Response to interpellation 2023/24:56 on the School Inspectorate's expanded mandate

Statsrådet Lotta Edholm (L)

Mr. Speaker! Linus Sköld has asked me how I intend to act so that the costs of the upcoming bureaucracy do not increase in a way that erodes the possibility of actual interventions in schools. The question is prompted by a review in the media of the Skolinspektionen's supervision of a private school group and the government's proposal that Skolinspektionen should receive expanded resources. Sköld has also asked me how I intend to act so that the upcoming administration for teachers and principals does not affect their work environment and the quality of teaching.

Despite the fact that all students have the right to a good education of high quality, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate found deficiencies in around half of the schools selected for supervision during 2022. The Government does not consider this acceptable. In order for the Swedish Schools Inspectorate to further be able to work towards ensuring that all children and students have access to an equal education and other activities of good quality in a safe environment, the authority needs to increase its presence and conduct more inspections, including more unannounced visits. The capacity in the Swedish Schools Inspectorate's operations needs to be strengthened. It is therefore why the Government has proposed that an expansion of the Swedish Schools Inspectorate's operations begins from 2024 and that funds are provided for it.

The Swedish Schools Inspectorate has since January 2023 received increased opportunities to close schools with serious deficiencies, particularly when serious conditions recur in the operations. As appears from a supplementary directive to the Inquiry on Profit in Schools (U2022:08, dir. 2023:109), the government wants to make the Swedish Schools Inspectorate's sanctions even more effective. It is part of the inquiry's mandate to consider whether the conditions should be changed so that, among other things, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate gets greater opportunities to intervene, for example without the requirement that the head of the school has not followed a previous order or without the requirement that the deficiency must be serious. The mandate also includes investigating and proposing how increased fines and sanction fees can be introduced among the supervisory interventions a supervisory authority can use. The government's objective is to significantly reduce the room for actors with quality deficiencies.

Regarding the issue of the working environment for teachers and principals, I would like to mention that the government in June 2023 commissioned a special investigator to carry out a broad review aimed at ensuring that preschool teachers' and teachers' working time can be freed from administration to be devoted largely to teaching and tasks that belong to teaching (U2023:01, dir. 2023:72). The investigator shall submit proposals regardless of whether the administrative task was created at the state level, the employer level, or the school unit level. This will ultimately promote the development and learning of children and students.

When it comes to the administrative burden of principals, the school employers have an important responsibility to ensure that the operations have the resources and conditions required. In the next level, it is the principal who leads the operations, allocates the resources within the unit, and makes decisions regarding the internal organization.

In the final analysis, the School Inspectorate's increased presence aims to work towards ensuring that all children and students have access to an equitable education and other activities of good quality in a safe environment. Costs regarding this should be seen in relation to what incomplete or deficient education costs the individual and society in the short and long term.

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Linus Sköld (S)

Mr. Speaker! I thank the Minister for Education for a nevertheless detailed answer.

6 million kronor and 5,000 hours is what the School Inspectorate has stated to Dagens Nyheter that it has cost the inspectorate to audit an independent school principal. Let me remind you that there are many hundreds of independent school principals in the country, but a single school principal has entailed 5,000 hours of work. And the government says that even more audits are to be conducted now.

Lotta Edholm says that the cost of the review should be weighed against the cost of deficient education, that is, incomplete or deficient education costs society money in the short and long term.

We cannot afford to have schools in our school system whose primary purpose is to provide profit to the owners. Running a school simply should not be allowed to be a business activity because it leads to deficient or incomplete education. In connection with the review that Dagens Nyheter has conducted, an old student who attended the aforementioned group's program for electricians has been met. The student was assigned to do APL at a wholesaler, which meant sorting screws.

We have in previous debates raised the issue of students who attend the transport program at another school provider, but they do not receive the authorization to operate the vehicles they are to work with. We have debated horse high schools that lack horses.

Can we stop pretending that the profit interest in the school market would be good for the students? Instead of doing something about the underlying problem, the government wants to tame the profit interest with more control and more bureaucracy.

Lotta Edholm was able to comment in connection with the review. The question I had intended to ask has already been insightfully asked to Lotta Edholm by a journalist, namely whether it would not be simpler to remove the driving force by completely banning profit withdrawals.

Lotta Edholm replied that she "can live with a school making a small profit by providing good education but perhaps saving on bureaucracy".

It is such a contradiction, because at the same time as the government allocates even more resources to supervision and auditing, these must be matched by the principals. It therefore costs a lot of time and bureaucracy to be supervised. And as the Minister for Education himself noted in Dagens Nyheter, a supervision does not necessarily mean that all quality problems at a school are rectified.

The government continues to pour money into supervision and new burdens on teachers and principals, while cunning profit-driven actors continue to extract money that should have gone to the students' education.

