The Education of Teachers in Sweden: An Endeavour Struggling with Academic Demands and Professional Relevance

Abstract

This chapter presents the main features of how teachers are educated in Sweden, including current reforms due to teacher shortages and criticism of teacher quality. It based on from the notion of teacher education as a societally critical activity, orienting around tensions, balances and difficulties in teacher education. It is argued that teacher education is a complex activity that policy and practice unfortunately do not pay adequate attention to. Teacher education in Sweden is profoundly varied. Recurrent top-down reforms complicate teacher education, as an understanding of the central aspects of teacher education has not been agreed upon or endorsed. The continued criticism of teacher education, despite many reforms and changing practices, might indicate that recurring political demands to reform teacher education rest on unclear or inadequate grounds or incomplete information, or they might be conditioned by overarching political motivations. As teacher education is central to education in general and to the advancement of democracy, this is particularly worrying. It is through an analysis of the full complexity of teacher education that it becomes possible to design adequate reforms that result in transformative work on how to ‘get better at getting better’, a feature that applies to both organizations and professionals.

1 Teacher Education: A Societally Critical Activity

As long as formalized education has been necessary, it has also been critical to ensure that teachers are competent. Even in the sixteenth century, Swedish legislation emphasized the importance of teachers and the profound difficulty of their task.¹ Education was regulated under the legislative framework of the church, the statutes of which emphasized the importance of education and that teachers themselves had to be educated to master teaching to become educators. That legislation also acknowledged how difficult and lamentable teaching could be, the importance of generous remuneration for teachers and the general necessity for humans to learn throughout their lives, positions that are profoundly relevant in contemporary debates. The formal structures for acquisition of knowledge and competence necessary to successfully shoulder the responsibility to educate others have shifted over time along with the wider purposes of education. How to educate teachers appears to always be depending on the models for education either in place or viewed as desirable to have in place and on diverse notions on children and youth.

1.1 Education as a Central Societal Endeavour

Today’s models for compulsory education and teacher education are comparatively new, even though these vast, complicated and interrelated tasks are in principle similar over time. Children and youth are to be educated towards agreed (but perhaps changing) aims, and teachers must be prepared towards becoming the best possible facilitators of their student’s development despite varied backgrounds and situations. Educating students into teachers involves the formation of professionals who can work systematically, methodically, and innovatively for schools to fulfil their purposes.² Herein lies both the complexity and the enormous importance of this endeavour. The current Swedish Education Act and compulsory school curriculum state that education aims for students to “acquire and develop knowledge and values” and to “promote all students’ development and learning and a lifelong desire to learn” so that all students can “find their unique character and thereby be able to participate in social life by giving their best in responsible freedom”. Education must consider the “different needs of children and pupils”.³ It is to be provided in collaboration with the family to best contribute to the students’ comprehensive personal development into active, creative, competent and responsible individuals and citizens. Thus, the school, its organization and the structure of each individual school unit must have access to a variety of competences. As part of the “public”, it must, in addition to its focus on every pupil, further “the ideas of democracy to become guiding in all areas of society”.⁴

One increasingly crucial aspect of Swedish teacher education is its role in attaining nationwide equality among schools. When Sweden radically shifted its governance model from the central to the local level in the 1990s, the role of teacher education also changed and grew more important as a tool for national policy and educational equity; indeed, teacher education and the national curricula were more or less the only remaining national governmental tools for equality in education. At the same time, Sweden introduced school choice, expanding opportunities for private schools to operate and offering full public funding for private schools, which transformed preschool, primary and secondary education into a market-based model in which all units are, at least in principle, competitors.⁵ Instead of the traditional focus on input factors like leadership, collaboration, competence and other resources, competition became the central mechanism for enhancement. This new landscape created specific problems for teacher education in that a more loosely governed and programmatically varied school system demanded a teaching profession educated for a more autonomous role while the increasingly decentralized model expanded the need for governments to control teachers.⁶

In the general debate on education in Sweden, as in many countries, a rather one-dimensional picture of educational issues has emerged, and there is a historical continuity in the tensions among different understandings of education. Powerful voices argue that education is primarily about basic knowledge acquisition, while others insist that education has a wider mission. Is education limited to qualification for the labour market and achieving employability, or is it about a wider kind of qualification that prepares individuals for citizenship and to become active members in and contributors to society? Does education also include socialization and subjectification? In essence, the spectrum stretches from perceiving education as about gaining skills to be used in labour to education as an endeavour that encompasses the vastly more profound process of becoming fully human.⁷ The compromise that dominates in Sweden is that both notions in principle are essential and that nothing should be omitted. In practice, however, the focus in Sweden – as in other countries – is primarily on qualification, especially for working life.

Tensions thus remain and surface over time, mainly in the form of shifting balances rather than tectonic changes. These tensions are also exploited in political debates and are articulated as demands for the reform of teacher education in one direction or another. While debating the quality of teacher programmes and how to best educate teachers has been a regular feature of public debate for centuries, the point of departure for the modern debate on teacher education can be found in an 1867 article in a Swedish educational journal about the increasing interest in providing schools with better-educated teachers by establishing special institutions for teacher education.⁸ In the 150 years since that publication, we have seen a split between the normal school tradition and the more academic perspective of teacher education, a split that is deeply interrelated with the debate on the purpose of education and what is to be understood as the core of professional knowledge: deep knowledge of content or advanced teaching capabilities?⁹

Needless to say, education is of utmost importance to any society, for both the individual and the collective. Socrates argued that the most important public assignment was responsibility for educating girls and boys, and Diogenes later emphasized that the “foundation of every state is the education of its youth”.¹⁰ Since the advent of democracy, greater significance has been placed on the individual’s right to education and the advancement of education to support desirable social progress. As a consequence, insigts into the huge importance of powerful models securing high-quality teaching has grown. As the need for the need for well-educated teachers has intensified, and different models for the connection between education in schools and the education of teachers have been developed, including models for the non-school-based parts of teacher preparation efforts. However, just as education is perceived differently, the notion of teacher education varies. It should be added that foundational ideas and priorities in teacher education have been understood as either out of step or timely due to education’s proximity to the core – if shifting – notions of what it is to be human and what kind of society is desirable.¹¹

Because any description of a national system runs the risk of being one-dimensional, we strive here to broaden the perspective by using the extensive international research on teacher education.¹² Sweden is a small country, and research on teacher education in Sweden is comparatively limited.¹³ Nordic teacher education offers an excellent basis for studies on teaching and learning within the framework of teacher programmes as academic professional education, and we hope this volume can contribute in this respect.¹⁴ In analysing research in the field, Hallsén (2013), in line with Ahlström and Kallós (1996) distinguishes research on teacher education from research for teacher education.¹⁵ She argues that such research focuses mainly on four thematic areas, of which the first two relates to research for teacher education, and the two later to research on teacher education:

• teacher education’s relation to the teaching profession and student perceptions of their education,

• the content of teacher education,

• the governance and reform of teacher education and

• the history of teacher education.

Many individuals in today’s societies might find it difficult to understand the complexity of the challenges of teacher preparation and the fact that it has more or less always been a struggle to provide schools with capable teachers.

This chapter describes today’s Swedish teacher education model, its development and the challenges that appear to be of central importance for the future. The study uses current and relevant research on these issues, but the nature of the chapter also implies that it draws extensively on legislation, directives, agency reports and the like that, together with parliamentary records and other governmental sources, inform teacher education as a public endeavour. International research is used to put the Swedish trajectory into perspective and reveal what lies beneath the organizational surface. In addition to describing how teachers are educated in Sweden, the chapter outlines the basic issues and priorities that have guided its development. The focus is on pre-service (or initial) teacher education but also touches briefly upon aspects of the continuum of teacher education in terms of professional development. Swedish teacher education is perceived here as a significant example of how the professional formation is sandwiched and forced to navigate between educational change, demands from the profession and demands from academia, on top of all that comes with education being profoundly politicized. As such, the hope is to contribute more generally to the discussion of conditions for professions and professionalism as key features of modern society and how it handles complex tasks.

1.2 What Is Teacher Education? Context-Based Notions of the Concept…

It may seem trivial, but in terms of experience, there are reasons to clarify how this chapter understands the concept teacher education. Three aspects need to be clarified. First, in this chapter the chosen term is teacher education, not teacher training. Teacher education refers more appropriate to today’s program content, form and features as academic programs within higher education, a term that also mirrors the significant shift the international discourse due to these changes since mid 1980s.

Secondly, it is not unusual to find that both teachers and students within higher education institutions tend to have a variety of connotations of the term teacher education. There is a particular ambiguity in the Swedish terminology that is surprising in comparison with languages and cultures more nuanced. A general understanding refers to programs in higher education that prepare students for entering the teaching profession. However, in contemporary dialogues teacher education ca also refer to more limited parts of these programmes, namely parts of the programs that are focusing on teaching, pedagogy, didactics and those parts that are school based.¹⁶ That connotation may possibly reflect an older tradition for subject teachers, where prospective teachers were recruited to educational studies among those who have acquired necessary content knowledge in academic disciplines, studies that had no vocational orientation towards education. That understanding mirrors the idea of consecutive models for teacher preparation that contrasts what in Sweden nowadays is the dominant model, concurrent studies.¹⁷ As both subject knowledge and pedagogical knowledge are central to teacher preparation, the term teacher education here means these programmes in their entirety, unless otherwise stated.¹⁸

The third aspect to pay attention to, is that it sometimes arises a confluence of the study programs as such with the organisations responsible for and conducting these programmes (i.e., its organisational base rather than its implementation). The fact that both the organisation for running these programs and these programs can be identically named in a conversation can cause a troubling ambiguity. If the organisational base of the programmes is intended, it is clearly stated or otherwise projected.

The unclarities and ambiguities in the Swedish terminology is something to reflect upon as it might indicate an immature terminology or lack of higher levels of a professional language. It is hard to imagine, that this kind of problems are to be found in areas like medicine or engineering. In addition, this lack of more adequate terminology, and hence understanding of the enterprise as such, might also observed in the fact that teacher seminars are still frequent terms in the public debate and in press in Sweden, neglecting the fact that all of them except one was terminated in 1960s and the final one in 2008.¹⁹ Taken together, the ambiguity of the Swedish language, and the aligned difficulties to be precise (as well as being correct in translation) in combination with the partly anachronistic terminology in the public debate comes with a message on the need to be explicit, But this phenomenon is also interesting, how can it be that we have such difficulties in such an important area? Could it be the case that it signals shortcomings in how society approaches teacher education and teaching as a profession? Later we will find other signs of that. Unfortunately.

2 Education of Teachers in today’s Sweden in the Light of its Historical Context

2.1 A Varied Landscape…

Sweden is a small country of just over 10 million inhabitants. For at least 15 years, around 400,000 students annually have studied at Sweden’s 48 higher education institutions.²⁰ For a student aspiring to enter the teaching profession, 25 Swedish higher education institutions offered 431 programme options in the fall semester of 2021.²¹ Between 10,000 and 14,000 students annually navigate these options and apply to become educated for teaching through these programmes.²²

Teachers in Sweden are educated within the framework of regular higher education, which means that most Swedish universities and university colleges provide one or more teacher education programmes. Two important consequences follow from this fact: first, no educational institutions focus exclusively on educating teachers; second, teacher education in Sweden is delivered in educational institutions with varied profiles. Some teacher programmes are offered in highly specialized educational institutions, but that specialization is on areas other than teaching, for example technically or artistically oriented institutions, while other teacher programmes are provided in general educational institutions like comprehensive universities and university colleges. Some programmes are offered in institutions with more than 40,000 students, and others in institutions with fewer than a thousand students. As these institutions differ so significantly in size, focus and tradition, they likely also differ in academic capacity. As a consequence of this varied landscape, Swedish teacher education programmes have different contexts and conditions; for example, not all teacher programmes are delivered in institutions with the right to provide postgraduate education.²³

Against this varied background, there is reason to question whether it is even possible to speak of a Swedish model of teacher education. However, this chapter aims to describe both the commonalities and differences in how teachers are educated in Sweden and the challenges these efforts face.

2.2 … but a Common Educational Structure

The way teachers have been educated in Sweden has varied greatly over time. Since 2011, teachers have been prepared for Swedish schools at all levels in one of four different programmes, each with its own degree:

• preschool teacher degree,

• primary teacher’s degree (with three different orientations: teaching in preschool class and grades 1–3, in grades 4–6 and in leisure time centres),²⁴

• subject teacher’s degree (with a specialization in teaching in either grades 7–9 or upper secondary school) and²⁵

• a vocational teacher’s degree.²⁶

2.2.1 The Legacy: Old Models Influences Novelties

Every model of teacher preparation is inevitably shaped by both older traditions and ideas and ambitions about the future, and Sweden’s current model is no exception. The introduction of the comprehensive school model (grades 1–9) in 1962 was not accompanied by any teacher education reforms designed for that novel school model. Indeed, reform arrived only in 1988, with the implementation of a teacher education model that was better suited to the structure of the comprehensive school and aligned with a school system that was less divided.

Separate programmes for teaching in primary level and middle level schools was abandoned in the reform of 1988. Teacher education for compulsory school became divided into two programs, one for teaching younger children (grades 1–7) and the other for teaching older children (grades 4–9). When the school system was reformed from 6 years of mandatory studies into a 9-year comprehensive school model by parliamentary decisions in 1950 and 1962, as noted above, no new teacher education model for the “new” lower secondary grades (7–9) was launched. That lack was partly solved with the 1988 reform but was based on the primary teacher education tradition rather than the subject-specific teacher education tradition used in upper secondary; nor did it include a constructive combination of the two approaches. Whether it would have been more appropriate to prepare teachers for these grades based on the secondary education tradition is a matter of debate, but such a model was indeed introduced much later, in 2011. Before then, students qualified for teaching grades 7–9 by not fulfilling required periods of study for upper secondary teaching, i.e. by reduced length of study in each subject.²⁷

In 2001, the structure of the entire teacher education field was fundamentally reformed by merging what had been eight teacher degrees into a single teacher’s degree.²⁸ This in-depth reform was intended to strengthen professionalization by building on a common degree and by combining the establishment of a (common) professional knowledge base with both extensive profiling opportunities and common requirements for a degree project of such a level that everyone, including preschool teachers, would be qualified for doctoral-level studies. The reform did not intend to establish a single educational programme for all prospective teachers; rather, the idea was to combine some common content with increased diversification. While all new teachers would have the same degree, their diplomas would indicate the grades they were prepared to teach, the subjects they had studied and any other specializations.

The current model, established in 2011 with four different degrees and alternative orientations, constituted again a profound change compared to prior reforms, which sought to strengthen the teacher’s identity and ultimately the teaching profession through the establishment of a single degree. As with the medical profession, for example, the single degree both offered a common identity and foundational education for the profession and entailed requirements for specialization. By contrast, the 2011 reform emphasized different degrees for different types of schools, primarily related to the age of the students. A simplified trajectory of the reform is as follows:

• 1980s: A number of different programmes and degrees were offered.

• 1990s: The number of degree programmes and degrees was reduced in favour of a clear model of teacher education for the 9-year comprehensive school model.²⁹

• 2000s: A single degree was established for preschool, elementary and upper secondary schools, including vocational subjects. However, the one-degree model did not aim to offer an identical educational programme for all student teachers; rather, the reform sought to establish a teacher identity with a strong individual profile by giving students a virtually limitless choice of courses.

