Sweden Bought Back 1.3 Million Textbooks In A Year

1 .3 million textbooks bought with one grant in one year for one country of 10 million people. Sweden, 2024. And the sentence the minister put next to the money, there has been thoughtless digitalization of schools resulting in more screens and fewer books, even at younger ages. This is the Education Commute Global Commute. Both voices on this show are synthesized. The judgment isn't. I'm Priya. I'm in the year two teacher's chair. And my classroom has 30 iPads in a charging trolley that the school is still paying for.

I'm Alex Eck. I've read the Swedish government's own releases in Swedish and in their English versions and the Swedish National Agency for Education's results page. And, you know, the honest story isn't the sensational headline, Sweden banned screens. It is far more specific and useful. Well, then let's run the autopsy on this. What they actually do. We have the headline. We have the minister's quote. But what is the actual policy mechanism behind those words? Right. So we start with the money. We move away from the overarching claims and look at the checkable facts, which means we look at the actual budget allocations.

In February 2024, the Swedish government set aside 658 million kronor. Wow. Yeah. And that is specifically for textbooks. When you look at the estimates provided by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, they calculate this sum. We'll purchase those 1 .3 million textbooks you mentioned. 1 .3 million physical books entering the system in a single year. I mean, think about the logistics of that for a moment. Yeah, it's massive. If you are sitting in a school, you understand what it takes to simply receive. catalog and distribute a box of 30 books so we are talking about a national procurement exercise aimed at putting a physical object on millions of desks exactly and the ministry of education culture and science stated a very clear numerical aim for this funding the goal is one textbook per student per subject one textbook per student per subject that requires massive coordination but You know, when you see a number like 658 million kroner in a single press release, you have to ask about the timeline.

Well, yes. Is this just a one -off capital expenditure to generate a PR announcement? Or is this a sustained budget line? Because a one -time grant... buys books that will be outdated in five years it is a sustained budget line for years the timeline proves this is a structural decision that 658 million kroner in 2024 actually followed a previous allocation oh there's previous funding yeah they allocated 685 million kroner the year before in 2023 And the plan continues. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science has budgeted 755 million kroner for 2025.

That's an increase. It is. After that, it levels out at a continuous 555 million kroner a year from 2026 onwards. So they're committing over half a billion kroner annually for the foreseeable future, exclusively for textbooks. This means schools can plan their curriculums knowing the physical resources will be funded year after year. Exactly. And that is only the first budget line we need to look at. There is a second line right beside it targeted at a completely different age group. Okay, what's the second line? In 2024, they allocated 176 million kroner specifically for fiction and nonfiction books.

This money is directed entirely at preschools and early years settings. Preschools. And what does 176 million kroner translate to in terms of actual physical books? For those early years. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science estimates it will purchase roughly 880 ,000 books for those young children. 880 ,000. Right. And that specific budget line is rising sharply. It goes from 176 million in 2024 to 480 million kroner in 2025. That is an enormous increase in physical reading material for three and four year olds. We're talking about putting hundreds of thousands of physical pages into the hands of children who are just learning to recognize.

Yes. Then we add the third line of the budget. They are providing specific money for staffed school libraries. And they have paired this funding with the change in the law. From the 1st of July 2025, the law will ensure that every single pupil has access to one. Notice the specific phrasing there. A staffed school library. Not just a room with shelves, but a room managed by a professional who curates the collection and guides the students. Exactly. So we have hundreds of millions of trona for textbooks, hundreds of millions for early years fiction and nonfiction, and legal requirements for staff libraries.

We are following the money, and the money is entirely about physical paper and the people who manage it. So where is the screens part? Books and librarians are funded, but where is the actual screen mandate? The screen mandate is located precisely in the preschool curriculum. The government instructed the national agency to make preschool essentially screen -free. Those are their exact words. Essentially screen -free. Right. And they put a date on it. Effective from the 1st of July 2025, the requirement to use digital tools in preschool is completely removed.

The requirement is completely removed. Wait, let's look at how they're applying this across the ages in that setting. Sure. They established a strict age rule. For children under two years old, the curriculum states they must use analog tools only. There are no exceptions provided for that age group. Wait. I need to pause here because this is vital to understand. Are you saying there was previously an actual requirement to use screens with children under two? Yes. The previous curriculum required the use of digital tools in preschool settings.

