School for a life of freedom – why schools must become national again

Why schools must become national again

The state must once again take full responsibility for school funding, teachers’ conditions, school quality and children’s rights. Resources, pupil welfare, libraries, workshops and qualified teachers must not depend on a municipality’s finances or a school’s profitability. Schools must be publicly funded and free from profit extraction.

But state responsibility must not mean centrally imposed uniformity. The state must guarantee rights, resources and objectives – while teachers and schools are given the freedom to create lively teaching. Equal standards do not mean uniformity. They mean the promise that no child’s future will be decided by postcode, money or market knowledge.

Schools must prepare people for freedom

The task of schools is not merely to prepare children for work. They must develop knowledge, judgement, creative power, physical and practical abilities, self-respect and responsibility for others. As artificial intelligence performs more and more cognitive routine tasks, the purpose of education must not be reduced to employability. Schools must become more human – not more machine-like.

The child is civilisation’s yardstick

Every child has the right to develop:

• their body
• their judgement
• their creative power
• their practical abilities
• their self-respect
• and their ability to live together with others

Education is more than factual knowledge. It encompasses reading, taste, feeling, judgement and civic responsibility. Beauty is not a luxury. It is a human need.

Eight parts of a more human school

Equal standards without uniformity

Schools must be tax-funded, free of charge and free from profit extraction. The state must guarantee equal resources, qualified teachers, pupil welfare, libraries, workshops, sports facilities and access to art and nature. But the state must set rights and objectives – not micromanage every lesson. Public responsibility must go hand in hand with educational freedom.

Art is a core subject

Every child must regularly encounter music, literature, visual art, theatre, dance, film and architecture – not merely as leisure-time decoration, but as part of their education. Appreciating art does not mean being able to recite names. It means learning to see, hear, linger and discern. A poem read slowly, a role performed or a melody learned provides experiences that the rapid stream of images cannot replace.

The hand is no less intelligent than the head

All pupils must have the opportunity to work with wood, textiles, metal, cultivation, cooking and repairs. Craft teaches children what the digital society easily forgets: resistance, patience, precision and responsibility. A stitch, a chair, a meal or a crop shows whether care has been real. Schools must not teach children that practical knowledge is worth less than theoretical knowledge.

The body as a living home

Physical education must not be only about competition, results and selection. Children need strength, endurance, play, dance, outdoor life and swimming. They also need knowledge of rest, sleep and the body’s limits. Young people should experience their bodies as living homes – not merely as objects to assess, improve or display.

Nature is a classroom

Children must be allowed to feel the passage of the seasons, wait for something to grow, learn about species and understand humanity’s dependence on living systems. Natural science cannot be learned solely from screens. Someone who has never been taught reverence for living things can easily become a skilled manager of their destruction.

Freedom requires responsibility for others

Schools must teach the things that shape an entire life: friendship, love, consent, conflict management, personal finance, food, health, grief, loneliness, parenthood and care. This must not be confined to moralising themed days. Pupils should be given real caring and civic responsibilities. Freedom is empty if people are never trained to take responsibility for someone else.

Children’s attention must be defended

Children must understand how AI systems, recommendation algorithms, advertising, manipulation and data collection work. They must learn to use AI as a tool – without handing over their judgement to it. The school day must also include protected spaces away from the commercial attention economy:

• screen-free meals
• uninterrupted reading
• face-to-face conversation
• creating things themselves
• longer periods of work without constant interruption

This is not hostility to technology. It is a defence of the child’s still-developing attention.

Young people matter already

Every pupil must take part in real shared projects during their time at school. This might mean restoring a place, organising a performance, helping younger children, documenting local history, creating a garden or solving a problem together with people outside the school. Young people do not merely need to be told that they have a future. They must experience that they already matter to society.

A new measure of school success

We will not abolish knowledge requirements. Children have the right to language, mathematics, history, natural science and genuine intellectual effort. But grades and tests must not be the school’s only truth. Schools should also be assessed through other questions:

• Can the pupil read a longer text with attention?
• Can the pupil create something that did not exist before?
• Can the pupil collaborate without losing their own judgement?
• Can the pupil distinguish information from knowledge – and knowledge from wisdom?
• Can the pupil take responsibility for another person and for a shared space?
• Has the pupil discovered something worth loving and caring for?