• 2010s and currently: The model organizes teacher education into four separate degrees, two of which have two or three orientations.³⁰

2.2.2 Structural Models in Change

Teacher education degrees can be obtained in Sweden in both first and second cycle studies, to use the Bologna terminology.³¹ These programmes comprise a maximum of 330 ECTS (the European Credit Transfer System in which a year of full-time studies renders 60 credits, or 11 semesters of full-time studies) and a minimum 90 ECTS when a student already has conducted required studies or have appropriate work experience.³² The foundational structure for these programmes are displayed in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1 The foundational structure of current Swedish teacher programmes

The two most recent reforms share a design with a common area of study in educational science for all students, but these reforms are profoundly different in their orientation. The previous programme model was basically divided into three study areas: a general field of education, an educational area and an area of specialization. In simplified terms, the general field of education consisted of central areas of knowledge (such as educational theories) and “interdisciplinary subject studies”, the educational area largely corresponded to subject studies and other traditional teacher education studies such as studies in teaching and learning language and mathematics for prospective teachers for the lowest grades, and specialization studies could involve drama, information and communication technologies and alternative pedagogies, subjects that might offer alternative insights into and perspectives on the more traditional areas of study. The assumption was that the many options offered would inspire students to craft their study profiles according to their interests and their understanding of what competence would be needed in schools in the future, enabling them to be clearer on how they would like to contribute.³³

This model, with its three study areas, was itself an attempt to break with the traditional design of subject studies, pedagogical studies and practice. The model was very decentralized; it was up to each institution to decide which studies would be included in each area and offered students enormous possibilities to shape their degree profiles. This feature, however, was likely also the model’s Achilles’s heel. The variation between programmes in different educational institutions became significant over time, and the absence of requirement on students to in advance announce their priorities and the freedom to chose their subjects for secondary teaching caused difficulties for school districts. For them, it was easier to organize schools if, for example, all math teachers also were teachers in physics or at least science, not history or art. Demands were made for more uniform programmes; thus, two foundational understandings came into conflict. Simply put, the 2001 educational reform was designed to develop schools by providing them with novel types of teachers, but that form of governance clearly conflicted with the desire of many school districts and school owners to be provided with teachers who would fit easily into their current models rather than advancing their practice by adapting to individual teachers profiles.

As shown above, Swedish teacher education is a varied landscape. The most common programme form comprises traditional campus studies, with the teaching provided at a geographical location that students attend, although new forms of teaching have emerged. Traditional programmes consist of the parts mentioned above and programmes correspond to the basic notion of university education; namely, to offer predetermined study paths to young people who want to qualify for a professional career. Stated differently, these programmes are excellent for those who, before starting their higher education studies, already know that they want to become teachers. However, others also desire to become teachers, often after having obtained other degrees or undertaken other professional activities. For them and those students who, during their studies at other programmes, realize that what they really want is to become teachers, other programmes are required, programmes that use these students’ prior studies and achievements. These programmes are usually termed “short programmes” in the Swedish context but should not be understood as “quick” options or studies that are alternative in the sense that they offer entrance into the teaching profession without the same level of qualifications. They are called “short programmes” because they consist entirely of the unique set of classes in educational science and an internship that are not available within other programmes. A short programme does not offer a different degree; what is different is the organization of studies.

The prerequisite for being admitted to a short programme is that the applicant has pursued studies within the frame of other programmes or through the system of independent courses. For example, in his or her undergraduate studies, an engineer would have taken several mathematics classes, and graduates from a biology programme would have gained extensive knowledge of what’s taught in the school subject biology; however, these types of prospective teachers are not qualified to teach in schools because they do not have a teaching degree. For these types of students, the short programme supplements their previous studies with classes in the core educational sciences and a practice-based internship. Thus, short programmes last only three semesters (90 ECTS).

This model has a particular history. After World War II, it was not widely advertised and was used as a rare and low-status exception that could be used by, for example, unemployed academics. However, this was once the main and in fact only avenue into subject-specific teaching, a model that was formalized in the early 1900s but which, in parallel with the reorganization of higher education studies, went from being based on studies in individual subjects into programmes designed to stretch over 3–5 years, as we have today, a change that put the former model in a bad light. The argument, which remains valid, was that you could better prepare a student teacher during a 5-year programme offering a specific sequence of learning events mixing different studies in a model focused on acquiring the professional competence required to be successful in the classroom than what was possible to achieve in a much shorter period of studies. So, the history is that the formerly primary model fell out of use and was replaced by the modern comprehensive programme model; in the last two decades, however, the old model has slowly been reintroduced and is now understood as a model that has as much merit as any other.³⁴

The preceding section has provided a picture of the common structures as expressed in the national regulations. As we have seen, there are more than 400 educational options for a prospective teacher, which means that most institutions offer several variants of the same programme. The explanation for this variety is that all programmes can be provided in different forms, at different speeds and with variable requirements in terms of both previous studies and previous professional experience; they can also account for simultaneous employment in schools and studying teacher education.

Historically, there has been a diversity in the ways to pursue teacher education studies. There have long been both formal and informal opportunities for different paces of study. In addition to traditional campus-based programmes, opportunities for distance studies have been available in teacher education programmes, as with other programmes. These have traditionally been of three different types:

• Education is delivered at a location other than the institution’s campus (most Swedish institutions are single-campus institutions) and provided by visiting teachers; these may be more accurately referred to as off-campus programmes.

• Education is provided as a distance programme, based on studies of literature and/or through various digital media, and students only travel to the institution’s physical campus for certain occasions. Alternatively, education is available in digital form but linked to the many different learning centres that have been established in many small municipalities without institutions for tertiary education.

• Education is completely provided and examined via the internet.

In recent years, two more variants of teacher education have emerged. These apply partly to short programmes and partly to what are known as practice-integrated programmes: school-based programmes that mirror the American concept of teacher residency programmes, but with the difference that “interns” are employed for part-time teaching as a kind of substitute teacher under supervision.³⁵ These teacher residencies are organized so that schools employ student teachers part time as they continue their studies.³⁶ The driving force behind these programmes is the widespread teacher shortage and the effort to open new paths to the teaching profession. However, the model can also be viewed in light of the relatively large percentage of teachers who are employed in schools but lack a teacher’s degree and thus cannot obtain a teacher’s credentials and permanent employment.³⁷

It is important to clarify that what is discussed here is simply a different form of study; in the end, students receive the same degree, and the degree requirements are identical. The opportunity to undergo this type of abbreviated teacher education has always existed in practice for subject teachers but has rarely been a formalized opportunity for other teacher degrees. The increased importance of this model is reflected by the fact that approximately one-third of subject teachers now earn their degrees through these programmes.³⁸ Like other teacher programmes, these supplementary courses are offered through different forms of distribution and with slightly different profiles. For example, a special model has a higher rate of study (125%) for people with a research degree (either a 2-year licentiate or a 4-year doctorate).³⁹ These students also receive an educational grant that serves as a salary during their studies. Special education provisions also exist for teachers with foreign degrees.⁴⁰

Teach for Sweden is another example of the variety in the Swedish teacher education landscape, though it has more in common with other Swedish forms of teacher education than its international counterparts. Like other short programmes, it offers people who have already obtained subject knowledge supplementary teacher education. While the initiative is identical to other programmes in that it has the same degree requirements and formal education is provided in regular higher education institutions, it differs in other aspects. Students undergo a specific selection process before admission, and the programme has a strong focus on leadership. Students are only placed in schools in disadvantaged areas with socio-economic challenges and are employed throughout their studies.⁴¹

The demands of these programmes and what we know about the complexity of becoming a teacher raise the question of whether education provided in these varied forms can maintain not only the same level but also a high-quality level, given how they differ in student profile, time for instruction and traditional interaction between teachers and students. Those posing this question often assume that traditional campus programmes offer the highest quality, but it may be the case that interaction with and among students can be equivalent or even more frequent in online models than in traditional ones.⁴² Paradoxically, these student teachers receive the lowest amount of teacher-led instruction in all of Swedish higher education, at an average of 8 h per week.⁴³

In summary, teacher education in Sweden is a multifaceted system that is conducted in substantially varying forms and types of educational institutions, with fundamentally different approaches to professional practice and with diverse funding and study conditions for students. From a critical perspective, it is reasonable to wonder about the possibility of maintaining equal levels of high quality in all aspects of the teacher education landscape. From another perspective, it is possible to interpret the situation as an expression of a process in which traditional forms of teacher education are under renegotiation to better meet current and future demands and the increased expectations of society and individuals.

2.3 Programme Funding and Funding for Studies in Teacher Education

In Sweden, higher education is free for students; no tuition fees are charged. The general rules that apply to higher education also apply to teacher education. Students are entitled to special loans through a publicly funded national programme. Sweden has offered such student loans in one form or another since 1919. The purpose of such loans has always been to prevent those born disadvantaged from being excluded from higher education. The modern and more general provision that makes a significant part of this support a subsidy rather than a loan has been in place since the 1960s.⁴⁴ Student loans and subsidies are intended to cover the costs of living and housing, textbooks and so on.⁴⁵ Students with student loans have the right, to a certain extent, to work while they study to earn additional income or obtain valuable experience that will improve their opportunities in the permanent labour market.

Students receive their loans in the form of monthly allowances during their studies, with regular checks of credits earned to ensure that each student is proceeding according to plan. If a student fails to make the required progress, the student loan will be withdrawn.⁴⁶ These loans are to be paid back over a 25-year period that starts after graduation. One-third of the amount of support consists of the subsidy, which does not need to be repaid, and the interest rate on the loan is very low (0.05% in 2021).⁴⁷ It has been suggested that a significant amount of the loan be forgiven for graduates who agree to teach in in rural areas, which face severe teachers recruitment challenges. However, no such model has yet been nationally approved.

Student teachers in the current model for residency programmes who work as teachers during their internships receive a monthly salary in addition to what is provided as a loan. This form of integrated models with, for example, half-time work and half-time studies are fairly recent and not yet established as a national model. Rather, they have emerged as local initiatives, with only a very small proportion of the country’s student teachers registered. However, this model may become more important due to the current severe teacher shortage because of their appeal to persons with other professional careers behind them.

Most of Sweden’s higher education institutions are public. Since the 1990s, education has been financed using a per capita model combined with specified cost allowances for areas of study. In practice, these institutions operate with divided funding systems for research, education and capital needs. There are currently 16 defined educational areas such as the humanities and social sciences, artistic fields and teaching. All courses offered are locally assigned to one of the various areas; through this classification, the financial bases for the education are determined. The lowest funding level applies to the humanities and social sciences (approximately SEK 53,000 in total). Natural science and medicine receive a higher level of funding of approximately SEK 86,000 and SEK 145,000, respectively. Teacher education receives approximately SEK 80,000. However, not all studies in a teacher education programme receive this funding level; for example, 210 ECTS in a 5-year programme for secondary teaching comprise subject studies and could be in the humanities or social sciences, which receive the lowest funding. The higher level of funding for teacher education only applies to educational sciences. There is also specific funding for student teacher internships (SEK 110,000), a percentage of which is used to compensate school districts for their support and supervision. Overall, one has to consider that the funding model is complicated and offers widely different conditions for different study programmes.

It is also worth noting that the per capita funding of education is divided into two parts. One part is obtained for a student who is registered for the programme in a given year, and the other part is based on how many ECTS that student earned during the year. In practice, this means that higher education institutions are encouraged to accept as many students as possible and that revenues decline in the event of decreased throughput. The model has also been criticized for providing incentives for lower quality by rewarding throughput. A strong programme rests on high quality-teaching, of which funding levels are an important precondition, but it also rests on extensive collaboration with schools and on research.

2.4 Different Conditions in Different Institutions

The model for how higher education is funded initially appears to grant equal conditions for all institutions, but that is not at always the case in reality. A central aspect of high-quality education in academia is a strong connection between education and research. Consequently, Sweden’s Higher Education Act requires institutions to maintain a “close connection between research and education”.⁴⁸ Research is, as noted above, financed separately from how pedagogical activities and does not use an equality-based model. Universities receive more extensive research funding than university colleges, older universities receive more funding than newer ones, institutions with particular profiles receives more funding than other and so on; taken together, this means that the same category of educational programme (e.g., a programme for primary school teachers) has different prerequisites that depend on the institution offering the programme. The model for distribution of research funding is primarily historical but does consider some quality indicators on the margins.⁴⁹

Teacher education is provided within different institutional categories, and since they receive very different proportions of research funding, the conditions for students vary greatly. Naturally, other conditions are also important, but this is arguably more than a marginal example of different prerequisites for these programmes; in fact, it is a crucial factor in the quality of higher education programmes in general. Table 4.2 aims to indicate how varied the local possibilities are to anchor educational programs in research are by presenting an overview of some examples of differences in this respect between an old university, a university inaugurated 1965, one designated a university in 1999 and a university college.

Table 4.2 Funding for education (based on a per capita model) and funding for research in four Swedish higher education institutions (2020)

The pattern is clear. Institutions of the same category as University College Dalarna has significantly less resources for providing its students with the type of enriching instruction that is based on an intense connection between research and learning opportunities that draws upon a deliberately programmatic design that gives the student extensive experiences of and insights into knowledge production and use. This is particularly important as teacher education programmes in general are proportionally larger in these type of institutions.

It must be noted that the Swedish higher education system has no mechanism to control the crucial link between research and education other than the general regulations stipulated in in the Higher Education Act.⁵⁰ As a consequence, there is a wide variety between institutions in how this is realized, and it also varies within institutions, depending on how they prioritize academic vs. professional in their funding models for research. In fact, there are no systematic reviews of how the size of research funding is linked to the teacher education field and to what degree teacher programmes are located within active research environments. These difficulties relate to the fact that teacher education and aligned educational sciences in Swedish higher education institutions usually is not located within separate organizational units. Therefore, this type of research is conducted within a variety of academic units and contexts.⁵¹ A recent governmental inquiry also confirmed that there is a lack of information regarding investments in educational science research and that it is very difficult to establish such information.⁵² But let’s look at some indications.

A national evaluation of the teacher education programmes in 2005 found “established research related to teacher education” in four universities and “relatively extensive resources” for third cycle studies related to teacher education in an additional four institutions.⁵³ The review evaluated 25 institutions. The 2008 evaluation found that the situation had improved; for example, research grants in this area at Uppsala University increased by over 60% compared with 2004. At the same time, the grant comprised only 0.65% of that university’s total research resources.⁵⁴ One study found that in two relatively large universities (institutions with extensive research funding), teacher education accounted for 8–10% of all degrees offered in 2012–2014, while that area was estimated to receive about 3.5% of research resources, indicating that neither national, nor local distribution of research resources did not appear to take into account the need for teacher education to be conducted in highly research-oriented environments.⁵⁵

In summary, the conditions for and quality of teacher education programme vary widely in Sweden’s higher education system. However, there has been some governmental support of relevant research during the last decades.⁵⁶ While this is clearly an improvement, the effort began from a very low level, so it is hard to foresee a significant increase of equality in the conditions between teacher education and other academic areas or between teacher education at different institutions. This change must be understood also in the context of deteriorating organisational autonomy for the teacher education sphere within Swedish higher education institutions (see Sect. 4.2).

2.5 The Many Reforms

It is difficult to understand the current model for teacher education, its strengths and weaknesses and thus the debates about it without a historical context. The briefest examination of modern Swedish society will reveal that education and teacher education are almost always on the reform agenda. The most recent example is from 2018. The election that September became followed by a rare process before a new administration took power. Usually, a new government is in place within a week or two after an election, but this did not occur until the beginning of 2019. The key obstacles turned out to be a rather detailed agreement (in 73 bullet points) between the parties from the previous administration, which ran from 2014 to 2018, and two liberal parties.⁵⁷ The agreement contained a number of reforms in the educational field, including reform of teacher education. A ministerial report was published and sent out for a public hearing in early 2021. We do not yet know where this process will end but, in accordance with the agreement, it will most likely result in the fourth teacher education reform in just over three decades and in the seventh reform that fundamentally changes Sweden’s national framework for teacher education since World War Two (Table 4.3).

Table 4.3 Teacher education (TE) reforms and higher education (HE) reforms with direct relevance to teacher education programmes

Since the Second World War, two major comprehensive university reforms have also profoundly impacted teacher education. The first was implemented at the end of the 1970s and came to have the greatest importance for teacher education by upgrading most post-secondary education to the university level. The old teacher seminars were discontinued, and the ongoing development and establishment of new, academically strong and research-based higher teacher education institutions designated for teacher education, that began in the 1950s was terminated in favour of a general merger of teacher education into existing higher education institutions. The basic motives for the reform were to increase accessibility, especially for students from families without academic traditions, to expand higher education programme offerings and to contribute to the democratization of higher education.⁵⁸ One consequence of this reform was that the more practice-based and skills-oriented teacher training based on the notion of professional training akin to the apprentice model (and located in teacher seminars) lost ground. Another way to put it is that it was boosted by the closer contact with the academic teacher education tradition in the universities, which was based on the scientific study of learning.

