellishing the image of their own operations, independent schools will continue to do so.
The Swedish Schools Inspectorate states in the article in Dagens Nyheter that they cannot intervene because they have no legal basis when it comes to information that school principals provide about their own operations on, for example, websites.
Then several other channels will be covered by the same lack of rules, namely direct advertising, advertisements, websites and printed matter. All can be full of half-truths, untruths and lies without the supervisory authority being able to intervene. That is the problem the minister does not address in his answer.
I will try to phrase the question like this instead: How will the minister ensure that schools do not provide false information about their activities for the purpose of making money? If the answer were to be the same as before, i.e., that the authorities' information should be improved, does that mean that the minister will simultaneously present proposals to ban other marketing of schools?
Statsrådet Lotta Edholm (L)
Mr. Speaker! It is naturally incredibly important that the information provided is reliable, and that is why we are now working on, among other things, a proposal for a common purchasing system. There, the information shall also be verified, so that it is correct. I envision that the information shall concern grades, results on national tests, teacher qualification and so on.
It is clear that schools that lie about what the conditions are like must be inspected and scrutinized significantly more strictly than today. Therefore, we have also given a special supervisory mandate to the Skolinspektionen - or rather, we will do so - to follow up on the results based on objective quality criteria.
The School Inspectorate shall also conduct more supervisory visits, preferably unannounced, and there shall be more visits and supervision in schools that have previously received sanctions.
But there is also something called the Marketing Act. It means that as an actor, one cannot lie just about anything. If one says that one has a certain number of qualified teachers and markets it in that way, and it then turns out that one does not have it, that is clearly not compatible with the legislation that exists today. Skolinspektionen must be given significantly greater mandates to act against actors who do not fulfill the legislation that exists. It is also particularly important for the parents to know what they should look for, what is true and what is not true.
Linus Sköld (S)
Mr. Speaker! I interpret that answer as that the Minister for Education is not prepared to move forward with a proposal to ban other marketing of schools. It will therefore be that there will be parallel information that cannot be verified. That is to say that the information that the schools themselves provide in their marketing does not need to correspond with the information that exists in the public statistics databases and so on.
This is not a new phenomenon. I thought I would take a few additional examples. In March 2014, SVT's Uppdrag granskning revealed that the preschool group Hälsans förskola was not so healthy, at least not for the children who attended it. The preschool children were served crispbread and water instead of the varied diet that the company itself claimed, while at the same time the company made several million in profit every year. After the revelation, the company changed its name. It is now known as Tellusgruppen.
"I believe that free school choice and free competition entail a risk of grade inflation," said Education Minister Jan Björklund to Svenska Dagbladet in August 2009. Cut to March this year. Then Dagens Nyheter revealed that a private school principal linked teachers' salary development to the grades the teachers awarded. Besides the fact that this is obviously a matter of compromised exercise of authority, it is also a clear result of exactly what the then Education Minister stated in 2009.
The profit-driven school heads have strong motives to embellish the image of their own operations. High grades are a clear marketing advantage. It has also been shown at a systemic level that those who have an interest in making money to a greater extent set unreasonably high grades in their operations. To lie and compromise in order to appear attractive to the students is, as it were, one of the marketing tricks.
If the Minister for Education believes she can control away all the side effects that the profit interest in Swedish schools leads to - well, then she is mistaken. The school group that I took as my first example and which was also the reason for the interpellation has lied to the Swedish Schools Inspectorate and stated that measures had been taken to rectify the excessively high grades. But when the Swedish Schools Inspectorate followed up on this two years later, it turned out that the school group had not taken any measures. They still have equally high grades in comparison with the national tests.
It is not enough to say that we should have stricter inspections and more supervisory visits. It will not lead to us solving the problems. What we need to deal with is that there are principals who run schools for the purpose of making money.
I imagine that the Minister for Education wants to keep the school market as it is. If a market is to function, the customers, or in this case students and parents, must be able to make well-informed choices. In that case, it simply isn't sufficient for us to have schools that fudge the grades so that they do not reflect the students' actual knowledge. It isn't sufficient for us to have preschools that claim to be healthy even though they are not, or that we have corporations that claim to have the best-educated teachers even though they do not—or for that matter, that we have corporations that claim they do not distribute profits even though they do. It simply isn't sufficient. It is not possible for students to make well-informed choices in such a system.