Experiences stronger than empty stimulation

The point is not to make young people stop using TikTok through bans and admonitions. The point is to give them experiences stronger than empty stimulation: a melody they have learned to play themselves, an object they have made with their own hands, a body that has carried them through the forest, a book that has changed the way they see and a real task in which another person needed them.

Schools must not merely prepare children for the future. They must make life larger already.

A new national school system

Implementation plan

2026–2027: decide the direction and carry out the financial inventory

The Riksdag takes a policy decision that the state will gradually assume responsibility as the education authority, for funding and for employer responsibilities in publicly funded schools.

A special transition organisation will then map:

• staff, salaries, collective agreements and pensions
• school funding and targeted government grants
• municipally owned and rented school premises
• school meals, pupil travel and pupil welfare
• IT systems, pupil registers and admissions
• agreements and organisational forms of independent schools
• which costs are to be transferred to the state and which are to remain municipal

The transfer to state control will cover preschool class, compulsory school, adapted compulsory school, special school, Sami school, upper-secondary school and adapted upper-secondary school. Preschools and komvux will be dealt with separately.

2027–2028: decide on legislation, funding and organisation

A new national school authority will be established with regional school areas. The state will guarantee funding, teachers’ conditions, the quality of education and children’s rights.

By law-regulated service agreements, municipalities will retain responsibility for:

• school premises
• school meals
• pupil travel
• local coordination with social services, leisure activities and culture

The headteacher will remain the educational leader. Teachers and schools will have professional and educational freedom within shared national rights and knowledge objectives.

A tax-transfer model between the state and municipalities will be decided. Municipal tax rates or municipal government grants must be adjusted when the state takes over the costs. SOU 2022:53 assesses that a tax transfer is required in the event of full transfer to state control, but that the amount and legal structure must be investigated separately.

2028–2030: begin the transfer

The target date of 1 July 2028 will be used for the reform’s first operational steps, not as a claim that the whole of Sweden can be transformed on the same day.

During the remainder of the parliamentary term:

• regional national school areas will begin work
• staff transfers will be carried out in stages
• a national and compensatory funding system will be introduced
• the many targeted government grants will begin to be replaced by a coherent basic funding system
• national admissions and school placement will be developed
• external moderation of national tests and grades will begin
• teacher training, special educational needs and headteacher training will receive multi-year national mandates

2030–2033: complete the transfer

The national organisation will be expanded throughout the country. Funding will consist of:

• a basic amount per pupil
• a compensatory supplement for socioeconomic factors, language, sparsely populated areas and support needs
• special national resources for, among other things, vocational education, natural science, culture, school libraries and special educational needs

School results, segregation, teacher supply, pupil welfare and accessibility will be monitored every year.

By 2035 at the latest: complete the transition for independent schools

Publicly funded independent schools will, during a seven-year transition period, be able to choose between:

• becoming non-profit-distributing, state-contracted specialist schools with shared admissions and transparency rules, or
• continuing as wholly privately funded schools outside the school voucher system.

The plan is not based on the state automatically buying up independent-school companies. Any compensation, handling of assets and legal transition costs must be investigated before the bill is tabled.

Costs

Schools are already funded with very large sums of public money. The reform’s main cost is therefore not creating the entire school budget anew, but moving existing expenditure from municipalities to the state and strengthening areas that are currently inadequate.

The National Agency for Education’s broader total figure for preschool, out-of-school centres, all schools and komvux was SEK 368.3 billion in 2024. It must not be used as the cost of this particular transfer to state control, since preschools, out-of-school centres and komvux are wholly or partly outside the proposal.