Prior to this reform, these traditions had also been in dialogue with each other, but they were now supposed to exist within the frame of a single organization. Today’s debates on teacher education issues are largely a continuing negotiation of the issues raised by this merger, which is now more than four decades in the past.⁵⁹ The reform of 2022 have not been announced as a reform, neither have it been prepared as a reform (which usually include a significant work by an governmental inquiry). It is only announced as a governmental initiative to raise quality of teacher education programs, establishing more attractive entry routes into teaching, raised entry requirements and improved governance.⁶⁰ The reform addresses heavily the problematic teacher shortage in Sweden but not much is said about how the reform reduces the required period of studies and how the new model for validation of prior studies in fact might reduce the requirements of academic qualification within the subjects that prospective teacher intend to teach.

Reforms aiming at countering teacher shortage more or less by default risk to negatively impact strategies for raised teacher quality. Swedish teacher education reform of 2022 appears to be a typical example of that. We have tough to take into account that the most challenging initiatives in that respect are conditioned within a 5 year period of experimentation. It might be the caste that this model will become permanent but it is of course also possible that it will be terminated within 5 years as the teacher shortage are diminishing according to predictions. It is though a rather remarkable move to launch such an experimentation. Sweden also have a significant shortage of physicians, but no voices is heard about alternative routes into medicine and shortening of programs to ease that problem. Probably we are witnessing a turning point in teacher education policy with the launch of the reform of 2022. Not only in these respects but also that sense that despite a decade of policy on increased autonomy for higher education institutions, this reform articulate need of and entail a more detailed governance of content in teacher education programs.⁶¹

2.6 Politics and Policy: The Relation Between Schools, Teacher Education and Educational Equity

The general political consensus around the introduction of the comprehensive school model was not strong and did consequently not last. The debate about the strengths and weaknesses of that model has naturally included questions about how teachers are educated; while that debate is too vast to fully analyse here, it has had a profound impact on teacher education reforms.

It is also noteworthy that the far-reaching decentralization and marketization of Swedish schools in the early 1990s led to teacher education becoming increasingly important for national equity. On December 8, 1989, a parliamentary decision transferred the responsibility for comprehensive schools from the national government to municipalities. On this occasion the Minister of Education and future Prime minister, Göran Persson, argued for the reform and highlighted, in response to the criticism that it would cause high levels of inequality, five factors that would guarantee educational equality and equity.⁶² After only a few years, only two of those factors remained – the national curriculum and the national teacher education model. However, a few years after that, the curriculum was dramatically reduced in both volume and specificity and reinforced the prevailing decentralization trend by leaving greater space for principals and teachers to make decisions and take actions independently, which also increased the importance of teacher education for equality and equity in education.

As the above description makes clear, Swedish teacher education is now housed in higher education institutions, and academia operates within a profound sense of autonomy. These institutions, despite being publicly funded and theoretically answerable to government, are notoriously hard to direct, so it has proven difficult to create and implement these programmes in a manner that supports equality in Swedish schools, given the wide variety of conditions. A national evaluation of all teacher education programmes in 2005 concluded that the model chosen for teacher preparation had created high levels of programme variation in both content and form.⁶³ The reform of 2011 aimed to reduce that variation, but Swedish teacher education is still a varied landscape. This observation should be taken into account with the assessment that the school system, through decentralization and marketization, has evolved from standardized and uniform into a state of “programmatic variation” which adds to the complexity.⁶⁴

2.7 Autonomous Higher Education Institutions Conducting Nationally Regulated Programmes: A Problematic Context?

Teacher education exists in the context of tension between institutional autonomy and national regulation.

Although each higher education institution has substantial autonomy on how to design, organize and operate academic programmes, the national Higher Education Ordinance regulates the degrees that they can award. General programmes like Bachelor of Arts or Master of Science are regulated in terms of quantitative requirements – how many ECTS a given degree entails – and by a core of nationally stipulated learning outcomes.⁶⁵ However, programmes leading to professional degrees, especially teacher education programmes, have an extensive set of national regulations on numerous aspects: content, form, length of studies, combination of subjects and learning outcomes.⁶⁶ The reform of 2022 takes this a step further by establishing a particular legislative regulation separate from The Higher Education Act and The Higher Education Ordinance, a move that diverge from the amplified governmental discourse during last years on the importance of autonomy for higher education institutions.⁶⁷

These national regulations are more extensive for teacher education programmes than other programmes. They also stipulate how many weeks should be spent on internships in schools and that 1 year (60 ECTS) is dedicated to “core education subjects” and their content. This detailed national regulation of teacher preparation has to be understood in the context of teacher education remaining one of the few traditional instruments for the national government to direct school development in a very decentralized school model.

In principle, national regulations are not supposed to specify the content of study programmes, with the exceptions described above. Content is to be locally determined, using plans established in each educational institution and each programme, and in their associated curricula. However, content and to some degree forms of implementation are regulated through the learning objectives associated with each degree. These objectives are divided into three categories, as shown with examples in Table 4.4.

Table 4.4 Categories of learning objectives with examples

In one sense, teacher education programmes are regulated like other programmes; and in theory, local institutions can add objectives, but that rarely occurs in teacher education. What stands out compared to other programmes are the more extensive quantitative and qualitative requirements for obtaining a degree, which may help explain why only some institutions have developed local objectives. The aspect that most clearly distinguishes the directive for teacher education from other programmes involves the very specific content directives regarding the year of study in core education subjects, which the regulations stipulate must include the following:

• history of the school system, its organization and conditions, along with core educational values including fundamental democratic values and human rights

• syllabus theory and didactics

• theory of knowledge and research methodology

• interdisciplinary studies in development and learning, including studies in cognitive science, and special needs education

• social relationships, conflict management and leadership

• assessment and grading, and

• evaluation and development processes.⁶⁸

This regulation does not mean that there have to be seven different courses or that this content should be grouped into a general area of studies taken by all student teachers in the same manner. On the contrary, it is to be read as a specification of content; it is also made clear that these studies should be adapted to future professional practice.⁶⁹ At the same time, the directives are vague enough that it is possible to interpret them as implying that these studies should be different from others and thus specifically intended for teachers. However, national teacher education policy have increasingly become detailed in its governance. The requirement launched in 2022 (mentioned above) that all programs should comprise studies in cognitive science is a recent example of that. The government has also announced their intention to establish a national model for monitoring the exact number of hours of instruction in teacher education programs, a rather remarkable example of detailed directives.⁷⁰

Other examples of the more explicit national governance of these programmes are the detailed regulations regarding which subjects can be combined into a degree.⁷¹ This is a striking contrast to the prior model in which it was up to each student to choose school subjects. As there has not been extensive debate on this change, it might be perceived as minor, but it is striking from the perspective of educating professionals that future members of the teaching profession are not granted this right to plan their careers. A last example involves grading. Generally, each institution decide on a grading system for its programmes, but that freedom is restricted for teacher education programmes.⁷² This trajectory continues in a ministerial report in early 2021 that outlines proposals for future reforms of teacher education.⁷³ The articulated intention of the document is to address issues of teacher quality and the teacher shortage; despite the fact that institutional autonomy is emphasized, the document proposes detailed national regulation of content, among other areas, about which more detail appears below.

These examples show how national governance does not really accord with institutional self-perceptions of autonomy or with the national government’s articulated but partly ostensible support of the idea of autonomous academic institutions. The rhetoric on institutional autonomy that has paradoxically grown in during recent years in the form of national higher education reforms signalling increased autonomy.⁷⁴ Teacher education is thus struggling to some extent with its localization in academia. Put differently and perhaps more accurately, the organs of the national government and academic institutions are all struggling with how to handle teacher education as both a professional and an academic programme.⁷⁵

3 Present-Day Challenges: Aspects of Change and Continuity in Swedish Teacher Education

Before looking into todays challenges, let’s take a look at some problem areas of a general and profound nature, less colored by contemporary culture and politics.

3.1 Critique and Critical Notions: How Can We Understand the Current Situation?

3.1.1 A Picture of the Criticism

Teacher education is a frequently debated topic. Over the last decade, the Swedish phrase that translates to “teacher education” has appeared in daily newspapers more than a thousand times annually, which indicates indicating not only the level of debate but also its persistent nature.⁷⁶ The criticisms of teacher education usually involve the following aspects:

• The quality is low, as is the throughput.

• There is a lack of balance between theory and practice.

• The components of programmes do not align.

• There is an insufficient and focus on the practice of teaching that appears too late in the programmes.

• There is too little focus on classroom management and the teacher’s role as leader and inspirer.

• Programmes are unable to develop future teachers’ ability to individualize their teaching to meet their students’ needs.

• Programmes are reluctant to prepare students for parental cooperation and other tasks outside the classroom.

• Teacher education programmes are isolated from other academic programmes, professions and potentially enriching environments.

• Institutions fail to identify students that are ill suited for the teaching profession and do not force such students to leave the programme.

• The rules that govern how students combine different subjects in their degrees are dysfunctional.

• The recognition and validation of other studies adopt too narrow a view, leading to bottlenecks in terms of entering the profession).

The continuity in these critiques is nothing short of remarkable. The Swedish government assigned in 1946 a school commission with a driving ambition to reform education in Sweden; its members soon realized that this effort also required reforming teacher preparation and studied what was wrong with such programmes at that time. The above is a summary of criticisms that appeared in their work in the 1940s, but these themes can also be found in today’s debate.⁷⁷

Not only is there a consistency in this criticism, there is also a stunning continuity in the proposed solutions to educational shortcomings. When it comes to teachers, there has to be improvement in “recruitment and the possibility of better selection, better substantive education in teacher training institutions, on-the-job training of younger teachers by more experienced ones”; of course, there has to be a raise in pay and an increase in status and “prestige of the teaching profession”. We discuss these same propositions today and, although they are put on the table as new, they have a long history in Sweden and elsewhere. The quotes in this paragraph are from an influential report that appeared after the Sputnik crisis in the late 1950s in the United States, but they are still voiced today in the Swedish debate.⁷⁸

It is striking to consider how many times questions regarding teacher education have been inquired since the beginning of the post-war redesign of the educational system in Sweden and how many reforms have taken place, but the same criticism recurs again and again, as if we are marching in circles and revisiting eternal problems and dilemmas.⁷⁹ If there were simple solutions to educational problems, this would not be happening. But because the challenges in that field are more close to dilemmas than readily solvable problems, they persist because they “are messy, complicated, and conflict-filled situations that require undesirable choices between competing, highly prized values that cannot be simultaneously of fully satisfied”.⁸⁰ Much of the criticism depicts an endeavour that is standing still rather than moving forward, but at the same time teachers and principals testify about change, change and more change. A well-informed mind might be able to paint a more nuanced picture by describing how these dilemmas could be balanced, rather than “solved”, which simply is not likely to happen because so many educational issues are about human differences, relationships, and contextual factors.

3.1.2 Ambitions and Conditions for Realization

We have seen above the high level of national reform efforts in Swedish teacher education, and the recurrent criticisms may lead to the conclusion that we are dealing with a problem without solutions. However, it may be the case that reforms have focused on problem solving when it would have been more appropriate to devise strategies that focus on dilemmas and how to balance their competing perspectives. Why? Because teacher education as an endeavour exists amid other activities and their main priorities. This is a consequence of the fact that a limited understanding sees teacher education as programmes preparing individuals for a certain task and of no value in itself; in other words, its only value is related to its importance for the education of others.⁸¹ At the heart of designing teacher education programmes, there is thus a conflict between prioritizing what is best for schools and their pupils and other priorities. The situation in schools, societal and individual educational ambitions and the like sets the primary frame for what are usually perceived as problems in teacher education, but how ambitions will be realized depends on the priorities of higher education institutions and their school districts partners.

The very mission of schools contains seeds of some of the challenges that teacher education programmes have faced. What should be the core elements of educating children and youth? Subject knowledge and skills? Or is education about something more, something that also includes personal development, identities, socialization and acquisition of democratic values? And what about the forms for instruction – should there be one-way transmission of information, student-centred dialogue, problem-based inquiries, or what?

Frequently, the discussion becomes a tug-of-war between poles that can clash with the mission of education and the foundational insight that systematic acquisition of knowledge and skills only rarely occurs without a broader development of the individual, as we all change in relation to what we learn. Put differently, individual development in this respect is largely about internalizing knowledge and mastering capabilities, and this acquisition process relates to values, understanding life, society, identity and what it means to be a human in this world.⁸²

Most teachers have found that teaching involves both explaining and describing phenomena and consciously shaping representations and processes to suit the learner, on the one hand, and motivating and interesting learners so that they not only becomes open and receptive but actually internalize knowledge into personal “knowing” and form insights in a meaningful manner, so that knowledge is not only accessible but “lives” in people’s consciousness and becomes an integral part of their personal identity and how they perceive the world, and by that becomes a resource for agency and action.

These multiple ambitions define schools as complex undertakings that face major challenges that are likely to be even greater for those who seek to educate teachers. On one hand, the challenges involve general conditions for school education as such and partly the cross-border nature of the teaching profession itself. The above description of the purpose of school education indicates that it has several functions. It should help qualify individuals for professional life, but it must also lay the foundations for their active lives as citizens and must in addition also contribute to the socialization of individuals so that they can work and live together and be able to develop a democratic society. Furthermore, education should offer all students an opportunity to develop their personality and understand themselves, enabling them to nurture their dreams and handle their lives accordingly.⁸³ Finally, as Aristotle argued, the aim of the constitution, the shared effort to create a life together, is happiness; education is the central activity in that effort as it turns human beings into citizens.⁸⁴

As challenging as education is in itself, it occurs in different contexts and against an unknown future, which is a challenge of enormous magnitude. Linda Darling-Hammond describes it well: “Thus, the new mission of schools is to prepare students to work in jobs that do not exist, to create ideas and solutions for products and problems that have not yet been identified, using technologies that have not yet been invented”.⁸⁵ It is no surprise that there are so many understandings of education and thus what is most essential in teacher education, as the different ambitions stretch from limited to daunting, from individual to collective and from reproducing what is known to transformative abilities oriented towards an unknown and unknowable future. But what do these debates reflect?

3.1.3 The Illusion of Simplicity

Educating students for an unfamiliar tomorrow is obviously difficult, and for those who will educate schoolteachers, even more challenges are added. In The Trouble with Ed Schools, David Labaree notes two particular difficulties in American teacher education. The first is that “teaching is an enormously difficult job that looks easy”.⁸⁶ One consequence of the fact that teaching, to an untrained eye, may look simple in its execution is that those responsible for crafting education policy have likely underestimated the need for firm structures that advance teachers’ instructional abilities; another is an underdeveloped professional language and an insufficient professional knowledge base.

The lack of support for advancing teaching capabilities is easily identifiable from a historical perspective, not the least from the fact that society has periodically expanded school education, whether from a 6-year mandatory model into a 9-years model or otherwise, without ensuring that when these measures are implemented, well-educated teachers are on hand to fulfil the lofty ambitions of policy. Another example is the common absence of any systematic initiative for teachers’ career-long development.⁸⁷ Yet another is the prevalence of the extensive use of inadequately educated teacher substitutes, in stark contrast to the practices in comparable professions of direct relevance to the general public and regulated by the government.

The second difficulty that Labaree discusses is not about the seemingly simplistic nature of teaching but its complexity, its high degree of difficulty: “The general rule of teaching is that general rules do not help very much”.⁸⁸ Early efforts in Sweden to build an academic foundation for the professional practice tended to simplify educational and psychological reasoning, in stark contrast to the teaching experience. In addition, and as a consequence of tendencies towards the trivialization of professional tasks, many efforts were invested in finding the “one” method for instruction rather than enhancing teachers’ competence to autonomously make decisions about using a variety of instructional strategies and models based on what the content, students and context require, in essence, this development signals a tension between professionalization and de-professionalization. On a general level, it took until the 1990s before more subject-specific research on teaching and learning, mirroring the pedagogical content knowledge approach that emerged in United States, become a more widely used research orientation in Sweden.

