Medborgarna och skolan efter trettio år med valfrihet:

maktutredningens medborgarundersökning i 2020 års version

Abstract

This article presents the results of a new study on citizens (“guardians”) ability to influence the school. The survey, which was conducted in 2020 by the Survey Institute at Linnaeus University in collaboration with Kantar-Sifo (Hagevi, 2020), is an exact replica of the survey conducted by the so-called Power Investigation 1987 (Petersson et al., 1989; SOU 1990: 94), which came to clearly influence the discourse on freedom of choice in school.

The question that this article intends to answer is: how do parents and guardians perceive the opportunity to influence their children's school today, thirty years after the introduction of freedom of choice in school?

In addition to the fact that the Government's proposal in the so-called responsibility bill (Prop. 1990/91: 18) meant that the responsibility for the school's activities was transferred from the state to the municipalities, the proposal also opened up for the establishment of independent schools. One of the Government's proposals for changes in the Education Act is namely that in addition to the schools organized by the public sector in terms of municipalities, there may be schools organized by individual natural or legal persons, so-called independent schools (Prop. 1990/91: 18). The reform of independent schools came during the first decade after the new law came into force to be somewhat overshadowed by what was considered to be the "big shift" in school governance, the so-called “municipalization” of the school. Now, thirty years later, it has probably become clear that it was the reform of independent schools, rather than the reform of a municipal responsibility for the school, that came to mean the fundamentally system change for the school.

The Power Investigation's report came to be of great importance for the reform of a changed responsibility for the Swedish school that was implemented in 1991. The reform entailed a fundamental shift of power from a state-run and state-funded school to a responsibility for the school exercised by municipalities and private actors (independent schools). As a basis for its conclusions, which are presented in the report Democracy and Power in Sweden (SOU 1990: 44), the Power Investigation conducted a survey on citizens' perceptions of opportunities to influence different citizen areas relevant to their daily lives and activities.

The single biggest change in the answers between the survey in 1987 and 2020 concerns the question of guardians' assessment regarding the possibility of changing schools for their children if they so wish. Here, the average has increased from 2.7 to 6.2 on a ten-point scale between the two measurements from 1987 and 2020 respectively, where values within the range 6–10 are considered “great opportunities”.

What the 2020 school survey shows is that relatively large opportunities for "exit", i.e., to "vote with your feet" and change school, do not lead to a corresponding increase in the opportunity to influence with the help of "voice", i.e., to influence the school activities by making your voice heard. The possibility of being able to choose a school therefore appears as an isolated phenomenon that does not co-vary with other opportunities for influence. Nor does satisfaction with the school increase with the "exit" opportunity to change to another school for one's own child. The results from the two measurements rather show the opposite. In the 1987 survey, twice as many stated the value 0, "no dissatisfaction", compared with the survey in 2020, while the proportion who indicated great dissatisfaction with the school increased markedly in 2020. 

In both measurements, guardians, despite a 33-year interval, assess that they have little opportunity to influence the content and design of teaching. Is this a problem? The goals and content of the teaching are regulated by the national curriculum, while the design of the teaching is part of the trained teacher's area of responsibility. It is the teacher, not the individual guardian, who is responsible for the task of designing the teaching in line with the curriculum's intentions. It is the teacher who can weigh together the class's overall need for teaching content and teaching methods. In the article it is argued that it is a positive result that individual guardians assess their opportunities to influence the design of teaching as small, as it is the professional and the political bodies that must be able to be held responsible for the school's activities.