How is the Minister for Education going to ensure that guardians and students can make well-informed choices if she wants to keep this system?
Statsrådet Lotta Edholm (L)
Mr. Speaker! It is a number of questions that Linus Sköld is asking. This issue with "joy grades," which I think should be called fake grades, we must get to rights with. We have now in the Government Offices begun a piece of work to ensure that national tests are more clearly linked to the grading. The previous government took certain steps to get to rights with this, but it was obviously not sufficient.
It is interesting that the educational institutions have now started to react against schools that give significantly too high grades. But one must remember that this is a systemic error altogether. It is a full 40 percent of all students in grade 9 who receive a higher grade in mathematics than they performed on national tests in the same year. At the same time, we know that knowledge in mathematics is declining. This is an enormously important matter for the government to address.
We must do something about the fraudulent grades. One way is to establish a clearer connection between grades and national tests. I believe there are some schools that have not quite understood that grading is the exercise of public authority. What is being done is just as important as all other exercises of public authority. A major problem is also the pressure that many schools and teachers are subjected to by parents who believe that their children are significantly more skilled in the subjects than they de facto are.
This legislative work is now being initiated to develop proposals for measures that are significantly tougher than what we have seen so far in this area.
I think Linus Sköld's idea of banning other marketing of schools is interesting. I adopt that idea. I believe it is incredibly important to have objective information gathered in one place. But that naturally also depends on actually getting that information in. The School Information Inquiry will submit its first report in the coming days, in fact. It is about ensuring access to information because it has been so problematic with GDPR and other things.
Linus Sköld (S)
Mr. Speaker! Thank you, Minister, for the answer! It was a pleasing announcement that the Minister intends to consider regulating the marketing of schools.
I hear the Minister say that one way to address the joy grades would be to link them more clearly to the national subject tests. Such work was initiated when we were in the Government Offices - that is quite correct.
I think that joy grades or cheating grades - I agree with the minister's assessment - are cheating and trickery. It should not be called joy. It is unfair, and it means that students get unfair chances to move to the next step in the educational chain.
Another way, or perhaps an additional way, than to link this to the national subject tests can be to deal with the market school's drivers. That there is money to be made from giving high grades is an anomaly. It leads to this type of problem and fuels and reinforces this type of problem.
Fiddling, cheating, swindling and lying is possible because there are school principals who can make money by fiddling, cheating, swindling and lying. That is how the drivers in this system look. As long as there is money to be made by inflating and beautifying the image of their own operations, independent principals who run schools to make money will continue to cheat, fiddle, swindle and lie.
Is the Minister also prepared to consider whether we should do something about the foundations of this problem, namely removing the profit interest from the Swedish school system?
Statsrådet Lotta Edholm (L)
Mr. Speaker! Yes, the government is now working on supplementary directives to the free school investigation which is currently working to address many of the problems that Linus Sköld raises. It is about increased penalty amounts. It is about sanction fees for those who do not behave. It is about the possibility of reclaiming school money if it has been paid out on incorrect grounds. It is about having profit-sharing prohibitions during the first years and an absolute profit-sharing prohibition if one does not meet the quality criteria. We are, therefore, working hard on these issues to address the problems that Linus Sköld raises.
But I also believe that one must be aware that it is not solely about those drivers. There are also other drivers that are unhealthy, for example, that parents try to influence the grading, that principals do not ensure that teachers set correct grades, or that principals even influence their teachers to set higher grades.
There are an enormous number of drivers in the school system that are not healthy. This is an outcome of this that the government intends to address.
FÖRSTE VICE TALMANNEN
Before we continue to the next interpellation debate, I would like to take the opportunity to welcome the members of parliament and officials from North Macedonia who are here as part of the democracy project that the Riksdag has together with the parliament in North Macedonia. A warm welcome to the chamber and to the interpellation debates!
Source: The Swedish Parliament. The speeches come from the open data of the Riksdag, translated into English by AI, which may contain errors.