Abstract
Against the background of a liberalization of Swedish compulsory education, this paper analyses post-1991 shifts in the way compulsory education performance in Sweden has been shaped by parental background, residential context and school context. We can document increasing school and residential segregation of foreign background students and, after 2008, increasing segregation by income, employment status and social allowance reception. Over time, educational performance has become increasingly linked to family, neighbourhood and school context. The greatest change has been for parental background, but the importance of school context and neighbourhood context has also increased. A noteworthy finding is that residential context consistently has a stronger effect on student performance than school context. Student grades were found to be most strongly influenced by the closest (12 or 25) residential peers of the school leavers as compared to larger peer groups. The increase in the influence of family, neighbourhood and residential context has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the between-school variation (intra-class correlation) in student performance, but it was not until after 2005 that this increased variability became clearly linked to the social composition of the schools. This study’s results suggest that the restructuring of Swedish compulsory education has had consequences for equality, possibly because disadvantaged social groups have not been as able as advantaged groups to navigate and benefit from the educational landscape created by the school reforms.
Highlights
In the literature on educational inequality, Sweden has been singled out as an exception to a general pattern of persistent inequality (Gamoran, 2001) The reason for this is that Sweden during the 20th century managed to reduce the influence of socio-economic class on educational attainment
Looking at the results presented above, the effects of parental background, school context and residential context there are clear signs of a school system that no longer has the same equalising power as before
There has been an increase in the importance of parental background for student performance
Summary
In the literature on educational inequality, Sweden has been singled out as an exception to a general pattern of persistent inequality (Gamoran, 2001) The reason for this is that Sweden during the 20th century managed to reduce the influence of socio-economic class on educational attainment. The period analysed by Erikson and Jonsson corresponds well with what has been seen as the most successful part of the Swedish welfare state era, closely connected to the political program of the Social Democrats. Post-1990 trends, on the other hand, have been influenced by welfare state retrenchment and neo-liberal inspired reforms that in many ways have implied a reversal of earlier policies in Sweden (Lundahl, 2002). The restructuring of the Swedish school system is a prominent feature of these post1990 trends. The aim of these reforms, implemented after 1992, has been to provide more competition, as well as higher quality and a higher degree of market control (Broady and Gustafsson, 2000, Wiborg 2013). In Nordic research the Swedish school system has been seen as a benchmark in neo-liberalisation since Danish, Norwegian and Finnish school systems are not as liberalised (Bernelius and Kauppinen, 2012; Brattbakk and Wessel, 2013; Fekjaer and Birkelund, 2007; Kauppinen, 2008; Wiborg, 2013)
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