Sweden

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Diversity is the name of the game: different pupils have different needs

The Times has a spread on free schools (p20-p21) today (£), focusing on the model of Kunskapskolan, one of the largest Swedish chains, who are setting up shop in Britain. "Pupils set their own homework, decide their timetables, set themselves targets and work at their own speed - oh, and they clock off at 2pm," says Greg Hurst, the paper's education editor. He visits one of their schools in Twickenham. "At the heart of the personalised learning", he says, lies a "one-on-one tutorial with a teacher for 15 minutes to review progress, weekly and long-term targets and timetables to meet them." A pupil, Lisa, is quoted saying: "You talk to the teacher and you cannot embarrass yourself. If you want to say something personal, you can say it to her.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Free schools: good for all schools

Free schools are all well and good – but what about the schools that remain? Some CoffeeHousers raise this question in response to my earlier blog, and it’s important enough to deserve a post in itself. Because introducing new schools to compete with council schools is the best way of raising standards for all – and studies around the world prove this. The ‘free schools’ agenda is not some Govian brainwave, but a simple reform that is being enacted from Chile to Obama's charter schools. The fullest example of this has been in Sweden, which the Gove system is modelled on, where about 13 percent of upper secondary kids are now in free schools.

Fraser Nelson

Which side are you on? | 26 October 2010

At last, The Guardian is reporting the grassroots rebellion in education. It has picked up on the story of Fiona Murphy who blogged on Coffee House yesterday about her trouble with the Tory-run council in Bromley. But hang on... the "grassroots revolt" of which the Guardian speaks is the councils, trying to protect their monopoly control over state schools. Here is the extract: "A flagship government policy has provoked a grassroots revolt against the coalition, with senior Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors lining up to attack the introduction of free schools, one of education secretary Michael Gove's most cherished projects...

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Low taxes work

I ration my writing about Sweden. As CoffeeHousers know, I can extol its virtues with room-emptying conviction. But it's now a few days since its election, and as far as I can tell no English publication has told the extraordinary story of its conservative victory - and the economic turnaround driven by the largest tax cuts in Swedish history. It is now the fastest-growing economy in the West. I tell the story in the political column of this week's magazine (subscribers, click here), but I will summarise it for CoffeeHousers here. Normally, conservatives are elected in Sweden as a kind of light relief, to punctuate decades of leftist rule. They're usually thrown out after one term, and the social democrats get back to taxing the bejesus out of the country.

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

From gloom to dispair

In little more than a decade, the cosy world of Anglo-American crime fiction has been transformed by wave after wave of Scandinavian invaders. Some, like Steig Larsson, are suddenly parachuted into the bestseller lists almost before we have had time to become aware of their existence. Others, like Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason and Norway’s Karin Fossum, advance steadily but less dramatically in terms of sales and critical plaudits. And then there’s Henning Mankell, the Swedish commander-in-chief of the invading forces, who deserves a category to himself. He is a distinguished playwright, publisher and children’s author, who has a long and honourable record of supporting charitable causes, especially in Africa.

Wednesday

Interconnect

Good women and bad men

Just in case you hadn’t guessed after nearly 1,800 pages of the ‘Millennium’ trilogy, the late Stieg Larsson has his alter-ego hero Mikel Blomkvist spell it out. Just in case you hadn’t guessed after nearly 1,800 pages of the ‘Millennium’ trilogy, the late Stieg Larsson has his alter-ego hero Mikel Blomkvist spell it out. ‘This story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies,’ he says. ‘It’s about violence against women and the men who enable it.’ Larsson’s three Millennium books, which feature adult reboots of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s characters Pippi Longstocking and Kalle Blomkvist, are slow-burners in the crime fiction charts.

Monday

Daniel Korski

The Swedish-Israeli War of Words

I am just back from holidaying in Sweden. And while I dutifully kept away from blogging, I did follow the news and the developing Swedish-Israeli dispute, the implications of which may yet become global. For those of you who have yet to read up on this story, it all started last week. In an article for Aftonbladet, Donald Bostroem recounted Palestinian allegations that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians to harvest their organs, and implied a link to the recent arrest, in the US, of organ-trafficking suspects. Many of the suspects were Jewish. Having read the article, the Swedish Ambassador to Israel issued a strong condemnation, saying she found the article "as shocking and appalling to us Swedes as it is to Israeli citizens.