On Monday came the results of the international study Pirls, which examines reading skills and attitudes towards reading among students in year 4. And in Sweden, children’s reading comprehension is falling.
The report shows that socio-economic background and the school the student attends have a great impact on the result. But at Hammarkullsskolan, which is located in a vulnerable area and has many students with a foreign background, the negative knowledge trend has been reversed. Above all, by creating a clear reading culture, according to assistant principal Linnéa Lindquist.
– We have a full-time trained librarian even though we only have 200 students at the school. We work with early follow-up, primary school teachers in preschool class so that we really work with basic reading learning from the age of six, she says.
Criticism of the National Education Agency
The students who start in year 1 without basic reading skills may attend intensive training for six weeks.
– Some schools succeed because we don’t care so much about what the Swedish National Agency for Education says. We do what we know works. But we need school authorities that support teachers in their mission, not oppose the school’s intentions, she says.
Martin Ingvar, brain researcher at Karolinska Institutet, agrees that the Swedish National Agency for Education has failed.
– The big problem today is that we don’t have methods that are generally proclaimed by the Norwegian Education Agency for schools. So the school is not led by the Swedish National Agency for Education and the common knowledge in the world, but people are fooling around, he says in Aktuellt.
“Not acceptable”
The National Education Agency claims that the pandemic is a partial explanation for the deteriorating results, but Martin Ingvar doesn’t buy that. He believes that the Swedish school system has failed students with Swedish as a second language and students whose parents have little education.
– It goes against the school’s equalization mission and it is not acceptable, he says.
Hear Martin Ingvar and Linnéa Lindquist about the shortcomings of the school system in the video player above.