An overview of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Sweden and its
relationship to compulsory schooling
Peter Moss
Structure of Swedish services
Sweden originally had an ECEC system divided between half-day pre-schooling
(kindergarten/lekskolan) and full-day nurseries (day-care centres/daghem). From the
1960s, policy aimed to merge them into one institution and concept – the preschool:
“The aim was to close the gap between the institution based solely on pedagogical
learning activities (lekskola) and that based mainly on care (daghem), and create the
ideal union of care and pedagogy “ (Lenz Taguchi and Munkhammar, 2003, p.11).
That aim was achieved some time ago and today Sweden has an ECEC system
based primarily on the integrated preschool (förskola). This is available as of right to
all children aged from 1 to 6 years1, whether or not their parents are employed: it is,
like the school, a universal entitlement. The intention, as the preschool curriculum
puts it, is to provide “children with good pedagogical activities, where care, nurturing
and learning together form a coherent whole” (Swedish Ministry of Education and
Science, 1998, p.8).
In 2005, 83 percent of 1 to 5 year olds in Sweden were in ECEC services; 77 percent
were in preschools, the remaining 6 percent in family day care funded by local
authorities. In recent years there has been an increase in preschools and a steep fall
in family day care. Moreover, despite a gradual movement to more private providers,
84 percent of children in 2005 were in services provided by local authorities
(Swedish National Agency for Education, 2006). In short, the great majority of young
Swedish children are in one form of service delivered by one type of provider. This
uniformity of provision, however, is matched by a high level of autonomy for
individual preschools in the pedagogical theories and practices that they adopt; the
preschool curriculum, for example, consists of just 19 A5 pages and leaves much
scope for local interpretation (Swedish Ministry for Education and Science, 1998).
Although compulsory school age is 7 years, Swedish children today mostly start
school at age 6, when 95 percent start to attend a school-based voluntary preschool
class (förskoleklass) for a year. Compulsory school (grundskola) may be provided
by local authorities or by private organisations. The proportion of children going to
independent schools has been increasing and in 2005 was similar to that in England,
8 percent; however, unlike in England, independent schools in Sweden are publicly
funded. Most schools continue to be provided by the local authority, though with
strong decentralisation to the rektor2. The rektor has considerable autonomy. She or
he makes decisions about staffing, the structure and budget of the school, the
organisation of the school day and how the curriculum is interpreted and realised.
Schools are often split into two phases with grades 1 to 5 or 1 to 6 (for children aged
7 to 12 or 13 years) forming one phase and grade 6/7 to 9 (children aged 12 or 13 to
16 years) the second phase. However, an increasingly common pattern is for
1
Children under one year of age are mostly at home with parents on well-paid parental leave. In
2005, there were only 30 children under one year in formal services in all of Sweden (Skolverket,
2007)
2 In what follows, the term, rektor should be translated as ‘principal’, rather than ‘headteacher’ in
recognition that this post, and its deputies, may be filled by staff from a variety of professions.
1
grades 1 to 9 plus the preschool class to be organised in one school on the same
site and with the same rektor, often too with a preschool on the same site and under
the rektor’s direction (though school entrants will come from a range of preschools,
not only the school-based one). In 2005, these age-integrated schools took a third of
all pupils (Skolverket, 2007, p.39).
In general, Swedish schools have much smaller rolls than English schools. In 2005,
there were 4,908 schools in Sweden with 995,000 children, an average of 203
children per school - approximately three-fifths the average size of English schools.
Just over half (55 percent) of local authority schools had fewer than 100 pupils and
only 1.4 percent had more than 700 (ibid.).
Free-time services (fritidshem or ‘free-time home’) is the term used to describe
school-age childcare provision: the ‘free-time home’ is distinguished from other freetime (leisure) activities such as sports or music facilities that are separate from the
school and do not offer a care service. More than three-quarters of children aged 6
to 9 years (78 percent) attend free-time services, most (over 90 percent) attending
services provided by local authorities. Today, free-time services are usually an
integral part of the school, with (as we shall see later) school and free-time staff
working together as teams in integrated ‘work units’ with the rektor directly
responsible for both school and free-time services.
Structure of the Swedish workforce
Swedish ECEC services and schools have five main occupations: children’s nurses
(barnskötare – not, it should be noted, a health nurse, more akin to the English term
‘nursery nurse’) working in preschools and preschool teachers (förskollärare)
working in preschools and preschool classes in schools; family day carers; and
school teachers and freetime pedagogues (fritidspedagog), working in schools.
Because of shortages of workers with a fritidspedagog qualification, the post of
freetime pedagogue may be occupied by workers with other professional
qualifications, such as barnskötare or teacher.