3.1.4 General Methods but Teaching Is About Specific Activities, Individual Students and Teachers

The dilemma regarding aspects of general and specific orientation of teachers professional knowledge has several dimensions as it involves issues regarding variation in content, subjects, school forms and the like, on the one hand, and human differences on the other. Students and teachers are individuals with shifting priorities, capacities, approaches and motivations. The challenge is even more daunting as the standard procedure in education is collective, and these types of differences can cause difficult dynamics in interaction, exchange and receptiveness.

There has historically been a tension in teacher education between whether a focus on general pedagogical studies or more specific ones are preferable. These positions highly oversimplify the foundational question about the knowledge and competence needed to be capable of systematically helping another person to acquire certain insights and capabilities. As touched on above, both content and humans vary, which shapes opportunities for teaching and learning, a long-established mainstream observation in educational research.⁸⁹ However, depending on circumstances, like for example a gap between what a person knows and the knowledge that the same person is expected to acquire, both general and specific strategies might be applicable. It could also be the case that a specific approach might be more useful in designing an instructional activity but less so for analysing the outcome of a sequence of instruction. The way forward for teacher education in this respect appears to be about deepening insights into the different variations and their relation to certain aspects of functionality rather than deciding what is “right” or “wrong”; those insights must be accompanied by attention to the fact that teachers must be allowed to act according to general insights in diverse patterns and thus be deeply anchored in themselves and their personality.⁹⁰

In a study of what teachers really do when they teach it is described that:

• “They portray curriculum content in a way that renders it comprehensible to naive minds,

• for students who are not necessarily interested in learning,

• whose grasp of the content is not readily visible to the teacher,

• and who are restless and easily distracted;

• in a way that satisfies the teachers’ personal needs.”⁹¹

What is added here is that on top of the student dimensions of instructional challenges, there is also a monumental challenge faced by a teacher educator – to help all prospective teachers find their way to teach, teaching must not only be appropriate to every situation as to content and learner but also in harmony with the teacher’s personality. The rationale is not only to avoid too much discrepancy between what the teacher says and does and what he or she “is” for the students, but also and above all to maximize synergy, where teachers’ actions, being and attitude support the totality of ambitions, societal and individual, that characterize the school as an institution.

This kind of challenging totality that every teacher has to shoulder, this holistic notion of teaching and its importance for successful teaching too often appear missing from the picture, perhaps because it is a daunting challenge and a perspective that can be difficult to digest. However, it may be the case that this phenomenon relates to the level of difficulty in the sense that it has hampered research and consequently the development of a professional language, despite the fact that its importance is widely accepted among students, parents, teachers and principals. Educating teachers is a profound challenge in itself, and any aspiration to educate teachers must address the following foundational questions:

• What should be the objectives of the programmes?

• Who can be educated into teaching and who should become a teacher?

• What should teachers study?

• When should the various content be studied and in what order?

• Who could and should educate new teachers?

• Where should teachers be educated? In what settings and under what circumstances?

• How should the programmes interact and collaborate with schools and the profession?⁹²

Fundamentally, it is about having a well-developed answer to the question of what characterizes the most favourable situation for a person to acquire the knowledge and competencies needed by a successful teacher. This leads to another set of questions that complements the preceding list:

• What kind of experiences do children need to grow and learn and develop the confidence and competence they need to succeed in life?

• What kind of knowledge do teachers need to facilitate these experiences for children and youth?

• What kinds of experiences must teachers have to develop these kinds of knowledge?⁹³

3.1.5 Teaching as an Epistemological Challenge

The situation is a bit paradoxical. On the one hand, reflecting on three central aspects introduced above, it appears not to be particularly difficult to establish and operate a teacher education programme. On the other, historical experience and the previously outlined difficulties lead to the opposite conclusion. It appears as if the endeavour to educate teachers branches into a series of difficult challenges for the various actors involved. To achieve success at the system level, it appears necessary that all challenges be met insightfully and with explicit and strong ambitions. The following points appear to be the crucial challenges:

• teacher education as a societal task

• teacher education as a collaborative task for the school system and for individual schools

• teacher education as a professional task for higher education institutions

• teacher education as a task for particular organizations in these institutions, each with its own legacy

• teacher education as task for individual teacher educators

• teacher education as a task for the teaching profession and individual schoolteachers

• teacher education as a study programme for prospective teachers.

Each bullet point translates into an extensive field of sub-questions, many of which have been discussed at length in the literature. But in addition to these points and those above, there is a perspective on the body of professional knowledge and competence that appears to have been at least partly overlooked. If we can conclude that content, context and people all vary, then we can understand something about the profound challenges teachers face in their daily work. However, we have to expand this perspective as the enactment of teaching also occurs at the intersection between epistemology and the foundational purposes of education.

A brief discussion might depart from Aristotle and his epistemological distinctions of “qualities through which the mind achieves truth” that translates into capacities like “art or technical skill, scientific knowledge, prudence, wisdom and intelligence”.⁹⁴ In a more simplified version in the educational literature, his notions boil down distinctions between to “know that” (episteme), to “know how” (techne) and to “know why” (phronesis), but we need to add dimensions that Aristotle’s wider view appears to have included or at least pointed towards. We can think about this in terms of bildung, (the capacities to take an overview, make connections, synthesize and identify implications, etc.), generative abilities, envisioning and creativity. A teacher needs to possess all these qualities and be simultaneously aware of them and the fact the task at hand in every moment in the classroom is to further all pupils’ development in all these aspects while at the same time enact the main function of education: qualification for working life and for an active life in society, together with socialization and subjectification. This enactment also has to be purposeful for all students on every occasion, meaning that when responding to one student’s question, the teacher has to consider how his or her response can be conducive to all students learning and towards developing all of Aristotle’s qualities – and hence fulfilling the extensive purposes with education. This aspect of complexity is usually overlooked, which is surprising given that it is consequential for education in the form that exists in most societies today. A tentative explanation for why these dimensions is seldom foregrounded is that the educational literature prioritizes reducing complexity to make these issues more accessible for prospective teachers.

This dimension adds extensively to the difficulty that inherently comes with designing teacher education programmes. Due to societal changes and the growing body of research, it appears necessary – on every occasion and in every context – to revisit and renegotiate the approach to these persistent questions about how best to educate teachers. The preceding discussion has suggested why this renegotiation is both necessary and difficult. Society is changing, as are the role of schools and teaching assignments, but the conditions for higher education itself are also changing. On an individual level, each person’s choice of path in life is part of a larger shift between generations, values ​​and understandings of the individual and society. The trajectory of how values in Sweden are changing is certainly not unique, but it is highly distinctive in its individualism and secularism.⁹⁵

At bottom, the entire area of ​​teacher education is a mix of challenges characterized by adaptation and change to meet new trends, the retention of both basic knowledge and competences necessary for teaching and the foundational academic approach and the ability to renew knowledge and insights through a scientific system based on an independent, creative and critical attitudes. The next section shifts the focus from these overarching questions to more concrete aspects of the challenges faced by contemporary Swedish teacher education.

3.2 Problems and Challenges in and for Today’s Teacher Education Programmes

Criticisms of contemporary Swedish teacher education are best understood from the perspective of the perpetual need to revisit and renegotiate how society shoulders the task of educating teachers. As such, it ought to be a deliberation that involves practitioners, researchers, schools (not to forget pupils and their parents), higher education and politicians. However, the debate appears to have become, to a significant extent, a political battleground, with proposals emerging that reflect the political needs for visibility rather than a sincere desire to improve education. There is presently a discussion about the content of these programmes. In simplified terms, the criticism consists partly of a discussion about removing certain study areas in favour of, say, teaching about modern cognitive science, brain research and digital tools, and a discussion that seeks to highlight content in education that could help address current societal problems, such as sustainable development. The former can at least partly illustrate how content issues tends to become zero-sum games, and the latter how societal problems and dilemmas that are hard to solve or at least sufficiently rebalance can easily become educationalized.⁹⁶ In Sweden, teacher education since 1990 has been continuously evaluated by national government agencies We start this section by looking into these reports.

3.2.1 Quality in Terms of Programmes: Evaluations, Politics and Reforms

In recent years, all teacher education programmes have been evaluated by the Swedish Higher Education Authority.⁹⁷ Outcomes are either approved, indicating they are of high quality, or failed. In the latter case, there is a 1-year process for improvement that involves submitting a revised report and follow-up processes. If the second evaluation also indicates insufficient quality, the programme is terminated.⁹⁸ Recent findings are as follows:

• Of 19 preschool teacher education programmes, 11 were approved.⁹⁹

• Of 48 primary school teacher education programmes, 24 were approved.¹⁰⁰

• Of 102 secondary teacher education (subject-specific) programmes, 58 were approved.¹⁰¹

• Of 10 vocational teacher education programmes, 4 were approved.¹⁰²

The criticism of a programme can vary, along with the evaluation methods applied and the context in which the review takes place. Swedish teacher education programmes had prior to this last round been evaluated 2005 and 2008; in addition, in 2010 all institutions were forced to undergo an accreditation process.¹⁰³ This section begins with a review of those outcomes. In 2005, the evaluation included a follow-up of the 2001 reform.¹⁰⁴ Criticism was directed at that time at the quality of the programmes in terms of organization, teacher competence and the degree to which they were research-based. The clear impression was conveyed that the programmes were highly varied and thus failed to achieve equality. For example, some higher education institutions clearly had established research that related to their programmes, while others to a high degree lacked such support for their programmes and some institutions devoted significant resources to research, whereas others did not.¹⁰⁵

It is not surprising that a reform featuring flexibility and freedom of choice could result in a situation in which students in parallel programmes at different institutions received highly varied educations and thus demonstrated highly varied competence as teachers in the end, which is a problem from a school-oriented equality perspective. Additionally, problems regarding progression were noted in most programmes and appeared to the evaluators as fragmented, which, in combination with unclear or minimal exit requirements, had a negative impact on the programmes.¹⁰⁶

The evaluation results were widely circulated in the media, a process that was ignited by the minister in charge of higher education and research, the social democrat Leif Pagrotsky, who published a debate article under the heading “I do not accept the low demands on student teachers”, in which he extensively criticized these programmes.¹⁰⁷ Soon after, similarly intense criticism came from the rest of the political spectrum. The municipality of Stockholm had long had a local politician heavily engaged in educational issues, Jan Björklund of the Liberal Party. His political energy was largely focused on frequent and extensive criticism of schooling and teacher education in Sweden.¹⁰⁸ Together with his party leadership, he soon published a debate article that not only articulated sharp criticism but also argued for discontinuing responsible institutions.

The article put forward the necessity of making teacher education a responsibility of higher education generally rather than particular institutions.¹⁰⁹ A reform had already been implemented in the 1970s, so that approach was perceived by many educators to be based on either a misunderstanding or a conscious political strategy for visibility or other tactical priorities. However, as Sweden still had one institution that only educated teachers, the Stockholm Institute of Education, the argument was valid in that municipality, in contrast to the national situation. The intensity of the debate has to be understood in the light of increased political tensions between the social democratic government in place since 1994 and the growing aspirations of liberal-conservative opposition parties to win the elections in 2006, an ambition for which they formed an alliance in 2004. That alliance did win the 2006 elections, with Björklund soon becoming minister for education.¹¹⁰

Academic leaders in charge of teacher education aspired to give their view of the situation but were denied access to the same debate forum. They chose to purchase a full-page advertisement with the same layout as the debate forum to publish their response, which reveals the intensity of the debate. Their message was that a biased, unbalanced and unilateral debate risked “lowering the status and quality of teacher education”.¹¹¹ It is difficult to avoid interpreting the intense debate as an expression of the politicization of the view on schools and thus teacher education, along with the tension between outside and inside perspectives.

In light of the shortcomings found in the evaluation, follow-up studies appeared in November 2006, which argued that one in four students who had pursued a teacher’s degree should actually have failed.¹¹² The harshness of the debate was not in accordance with what the evaluation had proposed. Despite being profoundly critical, the evaluation did not propose any terminations of accreditation or anything that dramatic. Instead, a report for each institution was presented that offered transparent and balanced recommendations and advice. In addition, a series of special investigations was published that drew attention to weaknesses in the national framework for these programmes.¹¹³

In December 2006, the new government announced, again in a debate article, that it intended to discontinue the Stockholm Institute of Education, that it was the government policy that higher education institutions that did not respond appropriately to the evaluation criticisms should lose their accreditation and that a government inquiry regarding a full reform of teacher education would be established.¹¹⁴ In spring 2007, the two ministers from the Liberal Party at the Department for Education, again in a debate article, presented a major reform package of teacher programmes, and the national inquiry into a new teacher education model was announced in summer 2007.¹¹⁵

All in all, the process clearly revealed a high degree of political engagement in the issue, and the process did not follow the traditional dialogue-based model; instead, a series of decisions were made that signalled a strong determination to impose change from the top down. The inquiry that had led to the teacher education model that would now be discontinued had been conducted by a parliamentary committee.¹¹⁶ The purpose of such an inquiry is usually to emphasize the importance of an issue and to reach a political agreement that includes most of the parties in parliament to secure long-term stability. When the new inquiry was launched, a radically different model was chosen, featuring a single chair, a secretariat and a group of experts.¹¹⁷ In this model, the experts were more of a group that were consulted during the process rather than a group playing a decisive role.

The evaluation had made clear that it was the responsibility of criticized institutions to take action and that a new evaluation was planned to study their expected progress. The sequence of political initiatives and events is somewhat surprising, as the government obviously did not wait for the outcome of that evaluation before taking actions that would completely overhaul the model, an initiative that appears to have been predetermined and hence without a foundation in the follow-up evaluation.¹¹⁸ In retrospect and from the perspective of contemporary problems with teacher education and the high level of continuity in the criticisms of these programmes, the episode is an example of these programmes’ vulnerability to political governance. On the one hand, it is self-evident that politics has a role in setting directives for endeavours of such vital societal importance as teacher education and that policies must ensure quality in such programmes. On the other, politicians are not experts and may cause more problems than they solve if they act without a strong, independent foundation of information. There are risks in not taking action, but it might be even riskier to implement profound change in a badly designed form and in a manner that does not nurture long-term improvement.

The evaluation presented in spring 2008 showed significant improvements, but the problems with too few teacher educators with PhDs remained in many places. Institutions had taken action to reduce flexibility and thereby established more standardized pathways in the criticized programmes; however, the problem of weak subject-specific educational studies remained. The evaluators also found deficiencies in compulsory elements and the general progression in studies. Problems of excessive variation remained to some extent, and the programmes still revealed features of fragmentation. For example, the study found that in one university, education was provided without a stable staff; 160 teachers were involved in the programmes, but the average proportion of their work for those programmes was only 10%, a situation that was perceived as insufficient to ensure continuity and coherence.¹¹⁹ In total, 10 of 26 institutions had at least one programme that was not approved.¹²⁰

In December 2008 came the report from the governmental inquiry on teacher education reform and in February 2010, the government presented the bill Best in Class: A New Teacher Education and already in April the bill was passed by the parliament.¹²¹ The new programmes were expected to admit their first students in 2011, before which they all had to receive accreditation, as one consequence of the reform was the introduction of new degrees which rendered all previous accreditations formally obsolete. This decision has to be understood in the context of the political debates and the government’s desire to reduce the number of institutions offering teaching degrees.

