Sweden: The 'Integrated' Upper Secondary School as Main Provider of Vocational Education

Abstract

As is well known, the Swedish debate about social equality has centred around the issue of educational access and content. Centralised reform efforts of the past 40 years have sought to make the choice of education depend upon personal abilities and interests rather than the economic and cultural conditions of a student's family background. Recent years have seen considerable deconcentration of control, with the employment sector and local authorities outside the formal school system increasing their influence over vocational education and training. At the same time, although compulsory schooling ends at the age of 16, the Ministry of Education has extended its purview to cover all young people under the age of 18. The expansion in numbers of young people as a result of very high birth rates in the 1960s, in conjunction with periods of economic downturn in the 1970s that grew even more severe in the 1980s, contributed to a doubling of the average unemployment rate for 16 to 24 year olds in Sweden over this period. By the mid 1980s, the unemployment rate for 18 to 19 year olds had risen to become the highest in the country, with considerable regional variations. The strain of youth unemployment has therefore had profound effects upon the availability and content of VET, and the latter has been affected by young people's preferences just as much as by official policies exercising socio-functionalist perspectives on the value of education.