My question to Lotta Edholm instead becomes this: How much bureaucracy does the Minister for Education think it should cost to preserve the profit margins?

(Applause)

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Anders Alftberg (SD)

Mr. Speaker! More than 400,000 children and students attend our independent schools or preschools today.

Our independent schools are an important and vital part of Skolsverige; it must be said. They provide increased pedagogical diversity, quality-enhancing competition, and the development of new effective working methods. Parents and children are also given a greater opportunity to find just the type of school that suits them. It could be about the need for a safer and calmer classroom environment with study rooms or another type of pedagogy that our municipal schools cannot deliver all the time. Sweden needs its independent schools.

Just because we safeguard our independent schools and see the added value they provide, we must also ensure that unserious actors keep away from the school world. This has been shown.

That is why we are now, via the Tidö Agreement, investigating stricter ownership reviews at the start and takeover of a school, stricter financial guarantees, and clawback of school funding in the event of crimes. Profit distribution shall not be permitted during the first years of a school's start to guarantee long-term ownership.

We are also investigating increased fines and sanction fees, distribution restrictions and increased oversight in independent schools, both legally and economically as well as pedagogically, as well as further intensified audits of schools with a confessional orientation in order, among other things, to address the problem of extremism and Islamism in our Muslim independent schools. The latter is more urgent than ever.

Mr. Speaker! The Social Democrats have held government power for more than 20 years since the friskola reform in 1992. During all these years, they have not lifted a finger to address any deficiencies and reform the system - not one.

In connection with the election campaign and now in opposition, they suddenly sound like good socialists and come up with one left-populist proposal after another. It is unserious, and it completely lacks credibility.

With this government, with the support of SD, we are replacing Social Democratic passivity with long-awaited and necessary action.

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Statsrådet Lotta Edholm (L)

Mr. Speaker! I am unfortunately completely convinced that the School Inspectorate needs both more money and new directives on how to work towards those independent schools and municipal schools that actually do not behave. Approximately half of the schools reviewed in the special review they conducted did indeed exhibit problems.

I therefore cannot quite understand why the Social Democrats want to cut the Skolinspektionens funds in the way one does when one directs criticism. It is, in any case, in a dangerous direction, as one does not think that these funds are needed.

I think that the recent discussions about, among other things, schools that obviously have IS terrorists employed show that the Swedish School Inspectorate actually needs greater resources. It is quite obvious to me. In some sense, one could say that it is expanded bureaucracy, but that bureaucracy is there so that students can receive the education they actually have a right to.

We must ensure that the actors present in the independent school sector are not there because the most important thing for them is to make a profit. But we must also ensure that municipal schools carry out their mandate in such a way that one does not risk, for example, encountering criminals or IS terrorists in the operations. I actually think that is quite important.

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Linus Sköld (S)

Mr. Speaker! To begin with, I must address Anders Alftberg's claim about "Social Democratic passivity".

It is Anders Alftberg's party that, together with the united conservative side, has blocked every single proposal that we have put forward in this chamber during the last two parliamentary terms, proposals that could have addressed these problems. Had Anders Alftberg sat here, he would have voted no to our proposals to limit profit extractions, because that is what his party did. The Liberals did so as well. Every single proposal that we have put forward. There has been no Social Democratic passivity. There has been a Sweden Democrat will to preserve the profit extractions. That is what has existed, and it remains.

But now people want to look as if they are doing something. The Government and the Sweden Democrats are eager to look as if they are going to do something about this problem because there is popular support to do something about it. But they are so eager that they are pushing so hard that they are about to burst, and what it will do is break the teaching staff and the school leaders under a new flood of administration.

It is not about us rejecting the government's money for Skolinspektionen, as Lotta Edholm speaks about here. She knows that is not true. It is about our thinking that the line of giving Skolinspektionen a completely new mandate, which is to be based on auditing quality criteria, will trigger a completely new flood of administration in the operations.

It cost 6 million to inspect the regulatory compliance in Thorengruppen's school units - the regulatory compliance, not the quality. The new assignment will be to inspect the quality as well. How much is it going to cost, Lotta Edholm, to make it look like you are doing something about the profit margins?

I think it is cheeky to stand here and make things up and attribute opinions about my politics to me, both from Alftberg and from Edholm.

We have long thought that we would only need to pay for the profit withdrawals of the friskolor just once. That is to say, that the money leaking out of the system, which should go towards the children's education, we would only need to pay for once. But with this government's policy, this government's stubborn protection of the companies' opportunities to take out profit, we will have to pay them again in more resources for supervision and again in increased administration and bureaucracy out at the school units.