The transition cost: SEK 8–12 billion

The working estimate amounts to approximately SEK 1.3–2 billion per year over six years. It is intended to cover:

• staff and contractual transfers
• pension and HR systems
• new regional national organisations
• national pupil, admissions and financial systems
• secure data transfers and IT
• accessible teaching materials and digital aids
• legal work and transition support

This amount is a planning framework. It has not been verified through a full budget inquiry. SOU 2022:53 notes that a national organisation of education authorities could encompass up to 200,000 full-time equivalent employees and that premises, staff transfers, IT and the government agency structure require further investigation.

The annual enhancement: SEK 4–7 billion

This corresponds to approximately 1.7–3 per cent of the reported costs for the types of school concerned. The money is intended for:

• more compensatory funding
• better pupil welfare and special educational needs provision
• recruitment supplements in sparsely populated areas and disadvantaged neighbourhoods
• continuing professional development and national career paths for teachers
• accessible teaching materials and aids
• school libraries, workshops, art, music and practical subjects

This too is a working estimate. The costs must be calculated measure by measure before a final reform budget is presented.

Funding and existing flows

Tax transfer

When the state takes over teaching, staff and pupil welfare, corresponding tax capacity will be transferred from the municipalities to the state. This is not new revenue for the country, but a transfer between two levels of government.

The exact amount is not yet known because, under the proposal, municipalities will retain responsibility for premises, meals and pupil travel, among other things.

Consolidated government grants

In 2025 there were 76 targeted government grants totalling nearly SEK 29 billion. The National Agency for Education describes the administration as burdensome and notes that many small providers find it harder to access the grants. This money can be brought into a more coherent national funding model, but it has already been budgeted and must not be presented as new money.

Reduced duplication in administration

A national system could eventually reduce costs for:

• parallel application systems
• municipal and private funding models
• duplicate IT and reporting systems
• repeated procurement processes and licences

No verified saving exists yet. No such saving is to be counted as funding until it has been realised and audited.

Profit-free public funding

Stopping profit distribution does not automatically mean that a particular number of billions will be freed up. The money may instead remain in schools, but the actual effect depends on companies’ profits, internal group costs, rents, interest and future contract rules. That is why no invented savings figure is given.

What we know

The main groups concerned cost approximately SEK 237 billion in 2024.

Compulsory schools alone cost SEK 159.7 billion.

Nearly SEK 29 billion was distributed through 76 targeted government grants in 2025.

In the 2025/26 academic year, just over 179,000 compulsory-school pupils attended independent schools. Of these, 74 per cent attended schools run by limited companies.

There were just over 141,000 teaching posts in the school system in the 2025/26 academic year.

The proportion of qualified teachers was approximately 73 per cent in compulsory school and 82 per cent in upper-secondary school. In adapted compulsory and upper-secondary schools respectively, the corresponding proportions were only 14 and 17 per cent.

The National Agency for Education forecasts a shortage of approximately 10,600 qualified teachers and preschool teachers by 2038.

The state can assume responsibility as the education authority in stages, but the reform requires a tax transfer, staff transfers and a strong regional organisation.

What we do not know

• The exact amount involved in the tax transfer.
• Which municipal employees are to transfer to the state.
• How pensions, collective agreements and salary differences are to be harmonised.
• What the final national IT and admissions platform will cost.
• What municipalities are to be paid for premises, meals and pupil travel.
• The legal and financial cost of the transition for independent schools.
• How large the actual administrative savings can be.
• Whether SEK 8–12 billion for the transition and SEK 4–7 billion annually will be sufficient.
• The full cost of the party’s quality commitments on pupil welfare, libraries, workshops, art, crafts and accessible teaching materials.

These amounts must be investigated openly before the state assumes full responsibility.

Decide now

We do not know exactly what every part of the transition will cost. But we know that today’s schools already handle approximately SEK 237 billion within the types of school concerned, and that responsibility is divided between the state, municipalities and private providers.

The parliamentary term must therefore be used to make decisions, carry out the tax and staff inquiry, build the regional national school areas and begin the actual transfer.

The state will guarantee equal standards. The municipality will remain close to the child. The teacher will have freedom in teaching. No one should be allowed to extract profit from a child’s right to education.

We know enough to begin. But we will not pretend to know what has not yet been counted.