After a 10-year reform period, the 2019–2021 evaluations found essentially the same problems as had been depicted in previous evaluations.¹²² The programmes’ design, implementation and results were according to these evaluations failing.¹²³ The landscape is shifting and the team of experts asserted that their impression was that teacher education programmes are operated by “hard-working and ambitious teachers”; they reported encountering “many good examples”.¹²⁴ However, a review of all the institution-specific assessments indicates that variation remains within certain areas. As stated above, there are deficiencies in progression, coherence and assessment, but the expert group also points towards the importance of ensuring students’ learning, which we have to understand as referring to the continuation of insufficient examination.¹²⁵

In previous evaluations, the scientific and research basis of the programmes was shown to have clear deficiencies, which remains despite the improvement found in 2008 of the allocation of research resources in several higher education institutions.¹²⁶ In the latest round of evaluation, it was found that resources in terms of teacher educators with relevant PhDs were deficient in several institutions; there were also examples of programmes with overly fragmented teaching staff, which the assessment group believed to have a negative impact on education.

A well-developed scientific environment appears to be a necessary but insufficient condition for high-quality education in a scientific sense. Successful researchers tend to have very little teaching time in the programmes, and a key challenge is to remedy this and connect teachers (from within these institutions and from schools) to these programmes in a way that ensures sufficient continuity and allows them to serve as sense-makers for the students, bridging theory and practice in the context of professional formation. Another key challenge appears to be recruiting the most experienced and advanced schoolteachers to serve part time in these programmes.

Thus, in one sense, history repeated itself. The previous teacher education reform was initiated before the results of the ongoing evaluation were clear, and the same thing happened in 2019. For those with the criticism of the 1946 School Commission in mind, it is worth considering what lies in the remarkably similar criticism of teacher education programmes. Obviously, these programmes have been profoundly reformed several times, yet several of the same issues persist. And recently the history of Swedish teacher education started a new chapter.

The Swedish parliamentary elections in September 2018 failed to produce a clear winner, and it took until January 2019 for a new government to be established. This was done through an agreement between the parties in power during the previous term (the Social Democrats and the Swedish Green Party) and two liberal parties (the Centre Party and the Liberal Party). The programme they agreed on for the mandate period included a reform of teacher education. It is most likely a clear indication of how politicized education is in Sweden, that issues like bans on the use of cell phones and application of the grading system in schools together with regulations of the number of instruction hours and content in teacher education programmes are part of political negotiations.

An early 2021 ministerial report suggested, in accordance with the agreement that helped establish a government after the election, a series of propositions under the heading of enhanced quality and an increased number of teachers.¹²⁷ The report, an outcome of the political agreement mentioned above, addressed teacher quality and teacher shortage issues but, according to the responses voiced in the open consultation process, the proposals failed in that effort.¹²⁸ A substantial strand of criticism focused on increased levels of detailed top-down governance as the report entails some formal propositions regarding the legislation and due to a proposals that require changes in the core content of these programmes. Several institutions reacted negatively to the notion that the political level engaged in discussions of content – let alone determine content – in these programmes. Another strand of criticism expressed profound concern over the fact that the report proposed a reduction of the number of semesters and credits required for the alternative route into teaching from three (90 ECTS) to two semesters (60 ECTS). A third strand of criticism pointed to the fact that the ambition to simplify the validation of prior knowledge and experience will result in lowered entrance requirements. In December 2021 governmental decisions was settled on all of those proposals and some came into effect already in January 2022, other will be implemented during in fall 2022 and during 2023.¹²⁹

We have above traced the outcome of the last two decades of evaluations, which on the one hand offers a picture of shortcomings in these programmes but on the other hand reveals both the continuation in critique and how that might lack a more sincere ambition to pay attention to outcome from evaluations. We have also briefly outlined the contours of political involvement in governing teacher education as an illustration of, or rather an indication of the conditions for, the local operation and advancement of these programmes. This issue is taken up again in the final section of this chapter, but some aspects of the teacher education programmes are discussed first.

3.2.2 Quality in Terms of Students: Recruitment and Attractiveness of Programmes

Is teacher education an attractive choice for a young person today? Is teacher education an attractive choice for a career changer, for someone with a higher education degree and extensive experience? Are enough students attracted to the profession – and are the right students attracted? Application patterns have been used to discuss teacher quality and the teacher shortage, which has recently become a central concern in Sweden. Media have depicted catastrophically low interest in the teaching profession by highlighting that a larger cohort of young individuals in Sweden applied for participation in Paradise Hotel, a famous television show on youth, relationships and sex, than for a teacher education programme.¹³⁰ The story goes that more than 10,000 applied for admittance to Paradise Hotel, a higher number than applications to teacher education. In, the same years as this story surfaced, 45,007 applications was submitted to teacher education programs in Sweden and among them, over 34,000 was qualified applicants and over 26,000 applicants had teacher education as their first choice.¹³¹ Stories like this, despite being untrue, tend to stick, as “everyone knows” that no one wants to become teachers. This story aligns to a medialized picture of teacher educations as flawed programs and to the prevalent teacher shortage. It is true that there is a teacher shortage but that’s not the same thing as nobody wants to become teacher, shortage it is due to high demands.

The actual situation is that teacher education is the largest educational field in quantitative terms throughout Swedish higher education. In autumn 2020, over 42,000 people applied for a teacher education programme. Almost as many people applied for an engineering degree, and about half as many applied for degrees in nursing or social work, the other large professional programmes.¹³² Of the applicants for the teacher education programmes in the autumn term of 2020, 33,000 were found qualified and 24,000 applicants had a teacher education programme as their first priority. The number of applicants has grown over the last decade but with some variations during the period, more than 18,000 people were admitted in fall 2020.¹³³ During fall 2019 and spring 2020, close to 10,000 students graduated.¹³⁴ Seven of ten students are women, a proportion that has been fairly stable in recent years.¹³⁵

The large number of applicants indicates broad interest in becoming a teacher. However, if the total number of applicants is compared with the number who applied for teacher education as their first priority, it is clear that teacher education is frequently seen as a secondary choice.¹³⁶ Of all the applicants to teacher education programmes, only over half applied for them as their first choice. The fact that the figures significantly have been improved since 2011 (+76%) have not yet washed away the mark as a second option program (Table 4.5).¹³⁷

Table 4.5 Proportion of first-hand applicants (Fall semester 2021)

Without other evidence, care should be taken in interpreting the fact that close to half of those applying for teacher education programmes did not make teaching their first choice. At the same time, that could be an indicator of how applicants view the attractiveness not only of working in schools and the teaching profession but also of teacher education as such. The attractiveness of teacher education will likely be determined not primarily by particular programmes but by perceptions of the professional role and school activities. The Swedish case shows a trend over time that students with stronger academic qualifications tend to favour programmes other than those oriented towards teaching.¹³⁸ It is also true that the profession’s so-called auto-reproduction is declining; fewer children of teachers are choosing to become teachers, which may indicate that the profession and/or the school as a workplace have declining appeal.¹³⁹ But other explanations may apply as well. Furthermore, there has been an increase in the proportion of students with a working-class background, and this proportion is larger in teacher education programmes than in higher education in general; about half the students in teacher education programmes have parents without any higher education themselves.¹⁴⁰ The notion of the trajectory is dual. On the one hand, it can be perceived that the teacher education field is exemplary in the sense that the programmes contribute to widening participation and to reducing social divisions in higher education. On the other, it cannot be ruled out that this development can also be understood as an expression of the declining prestige and appeal of teacher education programmes and the teaching profession.

3.2.3 Do Teacher Programmes Have the Wrong Students?

The Swedish debate about teacher education programmes has, in addition to discussing the number of students, also addresses the quality of the students that do apply. Who can become a good teacher? What is a good student teacher? What are the characteristics of students with the best opportunities to develop into highly capable teachers? Questions of this type are not a particularly Swedish phenomena, but they relate in an important way to the question of whether it is really possible to be educated to become a teacher, which seems to be the underlying premise, an assumption that leans towards the idea that teaching involves qualities with which one is born rather than acquired through education.

The unique teaching qualities that some people obviously possess sometimes lead to the notion that teaching is all about innate talent. That this is not the case is quite clear from the fact that no human being is born with insights into either atomic physics or the history of antiquity, both areas that are included in school curricula; thus, a person must be educated in these fields to be able to teach them. As in other professions, there is also essential knowledge, both theoretical and practical, on how to practice the teaching profession. Just as we are not born with deep insights into theoretical physics, nobody takes their first breath with the extensive psychological, sociological and pedagogical theoretical insights that facilitate teaching and learning. In addition, the fact that individuals have different capacities to absorb theoretical insights indicates that deliberate education is important. However, the issue is more complicated, as premises are more likely to be orientated around ideas of teaching as a kind of performance technique rather than an deliberate execution of educational insights in a way that results in students’ development of knowledge.

It must be noted that the whole educational system is based on the idea that it is possible to learn new things and strengthen weak abilities and that this is best done through different methods which is usually referred to as teaching. Why central teaching abilities should be exempted from that indisputable fact is unclear. As in every other area of study, students vary in their personal qualities and prior knowledge, and some will fail and never obtain a degree, in teacher education as in other areas of study. The fact that individuals are different and have various levels of innate talents and abilities has already been noted in this chapter, but discussions about teacher education sometimes also become a question of whether the right individuals become teachers. The idea that educational shortcomings in schools mainly relate to teacher education having the wrong students is rather problematic. Of course, students with higher entry levels in some respects are to certain extent an advantage for a programme, but as a general model, the interpretation that teacher education admits the wrong students must be rejected. It is difficult to avoid the parallel in which schoolteachers explain low outcome levels in their schools by the quality of their pupils rather than their own teaching and how schools do – and do not – support struggling individuals.

3.2.3.1 Student Teachers’ Grades

The Swedish press has recently reported that those who apply for teacher education programmes have poor secondary education qualifications. The daily morning newspaper with the largest circulation published an article entitled “Almost anyone can become a teacher”, which began as follows: “The status of teacher education is at its nadir. It is so easy to get into education that it is enough to write the entrance test without reading the questions”.¹⁴¹

The article claims that just about “anyone” can enter these programmes. It is not easy to decide why so few journalists bother to check whether this is true: can one really get into a teacher programme without any qualifications whatsoever? The answer is of course negative. In order to be admitted to teacher education programmes, certain requirements must be met. According to the authority responsible for admission to higher education in Sweden (The Swedish Council for Higher Education), “for teacher education, the special eligibility requirements are often higher than the requirements for traditionally highly regarded education programmes”.¹⁴² The claim that anyone can enter teacher education programmes is simply not correct; the requirements for admission are so high that many applicants are screened out, which reduces the competition among the remaining applicants and the number of “qualified” applicants appears artificially low. According to the admissions authority, it is impossible to say anything about teacher quality based on the results on entrance tests and it is therefore easy to get an inaccurate picture of the admitted students. Instead, it is something of a Catch-22: “the requirement for results on the entrance test is low due to the limited competition and due to the high requirements for special eligibility.”¹⁴³

Thus, a student cannot be admitted to a teacher education programme without having adequate grades in specified courses in secondary education that have been nationally identified as a guarantee of maintaining an “adequate level of requirements” for prospective teachers.¹⁴⁴ The entrance test, as an optional and alternative process, for gaining eligibility differs from the use of secondary school grades. Normally, student grades are translated to a numerical value between 0 and 20. According to a study, in the autumn term of 2015, the average grades of entering students in the various teacher education programmes were as follows:

• Subject teacher (secondary education) = 14.6

• Vocational teacher = 14.2

• Primary school teacher = 14.1

• Preschool teacher = 13.9¹⁴⁵

The figures above can be compared with the average values ​​for those beginning the programmes for physicians and psychologists (approximately 18), civil engineers and dentists (approximately 17) and nurses (15). The grading system has six steps and 15 represents a “C” on a scale where A (20p) is at top and F (0p) represents failing (Accordingly, there are grades E and D below C). On the one hand, an average of 14 are low but as on the other hand the number of students is high it is easy to make a misinterpretation about the number of well qualified applicants. The National Union of Teachers in Sweden, one of two teacher unions in the country, conducted an analysis and found that a higher number of students with top grades were admitted to teacher programmes than to programmes for prospective physicians, that is regarded as the most difficult to be admitted to.¹⁴⁶

The image of applicant qualifications is thus fragmented. The preceding section presented the media image that anyone can be accepted for teacher education, a view that has been shown to be inaccurate. On the one hand, the actual grade values ​​indicate that many applicants for teacher programmes have rather strong qualifications (for example, almost 20% of subject teacher programme entrants had grades above 17). At the same time, few beginners in the preschool teacher education had this level of qualification (only 6%). For comparison, those with a minimum grade of 17 generally constitute 30% of incoming higher education students.¹⁴⁷ On the other hand, the fact that the average grade of beginners in the teacher programmes is below 15 means that half of the students, despite the admission requirements, can be considered to hold insufficient levels of academic preparation. But that observation is far from the picture put forward in media that anyone can be admitted and that it is possible to qualify by completing entrance exams without reading the questions.

There is a certain logic in the argument that students’ entry-level scores are a problem, as it seems reasonable to assume that if students were at a higher level on entry, they might be at a higher level on graduation or at least have an easier time meeting the graduation requirements. Thus, the idea of improving teacher quality by recruiting stronger students is easy to understand but critically reflecting on the idea of solving educational problems by improving the quality of incoming students shows that it conflicts in a deep sense with a serious educational approach. Within an educational context, it is more appropriate to primarily explore how programmes and teaching could be redesigned into models that more powerfully accelerate student learning. It is profoundly alien to the very heart of the educational endeavour to first and foremost blame students for shortcomings in learning, as it is up to organizations, their leadership and their teachers to determine how they have to change to enable students to become successful.¹⁴⁸

However, in this context, it is worth considering that studies indicate that new teachers’ cognitive and social abilities in Sweden have decreased over time. Grönqvist and Vlachos have demonstrated this shift, reporting a rapid and steep decline of entering teachers’ cognitive abilities from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s.¹⁴⁹ The overall effect of teachers’ ability on their students’ academic outcomes was though surprisingly small; in fact it had a “negligible impact on average student achievement”.¹⁵⁰ In a comparative study of 30 countries’ school systems, Hanushek et al. (2018) found significantly stronger general links between teachers’ cognitive abilities and their pupils’ achievements.¹⁵¹ Notably, this study showed that Swedish teachers’ abilities were actually slightly above the average in the 30 countries studied. However, Grönqvist and Vlachos reported another important finding; namely, that teachers with stronger social abilities showed a greater capability to reduce the gap between low- and high-performing students’ academic outcomes, while teachers, or at least male teachers, with stronger cognitive abilities tended to work in the opposite direction. So, students’ qualities do matter but not to the degree often assumed, neither in assumed way. Rather they can affect outcomes in surprising ways; finally, from a comparative perspective, Sweden’s educational problems do not appear to primarily be an issue of teachers’ cognitive abilities.

In summary, it is clearly the case that teacher education programmes do not attract the academically strongest candidates but within this group, the largest student body in academia, there are a large number of exceptional students. As stated above, the broader socioeconomic background profile of the students has also changed. The fact that future teachers are not recruited from the upper socioeconomic level of society is not necessarily an educational problem but may well be a political and social problem, if it is a problem at all: welcoming first-generation higher education students is hardly a negative attribute. The great challenge is to organize teachers’ education so that it prepares student teachers well, regardless of their backgrounds or previous qualifications, so that when they graduate, they can all teach at high levels. Then, for the purpose of teaching excellence, teachers’ continuing education must realize the idea of ​​lifelong learning in a structure that works for teachers. However, there are signs that teacher education programmes do have operational problems, to which we turn next.

3.2.3.2 Dropouts from Teacher Education Programmes

Teacher education programmes have also come for criticism due to the number of dropouts. From time to time, dropout rates have generated some alarmist headlines in the media like “Sky-high dropout from teacher education”.¹⁵² In one newspaper, an interviewed student described how “everyone just dropped [out]. Lastly, we were only around five people attending”.¹⁵³ The picture that emerges is of programmes in crisis, which is often linked to the situation in schools. This section therefore takes a closer look at the teacher programme dropout situation and teachers leaving schools and the teaching profession.