This will take resources away from teaching. Every krona that Lotta Edholm adds to Skolinspektionen could have been used to make interventions that land in operations instead of in supervision. Every hour that a principal spends answering Skolinspektion's questions, the principal could have spent on their pedagogical leadership instead.

That cost cannot be ignored by Lotta Edholm, and therefore I think she should answer my question instead of resorting to low attacks and putting words in my mouth. How much is the bureaucracy allowed to cost? How much is it allowed to cost to preserve the profit margins, Lotta Edholm?

(Applause)

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Anders Alftberg (SD)

Mr. Speaker! The Social Democrat Linus Sköld argues in his interpellation that the solution to avoid expensive, extensive inspections is to introduce a so-called profit ban. This is actually absurd. The proposals that the Social Democrats have put forward would, in fact, lead to many of our independent schools having to close down. Calculations show that with the Social Democrats' proposals, as they have appeared, 60-70 percent of our independent schools would have to close in a relatively short time. It would be unrealistic to do so.

In that case, our municipalities will also, in one fell swoop, have to receive approximately 86,000 new primary school students. Furthermore, our municipalities will be quickly forced to establish approximately 370 new primary schools. Municipal schools that are overcrowded today will become even more overcrowded.

The proposed policy from the Socialdemokraterna poses a greater threat than our free schools possibly do. It will lead to organizational chaos. With the proposed Socialdemokraterna policy, we will get an increasing workload on our municipal schools and a poorer study environment.

The lion's share of the inspections and the fines that occur otherwise concern municipal schools, especially when it comes to the school environment, safety, and security. In my municipality alone, our municipal schools received 16 million in potential fines.

There is, therefore, an enormous amount to do. We need to have a school inspection with muscles and resources to address not only the potential difficulties of the friskolor but also our municipal schools.

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Statsrådet Lotta Edholm (L)

Mr. Speaker! I apologize if I thought this debate would be about whether the School Inspectorate should have more or fewer resources. It was easy to think that when reading the interpellation, because it is about the School Inspectorate receiving far too much money for its mission.

I am completely convinced that the Swedish school inspectorate needs to be strengthened in many different ways, including through the sharpened mandates that have been directed towards extremism and Islamism - extremely important. We see major problems in the free school sector, which must be scrutinized.

We have previously had a debate here regarding the free school inquiry's mandate to remove profit as the absolute most important incentive for running a school. It is important that we continue that work. But even given this, the Swedish School Inspectorate needs to be strengthened, because we have so many problems in our Swedish schools. That we now have IS-warriors in our Swedish schools, I think is an excellent example of why the School Inspectorate's mandate needs to be both expanded and actually also receive more money.

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Linus Sköld (S)

Mr. Speaker! I think that even Anders Alftberg should, as I pleaded to Lotta Edholm in my opening statement, stop pretending that profit withdrawals are good for Swedish students. Stop pretending that they lead to increased quality! Stop pretending that it is good for the students' education that limited companies can distribute profits to the owners! Can we just stop pretending? It is not so.

Those who have an interest in making money must do what they can to hide any flaws in their operations. Reputation is, as is well known, everything for a school principal who wants to make money. We have debated this as well before, Lotta Edholm - how schools are eager to embellish the image of their own operations in their marketing.

At the same time, private schools are not covered by the principle of public access. This gives employees who want to warn about deficiencies less security to do so. It gives the media poorer conditions to scrutinize the operations.

This type of lack of transparency is also a contributing cause to the need for ever greater inspection. If one truly wanted to address these problems, a good first measure would have been to introduce the principle of public access in the independent schools.

But what we really need to do is to stop the profit interest and increase transparency so that we do not have to drown the school's staff in a new flood of administration.

(Applause)

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Statsrådet Lotta Edholm (L)

Mr. Speaker! The heading for this interpellation is the Swedish Schools Inspectorate's expanded mandate, and it is primarily about what a huge problem it is that the Swedish Schools Inspectorate is now receiving more resources and new mandates. I think that both the additional resources and the mandates are good and important.

The Swedish Schools Inspectorate has a corrective effect, meaning that when deficiencies are identified, the schools should be told to rectify them. That is why this is included with coercive fines, for example. Now we have submitted a proposal to the independent school inquiry that one should also be able to issue fines, quite simply – not just coercive fines but also fines for the person who commits mistakes. I think it is completely the right way to go.

But the Swedish Schools Inspectorate's reviews, regardless of whether it is an inspection or supervision, also have a preventive effect; they can also increase quality. When schools see what deficiencies the Swedish Schools Inspectorate sees at other schools, this can lead to them reviewing their own operations. In that way, this type of inspection activity is very important.

I believe that the Swedish Schools Inspectorate's activities are extremely important in the Swedish school system, and I am convinced that we will need more of this in the future, given the problems we actually see.

The interpellations debate was hereby concluded.

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