That requirement is the exact thing being reversed by this new policy. So previously, a practitioner in a room with one -year -olds was expected by the national curriculum to incorporate a digital device into their day. Now, they are explicitly instructed to use analog tools only. And for the older children in the preschool setting. For older preschoolers, the use of digital tools is greatly restricted. They are permitted only in situations where there is clear scientific support for their use. Why did they reverse it? I mean, what is the rationale they put forward for taking a requirement to use digital tools and turning it into an instruction to be essentially screen free?

I will quote the government's exact reasoning from their published documentation. They stated screen free environments provide better conditions for children to develop relationships, concentrate and learn to read and write. OK. And they added that basic skills are, quote. best acquired through analog activities in analog environments right well here's my push and it's the one i'd make in the staff room thoughtless digitalization is a political sentence not a research finding where is the evidence that screens cause the problem they are fixing i'll offer the honest concession here the government cites scientific support without naming the studies and their releases.

I am not going to invent or name studies for them. Fair enough. But we can look at the hard numbers they were reacting to, which triggered this policy response. We need to look at the reading study results for 10 year olds. In 2016, Swedish 10 year olds scored 556 points. In 2021, that score dropped to 544 points. That is a 12 point drop. We have to look at the date of that second test, 2021. Everyone fell in 2021 because of the pandemic. Schools were disrupted globally and reading scores dropped across the board.

Yes, most did. The Swedish National Agency for Education acknowledges this context. They note that most comparable countries fell by around 10 points during that same period. And we must also include the broader European context. Even with that 12 -point drop to 544, Sweden is still 17 points above the European average, according to the data from Euridice. If you are 17 points above the Euridice average, and your drop was only marginally larger than the international average during a global disruption to schools, then the reading score itself cannot be the whole story.

What is the actual finding here? The real agency headline wasn't the average drop. It was the widening gap. When you look inside that 12 -point drop, you see a sharp demographic division. Pupils from well -off homes maintained their 2016 reading levels entirely. Pupils from poorer homes fell. So the well of pupils did not drop at all. The entire average decline was driven by pupils from poorer backgrounds losing ground. Exactly. This gap between the well of pupils and the poorer pupils is now wider in Sweden than it is in the other Nordic countries.

The Director General summarized this specific data point by stating, the Swedish school system is segregated. So the reading result that triggered the book's policy is actually an equity result. We started this discussion looking at a minister's quote about screens, but the underlying data from the agency is about a widening gap between rich and poor 10 -year -olds. It is. This explains the massive textbook budget. If poor students don't have access to physical books or stable digital resources at home, ensuring every single student has a government -funded textbook in the classroom guarantees a baseline of access, regardless of their background.

Right. The data points directly to equity. There is also a statistic you will see in the reporting around this policy that we should clarify. Which one? The phrase, over 20 % can't read properly. It is a round figure included in the government material about compulsory school. I mention it because you will see it cited, but we should not dress it up as a direct specific test result. That makes sense. So we have mapped the budget, we have detailed the preschool curriculum change, and we have explored the equity data driving it.

Now we need to look at what this actually means on the ground. We're going to divide the impact into three specific educational settings, primary, secondary, and specialist. Let's start with the primary setting. The specific move here is the preschool curriculum change we discussed. There is no requirement for screens before school and absolutely no digital tools permitted under age two. We must be precise about the ages involved. This is a curriculum decision strictly about three and four -year -olds. It is not a ban on tablets in year five.

If you're teaching nine or ten -year -olds, your classroom is entirely outside the scope of that specific screen -free curriculum mandate. The policy is focused on the youngest learners. Correct. Then we move to the secondary setting. In a secondary school, most of this package does not apply to you. The funding for early years fiction books does not affect you. The removal of digital requirements in preschool does not affect you. The focus for secondary is simply the provision of textbooks and the staff libraries. There is one specific budget line that touches secondary, which is 95 million kroner allocated from 2026 for mobile free schools.

