On the 10th of November 2023, an article was published in SVT announcing that 7 primary schools started by the Internationella Engelska Skolan (IES) group are conducting their education in violation of rules set by the Swedish Schools Inspectorate. They had conducted a majority of their teaching in English, and had employed English teachers with foreign (often anglophone) educations, both of which the Inspectorate considers to violate their responsibilities as primary schools. Rulewise, they’re right; IES certainly interpreted the Inspectorate’s rules in a more than creative way. But does this have any bearing on the foremost responsibility of the schools, the students’ learning?
According to Anna Bergqvist, a department head at the Swedish Schools Inspectorate, the problem with having English teachers of anglophone backgrounds is that they may struggle “to teach which difficulties there are with this particular language for Swedish students”. Seeing as only 41% of students at IES have a foreign background, we would then expect to see their English skills lagging far behind their peers at other schools. But statistics show just the opposite: in 2023, 96% of IES students scored a C or above on the English national exams, compared to 79% of other students.
The benefits of their internationally grounded education are not just confined to English either. Despite the Swedish language advocacy network Språkförsvaret’s claim that the schools feature “bedrövlig engelska, usel eller obefintlig svenska”, their students actually score higher in Swedish, with 66% compared to 52% at C or above in the aforementioned national examinations. If the rest of our education system can barely get half of their students above a C in their own language, how will trying to emulate them do either the language or the students any good?
All this is in accordance with what we know about internationally oriented, bilingual education. In 2016, a large-scale randomized study on the effects of a bilingual education program showed that students learning in two languages markedly outclassed their monolingual peers in both, leaving the researcher suspecting that understanding a foreign language helps us understand our own as well. As such, adapting our schools to the sweeping wave of globalization will not threaten the Swedish language or culture: However, given the widely acknowledged decline of Sweden’s student performance, our current way of doing things may.
Outside of language subjects, students also benefit: When teaching is done in English we can recruit the most talented teachers from across the world, hence why a 2019 study shows that attending an IES school leads to comparatively large increases in math scores between years 6-9, whereas the opposite effect exists in municipal schools. Graduates of the primarily English-speaking International Baccalaureate program are also known to outperform their peers in university, no matter their socioeconomic background. And given the country’s severe teacher shortage, being able to recruit teachers from across the world is more important than ever. Excluding global talent on the basis of these ungrounded fears about language death and poor academic performance will not just hurt our global competitiveness as a nation, but the future of our children.
Bearing these facts in mind, the position of our educational bureaucracy becomes all but untenable. With our ranking on the global PISA ranking declining and our universities complaining about the faltering knowledge of their new students, we should look to the best performing parts of our school system for guidance, instead of seeking to align them with the rest. If we can’t keep up and improve our standards, we’ll eventually lose far more than just our knowledge of “en/ett”: Our future as a highly developed nation is at stake.
Written by: Liam Virsand Gerrbrand and Tilda Jonsson in IB22
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