While the charter school movement was emerging in the US, free schools programme was being developed in Sweden almost simultaneously. The Swedish model of independent state funded schools, known as friskolor, emerged as a result of the introduction of a student voucher system in 1992 (Arreman and Holm, 2011). Following the construction of the welfare state since 1945 during the post-war period dominated by the social democratic values of equity and equal opportunities as well as social and economic justice (Arreman and Holm, 2011), the advocates of the neo-liberal way of thinking, which was prominent in the US and the UK at that time, began to criticise the public welfare service sector for being wasteful, bureaucratic and not allowing the citizens any choice over services (Wiborg, 2010). As the Swedish education system was rather homogenous with only a few private schools (Böhlmark and Lindahl, 2012), a more diverse school profile allowing for greater choice and competition
34 was seen as being a crucial part of the reformation of the national education system (Wiborg, 2010). In education, the new market-oriented policies influenced by the neo-liberal ideology with the emphasis on competition, choice, diversity and individual responsibility started to spread in Sweden (Sahlgren, 2011).
From the late 1980s, the process of weakening the state control over education began with the transfer of responsibilities for education from the Swedish state to local municipalities in 1988 (Wiborg, 2010). The next significant move towards decentralisation of the education system was the introduction of the voucher reform in 1992. The voucher system entitled privately run schools to receive public funding and compete for students with municipal schools. In line with the voucher programme, schools receive funding from the municipality in which they are located via a student voucher which is a sum of money for each student set annually by the government. The surplus of the student voucher can be used freely by the company which runs the school. In this context, the new independent schools, referred to as free schools, were formed. Similarly to the initial intentions of the charter school movement in the US and later on the Academies Programme in England, free schools policy in Sweden allowed parents, businesses, faith organisations and other groups interested in running a school to acquire a licence to start an independent school (Arreman and Holm, 2011; Sahlgren, 2011). As they are run by non-public providers, in legal terms these independent schools are private entities (Arreman and Holm, 2011). It was believed that private actors would transform the state education system. It was hoped that by offering various specialisms, the free schools would extend parental choice. Greater competition between schools would enhance teaching practices, improve school governance, decrease bureaucracy, and reduce cost of providing education, and students’ experiences of schooling and their educational outcomes would be improved (Wiborg, 2010). Free schools are not allowed to charge any fees or to select pupils based on ability (Böhlmark and Lindahl, 2012). Although they are not required to follow the national curriculum,
35 free schools are obliged to provide education in line with the general objectives and values set in national documents. They are also controlled by national and local inspections.
Although at first it was anticipated that free schools would be set up as a result of parental co-operation, it was noted that the fastest growing free schools have been for-profit schools run by large private companies (Wiborg, 2010). In this respect, this situation resembles the US charter school movement. In fact, Arreman and Holm (2011) identified four large educational companies that have dominated the independent school sector in Sweden. Pollard (2013)argues that concerns over for profit organisations running free schools were raised when the Sweden’s largest school operator, JB Education, announced its bankruptcy in 2013. Although it was not the first demise of a for profit firm, it was the biggest bankruptcy which led to a widely spread criticisms of for profit educational organisations which were seen as putting profit making first over providing education (Pollard, 2013).
Further to this, the development of free schools in Sweden has not enhanced parental choice over schools to a large extent as initially intendent. This has happened for two reasons. Firstly, pupils attend either free schools or municipal schools which are in close proximity to their home. In addition to this, various admission criteria are used when municipalities or independent schools make their decisions over admittance of students, and the distance between the school and a pupil’s home is taken into consideration (West, 2014). However, research investigating access to free schools found that independent schools tend to be set up in urban areas and in more well-off locations (Allen, 2010; Båvner et al., 2011). This implies that parental choice is greatly restricted by the place of residence. Further to this, West (2014) highlights the fact that at the upper secondary level, the real choice over schools lies in the hands of the students with the best grades.
36 Another important point to be made about free schools in Sweden is that pupils from better educated families and pupils with a foreign background are more likely to attend free schools than municipal schools which adds to the segregation between these schools (West, 2014). In relation to students’ educational outcomes in free schools, the evidence from research is mixed. Previous research found that in areas with high concentration of free schools, there has been a small improvement in pupils’ academic performance (Allen, 2010). Böhlmark and Lindahl (2008) found that although the educational results of pupils at the end of lower secondary school were slightly higher, there was no evidence of improvement in their long-term outcomes. However, in their next study, Böhlmark and Lindahl (2012) found that the increase in the number of free schools leads to greater competition between municipal and independent schools and to a greater productivity of these schools. This in turn causes improvement in pupils’ educational performance and has a positive implications for the long term outcomes (Böhlmark and Lindahl, 2012). The researchers explain that ‘because it has taken time for the independent schools to become more than a marginal phenomenon in Sweden, we have only been able to detect statistically significant positive effects for later years (about a decade after the reform)’ (Böhlmark and Lindahl, 2012:42). Nonetheless, Sweden’s results in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessments have been declining in recent years (Weale, 2015).
The discussion of the two international independent-state funded school systems indicate important disparities between the policy intents and its actual outcomes. Based on the reviewed evidence so far, the conclusions regarding the movements that were used to justify the direction of the education policy in England indicate that both movements have enabled an expansion of for profit actors who benefit from state funding. This also means that local communities have not been empowered in delivering education as originally indented. Some of the other contested aspects of the policy have been around the mixed evidence on students’ outcome, the level of autonomy granted to individual
37 schools, and lack of real choice of school provision. Despite the mixed evidence regarding the effectiveness of both the Swedish free schools and the US charter schools movements, the proponents of the expansion of the Academies Programme in England referred to these models of independent-state funded schools as examples of best practice. Having developed an understanding of the international models of independent state-funded school movements, the following section traces the development of the Academies Programme in England.