Tellusgruppen welcomes the report on the national school voucher standard

Published: November 3, 2023

  

Opinion, Miscellaneous

Tellusgruppen welcomes the study on an equitable and transparent financial system for municipal and independent schools.

We at Tellusgruppen welcome the government’s initiative to find a way to make school funding more equitable. As things stand today, there is a difference of as much as 70,000 kronor per year per student between the municipality that invests the most and the one that invests the least. It is good that there is room for some variation in the municipalities’ investments in schools, but the differences should not be so large, and the system should not be so complicated.

We also agree with Education Minister Lotta Edholm that municipalities should be compensated for their overall responsibility. But as things stand today, municipalities are already overcompensated. A report from the Swedish Association of Independent Schools shows that independent schools receive about 9 percent less in funding compared to municipal schools, even after taking into account the municipalities’ overall responsibility and differences in student composition. These facts demonstrate exactly how baseless the debate over the so-called overcompensation of independent schools is.

The fact that independent schools also provide high-quality education despite receiving lower funding shows that they manage their resources more efficiently than public schools. If municipalities had operated in the same way as independent schools, they would have saved 9 percent of their tax revenue.

Although the investigation guidelines emphasize the importance of equality, they also allow municipalities to allocate more funding to their own schools than to independent schools. This violates the principle of equality. If a municipality wants to invest in schools, it should do so for all students.

We look forward to a thorough investigation into the issue of funding and the equity of financial conditions. Such an investigation—and the resulting answers to the questions at hand—will benefit the entire education sector and can reasonably lead to no other conclusion than that independent schools are underfunded and need to receive more reasonable funding.

Bijan Fahimi,
, CEO Tellusgruppen

For more information

Bijan Fahimi, CEO of Tellusgruppen AB
bijan.fahimi@tellusgruppen.se
+46 707 167 453