On average, in Sweden about 20% of students leaves the 10 largest professional programmes before their second year. Medical students have the highest survival rates, with only 8% dropping out. Programmes for engineers, nurses, lawyers and social workers have an average frequency of early dropouts, as does preschool teacher education. Of the major professional programmes, dropout rates from teacher education for primary and elementary (grades 1–6) schools and subject teacher education (secondary education, grades 7–9 and 10–12) stand out with 26 and 35%, respectively.¹⁵⁴

There are some general patterns to note. In higher education studies, it is generally the case that dropout rates relate to age, gender, and immigrant background. These patterns also apply to teacher education; younger students quit to a greater extent than slightly older ones, which is most visible in programmes preparing students to teach in primary and elementary schools.¹⁵⁵ Furthermore, significantly more men than women drop out of teacher education, as does a considerably higher proportion of students with an immigrant background. For example, 35% of men and 24% of women leave primary school teacher programmes; in subject teacher programmes, 32% of those with Swedish backgrounds quit compared to 44% of those with an immigrant background.¹⁵⁶ However, in general, student social backgrounds play a relatively minor role in dropout rates from professional programmes in higher education; the difference in the rate between students with highly educated and less educated parents is only 4%, on average. This is also true of programmes for preschool teachers and primary and elementary teachers but there are larger differences in subject teacher programmes for secondary education, with 31% of those with highly educated parents quitting compared with 39% of those with less educated parents.¹⁵⁷

Students with better secondary school grades generally quit programmes to a lesser degree; on average, only 11% of those with the highest grades (over 19 points) leave, compared to 30% of those with the lowest grades (below 11 points). This pattern is clearly reflected in teacher education: of those with the lowest grades, 22% of prospective preschool teachers, 36% of prospective primary school teachers and 51% of prospective subject teachers leave their studies.¹⁵⁸ This suggests that, even if it may be easier to be admitted to these programmes, students with insufficient prior academic preparation struggle, sometimes mightily, to meet the programme requirements.

Dropout rates do not necessarily indicate low educational qualities in a programme. They might indicate that other alternatives appear more attractive, or the programmes are quite demanding and thus cause dropouts. It is difficult to determine an appropriate or “desired” level of early dropouts. It is likely not desirable that nobody to quit professional education programmes as one can anticipate that some applicants simply fail in their studies. In addition, it is rather the case that an ideal teacher education asks students profound and challenging questions about themselves, about what they want to become and how they want to contribute to learning in society through their professional efforts. A strong teacher education programme also places significant academic demands in terms of both knowledge acquisition and mastering knowledge, developing scientific, critical and ethical approaches and, of course, extensive teaching capabilities. Overall, this means that such programmes will filter out a certain number of students, primarily during the early years of their studies. In fact, it can be argued that early and conscious dropouts are desirable in certain respects. Unfortunately, researchers do not know much about which dropouts are due to programme standards, which are due to students’ dissatisfaction with their programmes and to what degree they are due to students experience of schools as a challenging work-place etc.

One could assume that students with the strongest grades from secondary education would be the most likely to quit if they think that a programme lacked quality, as such students have more options than others. These dropouts could serve as indicators of low quality in a given programme. If that assumption is correct, then the data reveal certain flaws in teacher education programmes. Among higher education students in general, those with grades between 17 and 19 have dropout rates among beginners of 14 and 11%, respectively, compared with 22 and 17%, respectively, of the same categories of students leaving the subject teacher programme and 20% of both categories for programmes preparing students to become primary and elementary teaching. Relatively speaking, it is more common for stronger students to leave teacher education programmes than other programmes; given the starting point, that may indicate quality problems.¹⁵⁹ At the same time, it is reported that dropout rates are much higher for students with weaker secondary school grades; for example, in programmes for teaching in secondary school, only 15% of students with grades above 19 leave, whereas 54% of students with grades under 11 and 44% of students with grades between 11 and 13 drop out.¹⁶⁰ To conclude, dropout rates indicate some quality problems in these programmes. It might be the case that some strong students find that the programmes do not operate at appropriately high levels, but we do not know if they are reacting to what they experience in their current programmes or whether other professional programmes attract them during their education studies. The high level of drop-outs among teacher students with weak secondary grades indicates however that these programs up-holds high levels requirements on students. It could be taken as a sign of quality that weaker students drop out as they struggle with the academic level of teacher education programmes. However, in accordance with what is argued above, an educational perspective would hold that these programmes are insufficient if they are not able to work with students to make them successful in their studies. The picture is two-fold. It is beneficial that weak students have to leave these programmes, but – and especially in times of a teacher shortage – it is a disadvantage to not be capable of accelerating these students’ learning to reach the required levels.

If the follow-up is broadened from focusing on beginner students to information on attendance later in the programmes, the image of problematic dropout rates is reinforced. After six semesters, attendance (the proportion of students who still are registered) is usually between 69 and 75%, which is also true of preschool teacher education. However, programmes for prospective primary and elementary teachers have a lower rate (61%), and subject teacher education sees less than half (47%) of students remaining in the programme after six semesters.¹⁶¹

This information is cause for concern about how well the programmes for primary, elementary and secondary teaching are working. These data also clearly indicate major flaws in the equality of these programmes since dropout rates differ markedly among various institutions. Within teacher education, in some programmes retain nearly 80% of their students through graduation, while others are below 30%.¹⁶² These data clearly indicate the possibility to conduct teacher education in ways that maintain the same standards as other higher education programmes, but institutions solve the task differently, despite the national regulation of the programmes; the substantially different results across institutions demonstrate a lack of equality.

To conclude, Swedish teacher education programmes on one hand largely follow the dropout patterns found throughout Swedish higher education; on the other, some teacher education programmes (and programmes in other disciplines) diverge from the general pattern. Dropout rates are higher in large parts of the teacher education area, but the cause or causes behind that fact need to be explained in greater detail. The fact that those with poorer grades leave teacher education programmes to a greater extent indicates that those programmes are maintaining a certain standard of performance, but at the same time, this cut-off means that fewer students in the end become (well-prepared) teachers, which will only worsen an already severe teacher shortage.

Finally, it must be acknowledged that these programmes, which are centred on teaching and learning, should have greater expertise in organizing learning at a higher level than other programmes, and it is reasonable to argue that they should be able to develop modes of operation that allows students who initially fall behind, to catch up and develop the necessary knowledge and competence more rapidly and more deeply. Naturally, if anyone can do that, it should be teacher educators. The consequences would be enormous, and it is in fact remarkable that this appears not to be the case. The fact that more people with immigrant backgrounds leave these programmes is equally troublesome. There is an urgent need for in-depth studies and follow-up by the authorities, which is the basis used here, to explain this phenomenon. One study that deepened the issue examined the relationships between Swedish student teachers’ motives for their study choices and dropping out; it found that students with more altruistic motives, such as a desire to help others learn and to contribute to society, had the least inclination to drop out.¹⁶³ This is but one example of the kind of studies needed to understand why students leave programmes and what dropouts actually indicate in terms of programme (and incoming student) quality.

3.3 Teacher Education Programmes and Teaching Capabilities – A Challenge for Academic Education?

Debates on quality tend to focus on whether operations are conducted correctly, but it is also essential that the right things are in focus. We might ask whether programmes are dedicated towards the most essential aspects of what teachers need to learn – indeed, this is a key question.¹⁶⁴ It is notable that despite much debate on teacher quality, there is virtually no systematic follow-up to answer the question. Theoretically, it would be possible to test new teachers’ preparedness for teaching, but the reasons why this does not happen are quite obvious; it would be a resource-intensive task as the number of students is so large, and it is unusual to have final examinations of this kind in Swedish higher education.¹⁶⁵ Instead, the final thesis work is intended to fulfil a similar function, along with the aspiring teacher’s final internship. One could also ask whether such tests would answer the question at all. Student teachers can acquire much knowledge about their subjects and pedagogical theories and learn to conduct research without developing the ability to deliver high-quality teaching that would enable their pupils to learn, even though that can fairly be perceived as the core of the teaching profession.¹⁶⁶ So, whether programmes offer the “right” learning opportunities is not easily to determine; however, in some years, certain institutions have conducted surveys among alumni to get their views on this issue.

3.3.1 Testimony from Alumni Surveys

One way to assess both whether things are being done correctly and if the right things are being done in teacher education programmes is, of course, to ask former student teachers.¹⁶⁷ For almost 10 years, institutions delivering teacher education in Sweden jointly conducted such surveys. Two years after completing their degrees, graduates were sent a questionnaire in which they could evaluate their studies and their preparedness for teaching by answering questions regarding how well their programme had supported them in their goal to acquire the relevant competence for the teaching profession. Overall, respondents were satisfied with their studies; approximately 80% would recommend their programme to others. However, an early study (completed in 2010) noted that only approximately 60% of respondents considered their education satisfactory in terms of preparation for direct teaching work.¹⁶⁸ These results were confirmed in later studies (four questionnaires administered between 2011 and 2017).¹⁶⁹ However, even if a majority responded positively regarding the value of their studies, the fact that 30–40% did not feel that way must be understood as unacceptable.

In a survey of secondary teachers who had earned their teacher’s degrees in various study programmes offered in Sweden from the 1980s through the 2001 reform, Bejerot et al. found a similar pattern; among those who had graduated more recently, just over 50% felt that their education had made them “well prepared” for teaching in a methodological and practical sense.¹⁷⁰ Additionally, these researchers claimed that they could demonstrate that the this preparedness had decline over time, but they also pointed towards a mixed trajectory in which some areas had improved. Overall, they believed that preparedness for teaching in terms of students’ acquisition of “practical teaching competence … has deteriorated over time” and that these programmes’ “adaptation to professional requirements has also deteriorated over time”.¹⁷¹

As touched upon above, there is a lack of knowledge about the actual quality in teacher education programmes in terms of solid information on learning processes and how well programmes prepare students to enter the profession and begin shouldering concrete daily teaching tasks. However, we find indications of negative trajectories. We do have to be aware of the fact that in parallel with what might be systematic indications of reduced preparedness for teaching, it may be the case that the daily challenges for teachers are increasing. The school system has been reorganized, pupils tend more and more to act as customer rather than learners, administration has increased along with demands for individual support and so on. All these factors may indicate that the negative trend could be more appropriately explained as not being able to respond to changing conditions and challenges in schools rather than deteriorating quality in teacher education programmes. In addition, different initiatives have been taken that aim to improve student teachers’ opportunities to develop the crucial capacity to take leadership in the classroom and teach effectively.

3.3.2 Internship: The Crucial and Practical School-Based Education

For the development of teaching capabilities, it is of great importance that student teachers have extensive opportunities to practice with an experienced teacher, although to become successful solid subject preparation and theoretical studies of learning and teaching are also essential.¹⁷² A purposeful programme design that includes an elaborate relationship between theory and practice is extremely important but is often the Achilles’s heel of these programmes. Inadequately designed and operated internships might even erase what student teachers have learned instead of bringing theoretical insights into useful practice.¹⁷³

In the context of the 2001 Swedish teacher education reform, the discourse on what was earlier labelled as “student practice” or “period of training” was abandoned in favour of a terminology that viewed that activity as an educational activity, just like seminars and lectures. The whole programme was to be understood as an educational endeavour; for the best outcome, one part was to be located at higher education institutions and the other in schools, which required a shift in terminology. At the same time, the concept of “teacher educator” was extended to include schoolteachers involved in, for example, the supervision of student teachers during their internships. From a historical and comparative perspective, this development was important as it signalled a more holistic and coherent understanding of these programmes and an increased awareness of the need to develop more vivid organizational relations between teacher education programmes and schools and among the individuals involved. It is also worth considering that this development entailed an increased attention to the theoretical understanding of teaching practice and the need to conduct research with a more didactic approach. At the same time, this shift increasingly emphasized teaching in terms of an embodied practice and the importance of student formation into a professional enactment of their theoretical studies.

In light of what evaluations and other follow-ups have put on the table, two special initiatives have recently been undertaken at the national level to improve student teachers’ internships. A special national follow-up of this part of initial teacher education was conducted and a provisional introduction of teacher training schools was implemented.¹⁷⁴ The follow-up from 2015 showed that student teachers’ school-placed education in general had improved; institutions had allocated “significant” resources to quality assurance and these studies functioned “significantly better”.¹⁷⁵ Student teachers were supervised to a greater degree by experienced teachers, 30% of whom were working for at least 22 years.¹⁷⁶ However, it became clear that there were problems with the preparation of supervisors. Preparatory courses were organized differently, and both overall conditions and participation varied. However, it was also noted that very few student teachers failed, and it was assumed that it was not a sign of high quality; rather, the opposite, and the follow-up recommended that the government should make a nationwide investment in courses for supervisors.¹⁷⁷

The study also illustrates higher educational institutions’ efforts to increase equality in how students are assessed but also makes clear how varied teacher education programmes are nationally. This is likely partly due to the changes connected to the reform in 2001. With that reform, the conditions and frameworks of students internships became a local issue to be negotiated into agreements between each higher education institution and cooperating municipalities.¹⁷⁸ That model appears to have ended the existing tradition of collaboration between teacher education programmes and receiving schools. The new model became more of an administrative process rather than part of a discussion on how to best design this collaboration to make it conducive to students’ learning; in addition, many supervisors found that their prior remuneration for their work in this regard had disappeared.

Another aspect of the model was that as these programmes depended for their operation on this collaboration, they had a very weak negotiating position. For example, they could not require that supervisors should have a certain level of experience, that there be education for supervision or that there be appropriate conditions for supervision. In the past, supervisors were often named by the higher education institutions and schools were obliged to accept prospective teachers, but when receiving student teachers became a matter of negotiation, municipalities could flatly refuse to accept students. The compensation models also changed. Previously, supervisors had been remunerated directly from these programmes but under the new model, sending institutions transferred financial resources to municipalities and it was up to them to decide how to allocate those funds. Some continued to pay teachers for supervision, while others allocated the money to the team to which the supervisor belonged as a kind of collective resource; over time, teachers reported that these resources effectively vanished.¹⁷⁹ Despite intentions to the contrary, the organization of internships appeared to have been severely weakened due to the 2001 reform; however, as a consequence of the follow-ups and the significant teacher shortage, improvements have been launched at both the national and local levels to again develop stronger and more conducive relationships between teacher education and schools.

3.3.3 Experiment Involving Re-introduction of Particular Teacher Training Schools and Improved Funding

The 2008 report on reforming teacher education also suggested the establishment of field schools.¹⁸⁰ Teacher training schools had long been used in Sweden and were part of the teacher seminars established in the nineteenth century as part of the emerging school system. However, teacher training schools were abolished in the 1970s, partly due to the growing insights into what became known as “practice shock” or “reality shock”, as it was perceived that the experiences gained in these schools did not fully match the challenges novice teachers faced in regular schools after graduation.¹⁸¹ In 2013, the government decided to conduct an experiment that re-introduced teacher training schools to improve the quality of student teachers’ practical preparation.¹⁸²

Fifteen higher education institutions participated in this 5-year trial, and the Swedish Higher Education Authority evaluated it. Its analysis was oriented around three perspectives: concentration, competence and collaboration. The report found that a higher concentration of students was achieved in fewer schools, which was believed to facilitate quality in planning and implementation. It also found improvement regarding supervisor competence and preparation for that task. Courses that prepare supervisors had been improved and the exchange of experience and collegiate learning increased, forms for supervisors feedback and support had improved, and collaboration between higher education institutions and schools had been strengthened, including research collaboration and the organization of internships.¹⁸³

For this experiment, extra resources were allocated nationally. At the same time, the government increased the general funding for the school-based part of teacher education. In 2015 the allowance was close to 94,000 SEK per student annually; by 2020, it was close to 112,000 SEK.¹⁸⁴ However, it remains to be seen how these changed forms and increased funding will play out. It may be not what is currently being done to improve quality that merits attention; rather, it is how this absolutely essential part of teacher education became so woefully neglected in the previous period.

