Academia is using your tax money to build schools abroad — and Ulf Christerson is helping. School boards and government need to give us answers as to how this is possible.
Sweden has such a radical school system that practically anyone can open a school and do anything with school money. The government wants to export it abroad.
In the past week, SVT has reviewed the expansion of Swedish independent schools. It has long been known that school money goes to profit instead of teaching students math, Swedish and English. Now SVT can show that school money has been used to buy, among other things, cottages in Åre and archipelago plots in Stockholm.
What is less well known is that Swedish school money is used by many school groups to expand abroad.
Many of us find it unfair to go to Swedish school money, high salaries, cottages in Åre and island clusters in Stockholm.
In recent years, Academia, Sweden’s largest school group, has acquired several school operations in the Netherlands and Germany. In their latest quarterly report, one can read that the company is in talks to buy a German school company with a turnover of over a quarter of a billion kroner.
International Engelska Scholen has already acquired several fee-paying schools in Spain, and Kunskapsskolen now has a presence outside of Sweden, including in the Netherlands, Great Britain, the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Swedish school groups thus use Swedish tax money to build schools abroad. Not only is the moderate government watching it happen, they are helping to make it possible. Or why the owner of Kunskapsskolan, Peje Emilsson (best known for his frequent text messages with Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson) should be one of Foreign Trade Minister Johan Forcell’s business representatives? Now most recently to India last fall.
Many of us see it as unfair that Swedish school money goes to profit, high salaries, cottages in Åre and archipelagos in Stockholm. But is it incomprehensible that the Swedes should pay for the schooling of German and Dutch children? With money that children in Sweden have to learn to read and count.
Why are Academedia, IES and Kunskapsskolan using our tax money to expand abroad? Why is Ulf Kristerson’s government helping school groups divert our tax money to overseas schools?
School bosses and the moderate government owe us those answers.
Vidhar J Lindgren
Social Democrat at Södermalm in Stockholm, Press Secretary to the Minister of Education 2021 – 2022
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