The main ECEC and school occupations – preschool teacher, teacher and freetime
pedagogue – are all educated to graduate level; teachers generally earn more than
the other two occupations, but the difference is not great. The three occupations
work together in teams in schools, as equals, and it is possible for rektors and team
leaders to be drawn from any of the three occupations (though, in practice, they are
usually school teachers).
This leaves two non-teacher occupations, the family day carers and the barnskötare.
As noted above, the former are a relatively minor part of the ECEC services, and
their numbers have fallen in recent years, having reached a peak in the 1980s. Only
29,600 1 to 5 year olds were enrolled in family day care in 2005, out of a total of
408,600 enrolled in all early childhood services; this is a decrease of 57,500 since
1995 (Skolverket, 2006). The barnskötare plays an important role in preschools,
accounting for about half the workforce, the remainder being preschool teachers;
some, too, are employed in schools to work as freetime pedagogues.
It should also be noted that over half (59 percent) of the workers in free-time services
(school-age childcare) have a degree-level qualification (Skolverket, 2006, p.26).
2
These workers are also involved, as a matter of course, with children during school
hours, working alongside teachers in teams. In other words, there is no group of
school-age childcare workers working apart from school teachers in separate
‘wraparound care’ services; free-time workers and services are an integral part of the
school and its workforce.
There are few assistants in Swedish schools - one or two per school in the four study
examples - mostly working with children with additional needs. This reflected a view
expressed at all levels and by all occupations that it was better, and often more cost
effective, to employ well qualified staff, and that this was especially the case when
working with children with substantial additional needs. The head of the resource
centre in Oldtown, which was providing a range of services to support school
children with additional needs in one of the case study local authorities, added that
the history of children with the greatest difficulties has been that they have had the
least educated staff. The resource centre did not want assistants working with
children with special needs; it wanted instead people with the highest possible level
of education. She reported that there had been a move in the local authority away
from assistants to more educated staff, a move supported by school rektors, even
though they have to pay for the staff. All said that there were problems with
assistants: they often do not stay long and they often cannot see how to support a
child.
The rektor of Ash school in the same local authority (with one assistant, working with
one child) confirmed this when she said she would much prefer to have qualified
teachers rather than assistants: an assistant cost about SKK17,000 a month and she
could get a teacher for SKK5-6,000 more. In her view, an assistant was “always
second best”; she maintained that it was not good that the least qualified staff work
with most disabled children. Her goal was to have staff who were “qualified and
gifted”.
Other occupations may be found working in schools, but in much smaller numbers.
All schools must have a school nurse, though usually she is employed part time;
rather than being shared between a number of schools, the school nurse usually
works in one school, spending the remainder of her time in a mainstream health
service, for example as a paediatric hospital nurse. Unlike the English school nurse,
who is usually employed and paid for by the local health authority, the Swedish
school nurse is employed by the school or the local authority (also the provider of the
schools). Many schools also choose to employ a kurator, a counsellor who may have
trained as a social worker; she is usually paid for from school funds.
An historical overview
Sweden has a long and sustained history of seeking closer relations between
professions and services. This has been focused in particular on three groups of
services: early childhood education and care (ECEC); compulsory schooling (CS);
and free-time services (FTS). At national level, education and social affairs are
clearly separated, while locally most communes have separate education and social
services departments; there appears to be no groundswell for moving towards
3
integration of responsibility for all services for children within a single national
ministry or unified local departments3.
However, discussion and action on the relationships between ECEC, CS and FTS
run like threads through decades of Swedish social policy. We can pick this up with
the report in 1972 by a National Commission on Child Care, which formed the basis
for ECEC policy in the remainder of the century. Like other countries in Europe,
Sweden at that time had an ECEC system split between full-time day care
institutions for children with working parents, and kindergartens for over 3s, offering
half day ‘educational’ services; the former had begun in the 1850s for the children of
poor working mothers, the latter in the 1890s for children of middle-class families
(Korpi 2007). The commission recommended merging these services to create one
institution – to be known as ‘förskola’ (‘preschool’, which became the official term for
ECEC centres) - that would combine care and education. This had major
implications, with accompanying tensions for the workforce:
Half day and full day services differed greatly in staff training and working
practices. The integration of the two would be rather painful for many teachers
in half-day services, since their professional experience was not valued
equally with that of the preschool teachers trained in the approaches
recommended by the [Child Care] Commission.
(Lenz Taguchi and Munkammar, 2003, p.12)
However what emerged from this reform, and the new integrated preschool, was the
present-day staffing pattern: the preschool teacher as the core worker, supported by
the barnskötare. This structure was in turn linked to a clear ethos of team working,
expressed in a 1975 report Education though teamwork, which “affirmed that no
formal difference should exist between the tasks of differently trained staff within the
preschool…[who] formed a ‘work team’, a non-hierarchical organisation that would
set a democratic example for children” (ibid., p.12). This shift to teamwork would
have wide-ranging effects, including for the process of integrating pre-schooling with
school, discussed below.