Quality in Terms of Pedagogy and Teaching: Too Much or Too Little? A Debate About the Academic Discipline of Education

When it comes to the question of the teaching competence of both prospective and current teachers, a conversation has emerged on the importance of teachers, their dispositions and their methods that deserve mention in this context. A 2005 OECD report, Teachers Matter: Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers, partly shifted the focus of the public debate on education and schooling from structural conditions to emphasizing teachers and teaching capabilities – or what are often called “teaching skills” – and thus the conversation also involves teacher education. The debate in Sweden was led in a particular direction by Minister of Education Jan Björklund who in the early 2010s began to argue for the re-introduction of a more strict teacher-led pedagogy, in contrast to ideas of student-centred teaching.¹⁸⁵ In the Swedish education tradition, there has long been a tension, perhaps even a conflict, between those who perceive traditional teaching for transmission of “pure” knowledge and “facts” for what is nowadays labelled as employability as most essential and those who advocates for a teaching approach anchored in “progressive pedagogy”, in which pupils’ acquisition of knowledge includes the importance of socialization, subjectification and their future lives as active citizens. Within these divergent ideas on what education is fundamentally, about there are also clearly diverse understandings on what teaching should look like: the right and wrong teaching methods. In comparison with other professions, it must be understood as highly exceptional that a minister, or any member of the government, would express opinions in his public role on what methods are to be used in a profession, and his criticism of teaching in schools consequentially also targeted teacher education and what was called the “educational elite”.¹⁸⁶

It is difficult to fairly describe the loud debate in all its aspects, but it is worth noting that on one hand, it includes voices that argue that the problem with teacher education programmes is that they no longer entail dedicated studies in the academic subject of education (pedagogics); on the other, it is argued that it is precisely studies in Education (Pedagogy) that are at the heart of the problems in teacher education.¹⁸⁷ Paradoxical yes, but the clash rests upon, in addition to shifting normative points of departure, uninformed ideas about what student teachers actually study and whether perspectives developed from within or from outside.

There are no requirements that student teachers study Education, and the relationship between that subject and teacher education varies between institutions. The discipline (Education) was once developed in Sweden to support teacher education but, as in other contexts, being focused on teaching and children are not the most prestigious choice for a career. Perhaps for this or other reasons, Education distanced itself in many respects from the education of teachers and from teaching as an activity. So, the assumption that student teachers study Education is to a large extent incorrect. What is required (in addition to subject studies and the like) is a full year of studies in educational sciences and that aspects of teaching and learning are included in subject studies like math and language. These classes in educational sciences can be taught by teachers with a background in Education or by others, but student formally receive credits in Education only rarely. In addition to this complexity, there is a layer of the criticism that argues that Education (and most of educational sciences is likely meant) advocates a post-modern epistemology that does not respect facts and notions of teaching as not being about teaching something to someone but rather about being a facilitator of someone’s learning.¹⁸⁸

The contemporary debate seems to be part of increasing ideological tensions that again politicize education as a phenomenon. Problems in schools have returned to the agenda, and those who do not tap into analyses focusing on structural inequalities explain shortcomings by insufficient competence among teachers; for them, the root cause is thus teacher preparation and primarily Education. However, critics have mistakenly assumed that student teachers study that discipline, which is why their explanation of school problems as relating to studies in Education is somewhat flawed. This is especially so due to the fact that since the 1990s, there has been considerable tension between the practice of teacher education and Education, as the latter became perceived by the former as insufficiently interested in conducting research of a more practical or clinical nature in support of teacher preparation. New academic disciplines became established, the most influential of which is Educational Work.¹⁸⁹ There are no national statistics available on this point, but universities in Gothenburg, Linköping, Karlstad and Umeå not only established Educational Work as an established discipline but also developed extensive PhD programmes and produced excellent research.

From a broader perspective, we note that over time Education has also become marginalized in relation to teacher preparation in a more profound manner, as the concept of “educational science” has gained a dominant position during the last decades; it serves as a kind of umbrella term for different disciplines of importance for teacher preparation. Among them is Education, which was previously established with the intention of being the scientific foundation for teacher preparation. So, from this perspective, the criticism that claims that educational problems relate to student teachers’ obligatory studies in Education reveals a somewhat dated understanding of the field of teacher education. However, that mistake is more technical in nature and in essence does not reduce the line of criticism claiming that how teachers are educated appears to be insufficient for successful classroom teaching. What is of importance here is to understand how the search for explanations of schools’ shortcomings other than structural conditions ends up focusing on bad teaching, bad epistemology and bad teacher education.

The dichotomy between these positions – the importance of structural preconditions versus the importance of teaching – is in any case false, as both aspects are of vital importance and co-exist in a sequential way; structural conditions, like segregation, funding and access to competence, are of course important, but it is also a fact that at the end of the day, given such preconditions, the qualities of key processes in schools, primarily leadership and teaching, will be decisive. The fact that an excellent teacher can remedy disadvantage is not an argument against the impact of structural conditions or an argument against combatting a disadvantaging structure, but it is an argument for also focusing on teaching excellence.

4 Swedish Teacher Education: Quality and Equality

What is the status of contemporary Swedish teacher education, and what are its real challenges? The previous sections have tried to sketch some contours of the problems. Societal problems are also to a large extent educational problems and hence problems for teacher education, although there is a tendency to try to solve societal problems through education in an inappropriate manner.¹⁹⁰ Much of the discussion about how teachers are educated relates to questions about the level of school students’ achievements, which is hardly surprising. At the same time, it must be understood that just as a school’s broad assignment consists of different aspects that together form a composite, so the tasks of teacher education programmes are multiple and can only be understood when viewed as a whole. What determines the properties of a composite is the composition itself, which means that if some parts are changed, the whole is inevitably affected. The focus on teacher education’s contribution to student achievement might intuitively be regarded as central to the discussion of quality in teacher preparation, but it must also be understood as an insufficient approach to an analysis of these programmes’ challenges.

The presentation so far has focused on quality and only touched on another central factor: the question of equality and equity. When schools were decentralized and became market-based, the national government also surrendered a large part of its control over the schools. From that perspective, teacher education remains a national control mechanism of importance for equality and equity in education. As touched upon above, both designs and forms appear to have shifted significantly within the Swedish teacher education landscape, which can be understood as a significant challenge in itself. The introduction of the teacher certification system in 2011 can also be understood from this perspective, but its ability to ensure equal access to teacher competence in schools remains significantly limited.

It is important to have a nuanced, exploratory and development-oriented conversation about how education for teachers can best be delivered. This chapter has described the overall features of the model for educating teachers that currently prevails in Sweden; it has also pointed to both change and continuity in these developments and the teacher education area more generally. The field of education is dominated by certain perceptions. One involves the value of constant adaptation and change; in other words, the value of national reforms.

There are reasons to reflect on the general value of these efforts, and more specifically what changes have come about that have positively affected education and are instrumental for schools to achieve their primary purpose. As this chapter witnesses, the constitutive element and primary goals of these programmes are schools, their students and those students’ achievement. Outside that context, we do not need teacher education. This means that the value of teacher education should be measured primarily on how well graduates can affect student learning and thereby contribute to schools in their struggle to achieve their purpose. In that context, we have to remember the wide scope of the purpose of education. Education is not only about a narrow qualification for working life; rather, we have to bear in mind when thinking about outcomes that education is about the full development of individuals and as such a contribution to societal progress. However, it is not teacher education but educational science research that is part of an extended endeavour, which is also true of the other branches of academia: the eternal quest for knowledge. That effort has a value in itself, but the shaping of students into teachers has its sole value in relation to society’s ambitions to educate its population.

A consequence of this notion is that teacher education reforms and the models they strive to implement must draw primarily upon solid studies of that outcome. However, that is easier said than done. Theoretically, and from a distance, it appears self-evident and quite feasible to establish information on how certain teachers from particular programmes impact their students. In reality, that is neither easy nor even doable due to the profound complexity of education and the resources that would be required for such a study. There is not space here to dive more deeply into the broad debate on this issue. It is important, though, to consider that no such information has been on the table for any teacher education reform and as a consequence, those reforms have all rested on rationales other than this most important – if unrealistic – one.

An added point here is that there is a discrepancy between the often very loud discussions about the quality of teacher programmes and the quality of the documents on which reforms are based. Given that, we can also reflect on the value of national reforms versus other alternatives.¹⁹¹ It is likely that new measures are needed to monitor different qualities in these programmes at the local level. This means that new forms of examining programme quality must be developed, along with more sincere and dedicated institutional approaches towards these programmes which, despite their size, are in some respects marginalized in terms of areas like organization and research funding. Thus, this chapter ends with further remarks on challenges and options.

4.1 Today’s Teacher Shortage

Teacher shortages are deeply troublesome for education and can have different causes, such as poor working conditions in schools, bottleneck problems in teacher education, inadequate long-term planning by central and local administration and so on. The teacher shortage issue welcomes all types of politically oriented interpretations because it is a multidimensional problem that invites metaphors like the chicken or the egg and the downward spiral. Having said that, it is true that Sweden’s population has increased by about 15% since the turn of the millennium, and there is a shortage of personnel in the welfare professions that is only expected to increase in the future.¹⁹² The number of pupils in schools is expected to grow by about 15% between 2017 and 2027,¹⁹³ which places more demands on staff in schools, especially as an unusually large number of teachers are set to retire during the period. Over 15 years have passed since the alarm bells started ringing. For example, in 2004, the government noted Sweden’s relatively high teacher density from an international perspective but also that Sweden had a relatively large proportion of teacher without full qualifications and the high average age of Swedish teachers which meant that efforts would be needed to ensure a fresh supply of teachers.¹⁹⁴

Despite those alarm bells, not much happened. It is important to understand that with the decentralization and marketization of education came a gap between the national level, with the government responsible for providing schools with educated teachers, and municipalities and private school organizations that are the ultimate “users” of the teaching force. So, providers and recipients ended up in a dysfunctional setting in terms of both teacher quality and teacher shortage. In addition to the shift to decentralization and marketization, deregulation was also a salient feature of the 1990s reforms, and national directives that required a teaching degree for permanent employment as a teacher were abolished. As a consequence, the proportion of qualified teachers has diminished, something that the introduction of teacher certification in 2011 aimed to amend; however, that task depends largely on the supply of graduates, which has been shaky.

Effective efforts have not been made to increase the attractiveness of the teaching profession and to secure teacher recruitment, which is deeply troublesome given the current severe teacher shortage. The forecasts vary, but it is clear that the shortage in the coming years, despite increased educational efforts, will amount to over 12,000 teachers.¹⁹⁵ The starting point is already troublesome; only approximately 70% of teachers in compulsory schools hold the required qualifications.¹⁹⁶

With such a large proportion of uncertified teachers, the National Agency for Education has been forced to develop support efforts for these teachers in the form of guidance for people without teaching experience. This is not about support for traditional substitute teaching (an hour or a day here and there) but guidance for those who have long term-contracts for teaching without qualification. This advice is accessible on a national website and offers documents and short video clips that introduce key concepts.¹⁹⁷ From a teacher educator perspective, this is deeply provocative, as it suggests that one could acquire teaching competence in just a few minutes of video observation; no one would dare go to a medical doctor who was instructed in this way. However, even though it is deeply problematic from the professionalization perspective, it is obvious that it is better to offer high-quality support to inexperienced persons that are assigned to teach than to leave them alone to figure out what to do. However, the severe teacher shortage and how it is being handled in Sweden is highly risky and might negatively affect the status of teacher education and the teaching profession itself. What worse is, is that teacher shortage ultimately hurt students.

The teacher shortage and the debate about its nature and its solutions are directly related to the question of teachers’ competence and teaching quality. The fact that solutions to the problems of teacher shortages and declining teacher quality can easily collide becomes obvious when considering the different options at hand. The 2021 ministerial report illustrates this by arguing for the need to increase teacher quality and recruit more teachers.¹⁹⁸ However, the large number of responses in the consultation process made it clear that a common interpretation is that the ministerial proposals will increase the number of teachers by lowering requirements; while that may successfully combat the teacher shortage, it will do so by reducing teacher quality, which is counterproductive given the simultaneous desire to increase quality and hence learning and development among pupils.

At the heart of questions around teacher shortages and teacher quality is a fragile balancing act. There is a great risk that badly designed initiatives to counter one of these two problems will worsen the other. In Sweden, approximately 8000–10,000 students graduate with a teacher degree each year, but the relevant authorities estimate that those numbers would need to double to meet the coming need for teachers.¹⁹⁹At the same time, these programmes have problem in terms of quality in organization and processes, and increasing volumes of students appears to also increase dropout rates. The number of seats in teacher education programmes have been increased substantially since 2015.²⁰⁰ However, as dropout rates are rather high, in many cases every second student leave, and as increased intake almost by definition result in lowered qualification on the applicants, not even substantial increase in seats result in desired growth of graduated teachers.²⁰¹

As discussed above, quality issues relate not only to student recruitment but also to teacher education as a mass enterprise that involves large groups of teachers in organizations with weak capacities for coordination. A turnaround would require increased numbers of classes, teaching in small groups, enhanced requirements and tailored parts of programmes. The tradition of increasing admission numbers tends, according to experience, to increase dropouts. And in the end, recruitment relates to the level of appeal that the profession has among students, and effective long-term strategies must work along with those kinds of insights. A spring 2018 government inquiry proposed a series of actions to improve education through making the teaching profession more attractive. It stressed the importance of professional autonomy, reduction of administration and establishment of extensive opportunities for career-long learning in the form of improved conditions for continuous professional development, recognition of competence acquired and improved opportunities to be assigned to tasks according to competence.²⁰² These proposals remain still in process (2022) despite a wide national endorsement of the propositions and recommendations made by the inquiry.²⁰³

From the perspective of the near future, though, the teacher shortage and the question of teacher quality will be the major challenges facing Swedish teacher education. They are difficult in themselves and are not made easier by the fact that they interact with each other. In all likelihood, simply further increasing the number of seats in every teacher programme is not a viable way forward, as these higher education institutions, at least under the current regulations, are not able to focus their resources sufficiently to solve this problem. The teacher shortage does not have one solution; rather, there are several. On the one hand, it involves organizing work in schools based on the prevailing situation; on the other, it entails both developing alternative forms of education and changing each school into a true learning environment. Such a strategy has to focus on the idea of systematically advancing teaching abilities among those who are active in schools rather than simply ensuring that they hold a certificate; in essence, it has to focus on realities rather than mere indicators. It simply involves starting with those who today work in schools and establishing procedures in support of both informal advancement of teaching capabilities, an initiative that if well designed, will also lead to formal qualifications over time. The guiding principle must be that everyone that teaches in schools, with or without the required degrees, systematically and continuously enhances their competence day after day, week after week, semester after semester and so on. Doing that requires a generative infrastructure. At the same time, stakeholders must face this challenge and be ready to understand why other developments must be implemented and how it is essential for an educational institution like a school district or, for that matter, each individual school to be organized in accordance with foundational understandings of knowledge and competence and how their growth are facilitated among not only students but also teachers. However, this theme extends beyond this chapter on initial teacher education, so we leave the issue of teacher shortage in Sweden with these comments.

4.2 Organizational Conditions for Effective Governance and Development of Teacher Education

As stated above, there are indications that the quality of teacher programmes in Sweden needs to be strengthened in certain respects to increase their capacity to make student teachers more successful as teachers. The picture is not all negative, as has been shown; evaluations also point towards progress over time. However, the fact that these programmes have strengths is not an argument against further development. On the contrary, insightful analysis of these strengths will show not that they represent “best practices” but what should be viewed as “next practices” for programmes that are struggling.

An essential prerequisite for advancement is an elaborated understanding of what properties or qualities a successful programme has; that piece of knowledge then has to be transformed into a locally contextualized understanding of not only its purpose but also an understanding of why that is essential and how these mechanisms work together with a well-elaborated notion of how the particular conditions at the local site could best be employed. Second, but of equal importance, it is decisive to have the ability to implement these ideas. As outlined above, Sweden has a fairly extensive national framework, but key aspects are always conditioned locally by the circumstances at hand.

