Early education in Sweden – No comparison

Nursery World recently reported a visit to Sweden by England’s then Children and Families Minister Will Quince in June. The visit was ‘part of the Government’s fact-finding mission to lower the cost of childcare’. The minister tweeted that ‘I’m determined to tackle the cost and availability of childcare for working parents, which means improving our evidence about what works from our international neighbours.’ I was left mystified.

In the first place, I couldn’t understand ‘the mission’. The cost of ‘childcare’ (and I’ll return to why I’ve put that word in inverted commas) does not need lowering. It needs raising and raising substantially to tackle the scandal of a low-paid, low-qualified and low-status workforce, overwhelmingly women, who are part of a much larger marginalised ‘care’ workforce. The question then is not how to lower ‘childcare’ costs, but how to allocate higher costs between parents and government.                     

But I was even more mystified by the minister’s visit to Sweden. He could, of course, have saved CO2 emissions by finding out all he needed to know from his desk in London; the Swedish early childhood system has been well documented for years by myself and others, and he could have put in a few video calls to Sweden. But above all, I could not understand what he hoped to learn about ‘the cost of childcare’ from Sweden. Because the point is, Sweden does not have ‘childcare’. Let me explain.         

DIFFERENT SYSTEMS

As is well known, England has a fragmented and highly dysfunctional early childhood system. There are school-based services and ‘childcare’ services; there are teachers and there are ‘childcare workers’; there are multiple sources of funding; there is a mish-mash of services – day nurseries and Reception classes, playgroups, childminders, nursery schools, Children’s Centres; and while there is talk of ’education’, it is nothing compared with the endless talk about ‘childcare’.

There are entitlements, but universal attendance is only ensured from three years, offering a short period before an early entry age to primary school; moreover, some children get 30 hours a week free attendance by reason of their parents’ employment, while the rest only get 15 hours. There is also a feeble system of parental leave, which provides just six weeks of well-paid leave and does not synchronise with entitlements to attend early childhood services. Parents complain ‘childcare’ is far too expensive, while ‘childcare workers’ complain their pay is far too low. The system, in short, is a mess, the ‘cost of childcare’ being just one symptom.

Sweden’s early childhood system, by contrast, is not a mess and is not about ‘childcare’. It is a universal and integrated system of early childhood education. Since most parents in Sweden are employed, early childhood services support them by being open ten hours a day – but so too are schools. Their main function, though, is education and the Swedish early years curriculum emphasises that this ‘[e]ducation should be based on a holistic approach to children and the needs of children, in which care, development and learning form a whole’ (see Further information).

The Swedish system is based on the ‘pre-school’ (förskola), a centre that is legally classed as a type of school and takes children from 12 months, when all children are entitled to a pre-school place, until they start primary school at six years old. Most children start pre-school during their second year of life, before which they are at home with parents, who are entitled to 13 months of well-paid and very flexible parental leave, designed to encourage sharing between fathers and mothers.

While there has been an expansion of private pre-schools in recent years, most (over 70 per cent) are still provided by local authorities and funded by local taxes, with local authorities responsible for funding all other services. Unlike England, therefore, local authorities continue to play a key role in the early childhood system in Sweden. Unlike England, also, family daycare plays a very minor role; Sweden’s young children overwhelmingly attend pre-schools.

What about the workforce? The Swedish system is based on a graduate pre-school teacher (Förskollärare), accounting for just over 40 per cent of the pre-school workforce, working alongside assistants (Barnskötare) with a qualification equivalent to an English Level 3.

Salaries are individually negotiated and, given the shortage of qualified pre-school teachers and assistants, there can be considerable variation. There is a high level of trade union membership, with most pre-school teachers members of Lärarförbundet (the Teachers’ Union), the product in 1991 of the amalgamation of three previous unions for pre-school teachers, free-time pedagogues and school teachers (except for most teachers at secondary and upper secondary level, who have a separate trade union).

PUBLIC FUNDING

What do parents pay? There is 525 hours a year free attendance for children aged three and over. For the remainder, parents do pay fees, but these are capped at a low maximum level (the maxtaxa). Exact payments depend on how many children parents have attending pre-schools and parental income; the maximum payable is SKK1,510 (about £123) per month for a first child at pre-school, SKK1,007 (about £82) for a second child, and SKK503 (about £41) for a third child.

How are the costs kept so low, while ensuring a well-qualified and relatively well-paid workforce? Adequate, tax-based public funding. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, public funding of the Swedish early childhood system in 2017 amounted to 1.6 per cent of GDP – compared with 0.6 per cent in the UK (and Sweden spends far more on parental leave).

From the comfort of his Whitehall office, the minister could easily have discovered that Sweden is no help to a narrow and misconceived mission to ‘lower childcare costs’. But having discovered this, and briefed himself fully on Sweden, he might still have thought a visit worthwhile, but as part of a more serious and thoughtful undertaking. For visiting other countries, doing comparative work, can be immensely valuable if approached in the right way and for sensible reasons.

In an earlier interview, the former minister said, ‘I need to see what is happening abroad, flying over to Sweden and France and the Netherlands and see how they do it differently.’ This is neither the right way nor a sensible reason for studying others. Of course, other countries do it differently. But do flying visits give an understanding of this difference, and why bother seeking such understanding?

GETTING IT RIGHT

Early childhood education needs far more comparative studies, properly conducted, and for the reason spelled out by Joe Tobin, a doyen of comparative researchers: ‘Practice as well as scholarship in early childhood education (as in other subdisciplines of education) suffers from provincialism…Comparative international studies can push back against this… by challenging taken-for-granted assumptions, [and] expanding the menu of the possible.’

The early childhood system in England is, quite simply, dysfunctional, going nowhere because it is stuck down a ‘childcare’ blind alley. The Government has long given up on doing more than fiddling about, when what is clearly needed is transformation, based on ‘challenging taken-for-granted assumptions’ and ‘expanding the menu of the possible’. Comparative work has a central role to play in this process – not by ministers on flying visits hoping simplistically to import policies, but by making all involved think, question and enter into democratic dialogue about possibilities.

And here, again, Sweden seems to have got it right. Back in 1968, the country realised it needed to transform its split and inadequate early childhood system. It set up a national Commission on Barnstugeutredning (‘nursery provision’), which sat for four years. As a senior Swedish civil servant who was subsequently to play a leading role in the evolution and integration of Swedish services explains, the commission ‘mobilised expertise from every corner of the country to assist them in their work’, and its work provided the ‘foundation, ideologically, pedagogically and organisationally for the full-scale expansion’ of Sweden’s early childhood services that followed – including the move to an integrated ‘pre-school’ and an integrated workforce and, over time, to a universal system of early childhood education.

Instead of more fiddling around with ‘childcare costs’ and more pointless ministerial flying visits, what early childhood in England needs now is a belated national commission to transform the system – and stimulated to think, question and expand the menu of the possible by rich comparative studies.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Nursery World: ‘Children and families minister visits nurseries in Sweden as part of mission to cut childcare costs’ 

Peter Moss is an emeritus professor at the Institute of Education, University College London. For many years he has undertaken comparative work on early childhood services and parenting leave, including extensive work in Sweden. He has recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Comparative Education on comparative studies in early childhood education. Peter.moss@ucl.ac.uk.