The present day integrated ECEC system and workforce took shape in the 1970s; a
clearly conceived idea of an integrated centre underpinned strong reform and
development to make this reality. There are two other key and changing
relationships: preschool and school; and school and free-time services. Strategies to
improve coordination between ECEC services and schools were required from the
1940s, for example early childhood workers being required to teach 6 year olds skills
considered necessary for school. Through the 1970s and 1980s, there were
numerous local projects, which “overwhelmingly tended to be administrative and
organisational in nature rather than attitudinal” (ibid., p.13), for example regular visits
to school by preschool children.
The 1990s brought major changes. In 1991, legislation established a flexible schoolstarting age, allowing parents to enter their children in school at 6 years, before
compulsory school age of 7; to enable this, individual municipalities began to
3
However, it should be noted that Sweden has a very closely integrated relationship between
parental leave and ECEC policies; 13 months of well paid parental leave dovetails with a universal
entitlement to a preschool from 12 months of age.
4
establish preschool classes for 6 year olds in schools (for example, our second
Swedish case municipality began this in 1993). In 1998, municipalities were obliged
by law to provide these classes, and although attendance was voluntary, by 2005 95
percent of 6 year olds were attending. The introduction of 6 year olds and preschool
classes into compulsory school was accompanied by preschool teachers, now
working not only in preschools but also alongside school teachers.
A major change of relationship between CS and FTS also began in 1991. Free-time
services had previously been mostly separate from schools, and freetime
pedagogues had been accustomed to a child-free period in the middle of the day
while children were away at school, when they could plan and prepare. But in 1991 a
Commission on the relationship between CS and FTS reported. Its task had been “to
monitor, stimulate and accelerate development towards a more organisationally and
pedagogically integrated system for school and school age child care” (Korpi, 2007,
p.50); it funded development projects and “proposed that leisure-time centres would
be completely integrated with the school” (ibid., p.52). From the early 1990s, freetime services and pedagogues began to move into schools and pedagogues began
to work continuously with children, including during the period of the day regarded as
‘school hours’. This physical relocation – of preschool teachers and freetime
pedagogues into school – encouraged municipalities to explore different ways of
organising schools and gave impetus to team working in schools.
A freetime pedagogue at Fortis school in Oldtown, who had been through this
process, described in an interview for the study how when she first started work, at a
time when the fritidshem was separate from the school, children went to school at 8
or 10 am and she had a child-free period, when she did baking and planning. Now, in
a work unit with 6 and 7 year olds, she was with children all the time and said she
enjoyed her work more, because she could be a freetime pedagogue all day. She
also liked working with teachers and in a team. The work she undertook in the
fritidshem in the past, she now did in school, for example taking children to the
woods on a regular basis as part of the school week, having special responsibility for
nature and biology, and doing creative activities, such as drama and theatre.
An official investigation (The foundation for lifelong learning: a ‘child ready’ school)
that reported in 1994 advocated “the work team as a superior organisational
practice, enabling preschool teachers, [freetime pedagogues] and regular school
teachers to exchange methods and ways of understanding children’s needs” (Lenz
Taguchi and Munkammar, 2003, p.15). An important report prepared for this
investigation, which analysed the traditions and understandings that distinguished
and separated preschool and school, argued the need for these two services to find
a new pedagogical meeting place, based on shared understandings of children, as
co-constructors of culture and knowledge (Dahlberg and Lenz Taguchi, 1994). This
investigation laid the basis for a new, integrated curriculum, spanning preschool
class, compulsory school and free-time services, introduced in 1998, whose aim was
clearly stated:
To support the integration of preschool classes and leisure time centres in the
school system…[It] involved a new view of children, knowledge and children.
The concept of teaching was replaced to a large extent, but not completely, by
learning, reflecting the idea that children are active in their own learning
5
processes, and need challenging learning environments… Alternative ways of
expressing oneself and learning, other than through reading and writing, were
emphasised, such as the use of music, drama, body movement, drawing,
painting and multi-media.
(Lenz Taguchi and Munkammar, 2003, p.19)
These institutional and conceptual changes were paralleled by major administrative
reforms in the 1990s. Municipalities, in 1990, became the employers of school
teachers, taking over this role from the state. They were now responsible for ECEC,
CS and FTS, and many took this opportunity to integrate responsibility for all three
services into one department, and to initiate developments in school-based team
working. In 1996, central government followed suit, moving responsibility for ECEC
and FTS from social welfare into the Ministry of Education; support was given to
those municipalities that had not yet integrated preschool and school administration
to do so.
6