ABSTRACT

Sweden has had the most negative development in PISA statistics among all participating countries, and the crisis has worsened with every successive round of assessment. In fact, the changes are so grave that the head of OECD's department of education, Andreas Schleicher, presenting a special report on Sweden's school system, emotionally announced he felt it had "lost its soul". In fact, Sweden is the country where teachers regret most their choice of occupation. In 1989, the Swedish social democratic minister of education, Goran Persson, wrote that the Swedish centrally governed school system had been very successful in results and, in creating equity. The Ministry of Education, in May 2016, calculated that in five years' time Sweden will lack more than 60,000 teachers. The National Agency for Education has written to the government stating that the situation is very grave, and that forceful measures need to be put in place to reinstitute equality in the system.