Mobile free schools money. But if we look at our own context, England already crossed this line via statutory guidance this September. The policy of removing mobile phones from the secondary school day is something the sector here has already received instruction on. Yes. Which leaves the third room, the specialist setting. And in a specialist setting, the vital takeaway is the phrase, one textbook per student per subject. How does that broad aim apply to pupils who require adapted materials? If a student needs a braille text or a specifically formatted resource, how does this procurement effort serve them?

The Swedish grant explicitly covers adapted and special schools. The policy is completely inclusive of these settings. The point here is not a debate about paper versus glass. The point is that access to a teaching material is now something a pupil is entitled to in law from July 2024. Whether that material is a standard textbook or a highly adapted resource. Exactly. The legal entitlement to possess it exists and is funded. So we have looked at how this applies to toddlers, teenagers, and students needing adapted resources. Now we reach the transfer verdict.

We take these Swedish structural changes and directly evaluate how they would transfer to England's system. We must outline the structure first because it dictates what is actually possible. Sweden's schools are run by municipalities and independent providers. Overseeing those operators is a national agency and a national curriculum. The central government does not manage the daily operations of the schools. They cannot walk into a classroom and issue direct operational orders to a teacher. No. They can rewrite the curriculum, and they can fund the books. England's structure is structurally similar to this.

The Department for Education writes the framework, and the schools decide how to implement it within their settings. The Department for Education holds the same structural levers as the Swedish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. So what would actually transfer? If the structures match, which parts of this Swedish policy could theoretically be imported? The preschool curriculum change is importable. England's Early Years Framework is a Department for Education document. They could choose to rewrite the requirements for digital tools in the early years tomorrow, just as Sweden did.

The regulatory mechanism exists. The framework could be changed, but what about the funding? Can the budget transfer? The money is much harder. Sweden is spending over half a billion kronors a year on a fraction of England's system size. Scaling that level of continuous investment to match the pupil population in England would require a massive, sustained budget commitment that does not currently exist. We also have to contrast this with England's actual written direction regarding technology. What has England written down for its schools? The Department for Education has issued six digital standards that every school is expected to meet by 2030.

These six standards are broadband, network switching, wireless, cybersecurity, filtering and monitoring, and digital leadership. Let's be clear about what those standards actually are. England's standards are plumbing, not pedagogy. Providing broadband, installing network switching hardware, and ensuring cybersecurity are physical infrastructure tasks. They involve running cables and installing server hardware. They do not dictate how a teacher instructs a child in the classroom. I confirm that distinction. And it explains why the two countries are taking different actions. Sweden is not removing its wireless networks. It is maintaining its infrastructure.

But it is buying books and removing a pedagogical screen requirement for toddlers. Right. England is building the plumbing, but saying nothing statutory about screen time for a five -year -old. They are focusing on the cables and the walls. not the device on the desk we also need to add that england's reading number is 558 and unchanged across cycles making its case different from sweden's 12 -point drought so bringing this all back to your daily reality in a school returning to the trolley of 30 ipads i mentioned at the start the practical takeaway here isn't simply switch them off The lesson from analyzing this policy is not an absolute rejection of the hardware.

No, the lesson is the actual Swedish test applied to the older children. Is there clear support for using this screen with these children for this specific task? If the answer is it came with the trolley, that is the thoughtless bit. At break, ask whoever's next to the kettle. In reception and year one, what do the children do on a screen that they couldn't do on paper and who decided? If a governor asked how many pupils in year seven have their own textbook for each subject or a class that they share or a PDF on a device, could you answer by subject or would the honest answer be it depends who's teaching it?

Four things off the drive. One Sweden put 658 million kronor into textbooks in one year, 1 .3 million books, aiming at one per pupil per subject, and the money runs on past 2026. Two, the screens decision is specific. Preschool no longer required to use digital tools. None under two and only with clear support above that from July 2025. Three, the number behind it fell 12 points. But the agency's own headline was the widening gap between richer and poorer pupils, not screens. For England's written direction is plumbing by 2030, not pedagogy.

The importable Swedish line is the question, not the ban. What's the support for this screen with this child for this task? Everything's linked to the show notes where the trailer, not the film. Both voices on this show are synthesized. The judgment isn't. Safe trip in. See you at the gates.