Based on the literature on teacher education, it is possible to design successful teacher education in slightly different ways. Linda Darling-Hammond studied in Powerful Teacher Education – Lessons from Exemplary Programs (2006) seven particularly successful programs in United States. These programs differed in design and academic context but according to Darling-Hammond they all shared some essential features. These programs not only draw upon articulated notions of high-quality teaching but displayed high levels of coherence in how that vision directs program design and execution. These programs taught a strong core curriculum and required students to do an extensive clinical experience, interwoven with coursework. Case studies were frequent, and courses often revolved around inquiry approaches to connect theory and practice. In addition, assessment was based on professional standards and utilizing methods, such as portfolio that centred students’ abilities and performance, supporting adaptive expertise. Finally, these programs were grounded in elaborated school-university partnerships that not only included students in communities with shared professional understandings but also gave students opportunities to “learn to teach” in “state-of-the-art practice”.²⁰⁴

In practice, it is all about finding distinct solutions to the basic issues described in this chapter and to establish a strategy for teacher education as an institution and its operational execution in different educational programmes in models that support achieving the ambitions that have been articulated. That may sound trivial at first, but in fact most activities mirror more of the past and their organically based growth rather than deliberate design. It takes leadership to do this, but that leadership must also have appropriate structural support and conditions. For that reason, there is a need for a governance model that ensures that every decision prioritizes student teachers’ development into capable teachers.

In practice, it is all about finding distinct solutions to the basic issues described in this chapter and to establish a strategy for teacher education as an institution and its operational execution in different educational programmes in models that support achieving the ambitions that have been articulated. That may sound trivial at first, but in fact most activities mirror more of the past and their organically based growth rather than deliberate design. It takes leadership to do this, but that leadership must also have appropriate structural support and conditions. For that reason, there is a need for a governance model that ensures that every decision prioritizes student teachers’ development into capable teachers.

Two decades ago, the Higher Education Act included a paragraph that stated that every higher education institution that carries out teacher education must also have a special board responsible for that effort and attached research in the field (where applicable, this was also the case for postgraduate education).²⁰⁵ The idea was to have not only responsibilities but also executive capacity to always prioritize student learning. This was in principle a leap forward, but many higher education institutions opposed the establishment of such organizational bodies and asserted their institutional autonomy. The directive was among several higher education institutions perceived as a part of a national-level micro-management that hampered the development of teacher education. Resistance forced the relevant authorities to conduct follow-ups on compliance but after only 10 years, the legislative demand for this governance structure was repealed.²⁰⁶ Consequently, many institutions changed in ways that allowed other priorities to wield influence.

Based on the organizational changes that were carried out locally in the educational institutions, there are indications that steering capacity has been weakened.²⁰⁷ The fact that the governance models shifted within institutions does not need to be a problem, given that these bodies have the competence and integrity to purposefully shoulder that responsibility. It may be an open question whether this is the case, but historical experience does not indicate that this is the best solution; at the very least, one could conclude that if it were, we would not have our current problems. It is hard to avoid understanding the historical track record of institutional governance of teacher education as weak, ambiguous and insufficient to prioritise this activity in accordance with its societal importance, and for that matter, its large proportion of higher education students. Becher and Trowler’s classic study Academic Tribes and Territories points to the fact that “soft” and “applied” sciences and aligned programmes are usually subordinated to what usually termed “hard”, “pure” or “basic” sciences, which suggests that significant leadership at the highest institutional level is required for teacher education endeavours to operate successfully.²⁰⁸

4.3 Mass Higher Education with Quality Requires Exceptional Teacher Quality and a High Level of Individual or Small-Group Tutoring

There has long been discussion about how the post-war transformation of academia from a small-scale elite enterprise into the large-scale educational efforts has affected educational quality. This transformation has been profound in Sweden. In 1953 the number of secondary degrees exceeded for the first time 5000 which equals to about 5% of an annual youth cohort for which that those degrees were the doorway to a career.²⁰⁹ Today, almost all pupils pursue secondary education, with close to 80% graduating.²¹⁰ For higher education, the expansion has also been extensive. In 1945, 14,000 students were enrolled in tertiary education; in 2020, the figure was a stunning 384,500 students.²¹¹ Close to 45% of an annual cohort are admitted to higher education studies within 5 years after their secondary diploma and 1.3% of the Swedish population has a PhD or equivalent. During the last two decades, between 2500 and 3000 PhDs have been awarded annually which is 2–3% of a yearly cohort, compared with 5% taking a secondary education degree in the 1950s!²¹² This pattern is not at all unique to Sweden, instead it is a rather common development in many industrialized countries. However, how that transformation has affected teacher education does vary.

In this chapter, I have reported that students in teacher education are the largest student cohort in Swedish higher education. That might surprise some readers, but it is not that surprising from the perspective of how extensive education is as a societal endeavour. In fact, teaching may be the most common professional occupation. But we have also described the fact that student teachers are among those who receives the least amount of instruction time. Studies in the old teacher seminars prior to the academization of these programmes was organized in a manner with at least double the amount of teaching hours that students receive today.²¹³

The merger of teacher education into general higher education institutions and the massification of higher education in general have profoundly affected how teachers have been educated in many ways. To be able to understand this accurately, we must consider the timing of these two changes. The drive towards academization first emerged under the small-scale and elite perception of academia but became more critical later in a situation when academia was transformed into a mass higher education model. We also have to consider that teacher education, by national decisions, was not only merged into higher education at this point; rather, it made a major contribution to that transformation. Teacher education became part of the democratization of higher education in the sense that these programmes recruited broadly from traditions that historically had been extremely underrepresented in academia.

Academization certainly brought a number of advantages, but as it progressed within the process of massification, aspects of crucial importance for the formation of teachers were impaired. One example is the reduction in instruction time; today, it is hard to imagine that profound progress could be made in these programmes without addressing that issue. In addition, it is not only about instruction time per se; it is also, indeed primarily, about how instruction is organized and the competence with which it is delivered. Today, the main educational activity is lectures to large groups of students instead of small groups, and we have to take into account that those academic teachers who shoulder the main responsibility for these students are in general those with lower academic qualifications than teachers in other programmes.²¹⁴ It is hard to believe that a more fundamental advance can be achieved without developing a strategy that also takes these relationships into account. Simply expressed, the current teacher education model, with a multitude of lectures in large groups and teaching largely based on each university’s less qualified teachers who have a limited time to teach, is of course the major challenge. And typically, the particular competence that are essential for becoming a well-functioning teacher are probably very hard to acquire in a mass higher education format, as those capabilities require extensive and fairly tailored instruction.

The teaching profession is complex in several ways, as is teaching itself. It is a multidimensional activity in which a number of considerations have to be negotiated, balanced and enacted within the blink of an eye. For a layperson, content in terms of grammar, fractions or the Neolithic revolution might be perceived as challenging but mastering content is only the first and perhaps the least difficult step on the road to successful teaching. The task for a schoolteacher is to work with groups of students so that they all experience it as directed to their personal advancement, suiting their personal needs, desires and ambitions and realizing their “full potential” while they fulfil the obligation to compensate disadvantaged students by their teaching and socialize all students as a collective etc. In essence, they must realize all these important ambitions by delivering an education that entails foundational aspects of developing self-awareness, confidence and a personality, along with contributing to democratic virtues and societal cohesion.²¹⁵ Everyone who has had this assignment knows how demanding this is; and as noted above, “teaching is an enormously difficult job that looks easy”.²¹⁶ This is a profession that, on the foundation of a professional knowledge base, must be developed into a personal mastery; that requires a certain amount of individualized teaching. Some parts of a teacher education programme might be suitable for large-scale lectures, as in other fields, but other parts are not. Here we touch upon a core problem in Swedish teacher education; these programmes are simply not appropriate in their arrangement of classes. One might claim that the strengths identified in these programmes exist despite rather than because of the conditions in teacher education for; consequently, shortcomings are to be expected when conditions are not sufficient.

The problem of how to reach higher levels of learning is not unique to teacher education. A remedial strategy can be formed along the lines of the first law of teaching (the more teaching, the more learning) or the second (the better teaching, the more learning) or preferably by combining the two. Much research has been devoted to responding to the second law by developing the best teaching methods.

Benjamin Bloom, one of the leading scholars in educational research after World War Two, described in the mid-1980s how his research team worked to resolve the issue and suddenly realized a new dimension of the challenge.²¹⁷ Bloom and his team had put significant effort into developing a teaching method called “mastery learning”.²¹⁸ They felt that they really had developed a teaching model that produced better results compared to a traditional teaching and this was confirmed in studies.²¹⁹ However, mastery learning as a method was also based on a typical teaching situation with a teacher and a large group of students. What Bloom and colleagues later found was that if individual lessons, so-called tutoring, were added to the model for a few hours, then the outcome changed dramatically. The student with average results in the tutoring group was superior to virtually all students in the traditionally taught group. Mastery learning had a measurable and positive effect, but the group that also received a certain amount of individual instruction had higher scores by two standard deviations. That model played in a completely different division, to speak in the language of sport.²²⁰

In simplified terms, what Bloom points out is confirmed by both general human experience and research on expertise. How do we manage ourselves when there is something we do not understand or are not able to figure out how to do? Have we not all experienced how liberating it is to talk to someone who really knows something about the issue, someone that can show us, the ones with the problem at hand, how it works and someone we could ask questions? That is usually hard to experience in a situation with one teacher and 30 learners, or for that matter, one lecturer in a lecture hall, but it can be achieved in a one-to-one or one-to-three situation.

When students in music seek to take new steps in their professional development, they usually apply for a master class, where they, together with a few others and with individualized teaching, learn the next level from a recognized master. In Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool summarize research on how expertise can be developed. A continuous feature is precisely this individual or small-group learning from a master, together with perseverance and attitude.²²¹ Studies on teacher expertise show that, like other professionals, teachers perform their tasks in specific ways. Therefore, the development of teacher education must not only advance individualized and small-scale teaching, but must also ensure that the highest competence is tied to teaching, professionally and academically.²²²

This perspective does not mean that teachers’ foundational knowledge is something personal; rather, it focuses on the fact that there is a challenge in how individuals internalize the general professional foundation of knowledge into personally enacted and extraordinary teaching capabilities. Consequently, a development strategy for teacher education has to combine the first and second laws of teaching. Quantitatively, instruction time must be extensive, as more instruction will yield more learning and qualitatively, a certain amount of added instruction should prioritize small-group learning, individual instruction and increased teacher competence, as more advanced teaching in more appropriate forms will result in increased learning. So, when making national decisions on allocating resources, it is essential to improve funding, while higher education institutions need to reallocate teachers and develop collaboration with schools in models that ensure that the most advanced schoolteachers are also part of the formation of students into teachers. Teacher education needs to draw upon the most qualified teachers, academically and professionally, and to be conducted as a learning activity with excellent conditions for profound and in-depth learning, not as a second-rank activity in higher education.

4.4 Adequate Conditions for Teachers’ Lifelong Learning

Could it be the case that some aspects of teachers’ qualities are too difficult to develop in any teacher education programme, no matter how good? This is a chapter on initial teacher education, but it does deal with problems in education; hence, we also have to discuss teaching as a profession and the importance of professional learning and development throughout the teaching career. Teaching in Sweden is a profession in which an individual remain. For example, at the end of the 1990s, 75% of teachers that had graduated as secondary teachers in the early 1980s – almost two decades back – were still active as schoolteachers.²²³ Teachers that graduated later and started their teaching careers during the 1990s appear to have been more willing to leave the classroom, but the trend in recent years has reversed itself, with teachers again preferring to stay in the profession to a higher degree.²²⁴ A recent study found that approximately 80% of graduates remain in the educational sector, a pattern that has held for at least two decades.²²⁵ Even though a significant percentage of teachers leaves the profession, we have to take into account that an absolute majority stays, a fact that requires us to rethink how society can best develop teaching competence.

For a career that spans over three or four decades, initial teacher education must be understood as only an entrance ticket that is insufficient to support a whole career. Highly demanding and complex professions have often developed systems that, after a demanding pre-service education, gradually educate not only novices but also more senior colleagues into ever higher levels of competence, processes that guides them to be fully independent professionals who are capable of shouldering all professional challenges, including remaining updated on the latest research. Such structures are essentially absent for most Swedish teachers.²²⁶ They are expected to be able to take full responsibility for all teaching situations from day one to such an extent that the teaching career can be described as a backwards model.

Two decades ago, a scheme was established to support newly qualified teacher during their induction period. The scheme was nationally funded, but the model was established in agreements between teacher unions and local municipalities, or more accurately, employers. Follow-ups indicate that fewer than half of newly qualified teachers receive systematic support during their induction period, despite the fact that the national funding has continued to be allocated.²²⁷

The fact is that new graduates are often forced to start teaching in schools with the greatest challenges.²²⁸ After a couple of years, they proceed to other schools once they have gained enough qualifications to make the move. Consider the reality: among many teachers, this is understood as the normal hard entrance years, but is that an appropriate approach to the profession and to children in these schools? A traditional teaching career means that the most inexperienced teacher tackles the most challenging teaching tasks, a totally backwards approach. It is a bad tradition that individual teachers understand this reality as the hard years after graduation, the hard years in which the necessary capabilities come into place. Of course, those who survive – and many do – learn something, even a great deal, but they may learn only to survive rather than to excel by organizing these years into systematic learning and development. From an institutional perspective, it is a model that not are conducive for development as the most precious opportunity to develop teaching capabilities are wasted. The most advanced teaching can most likely only be developed during the most challenging conditions, and that is what this is about. More experienced teachers can not only master teaching in challenging circumstance to a higher degree than novices, they also have better opportunities to learn and develop new teaching models. To be clear, the most advanced teaching can only be developed under the most challenging conditions – and most likely, only by the most advanced teachers! In addition and from the broader perspective of disadvantaged students in these schools, it is a horrifying that current models that offers the student cohort with the highest need the less advanced teachers! Sweden shows clear signs of this pedagogical segregation, where the most experienced and best educated teachers are employed in the schools that mainly draw students who are easy to teach due to their socioeconomic profiles and well-educated parents.²²⁹ In concrete terms, this means that new teachers start with the most difficult tasks and, just as they become more experienced and advanced in their professional work, they take on simpler assignments; in the meantime, institutional learning is absent and students needs are systematically disrespected.

This model for the teaching career must be replaced by a fundamentally opposite model that honours competence, institutional learning and continuously nurture growth of competence and in respect for pupils allocates the most experienced and capable teachers to handle the most difficult teaching assignments. Such a model must contain several different parts and, from an educational perspective, it is absolutely necessary to build new forms for teachers professional development in a career-long context.

It is a stunning and incomprehensible fact that the teaching profession, which together with researchers must be regarded as the most knowledge-oriented professional practice, is not assured excellent opportunities for systematic lifelong learning. Internationally, processes are under way to address questions of teacher competence from system-oriented perspectives, and an increased awareness of how important this is has been found in Sweden during recent decades. Consequently, we have also witnessed a growth of career pathways and other initiatives aimed at ensuring higher teacher quality through novel forms of career-long learning for teachers.

The Swedish Governmental School Commission (2015) proposed that this issue should be addressed, and two governmental inquiry reports in 2017 and 2018 did just that. With Teaching Excellence In Focus – A Framework For Teachers’ and Principals’ Professional Development proposed the establishment of extensive national programmes for these professions’ continuous competence development, to recognize competence and to strategically use competence.²³⁰ As described above, in early 2019 a multi-party agreement in parliament that served as a foundation for a government to come into place. This agreement included an implementation of the proposed model. Accordingly, budget allocations have been decided nationally and Swedish National Agency for Education has been assigned to prepare a launch. Thus, it can be said that the concept of teacher education will also change from referring only to pre-service education to also referring to development efforts throughout the teaching career; it will then have the contours of a contract between society and its key profession, granting those who enter the teaching profession not only adequate preparation but also exemplary conditions to be successful year in and year out.

5 Conclusions: Advancement by Making It Simple

This chapter has presented the main features of the way teachers are educated in Sweden; for the purpose of a more thorough description, it has been oriented around somewhat eternal tensions, balances and difficulties. When describing a system model like teacher education we usually tend to detach and simplify to make the presentation accessible. However, that might not serve the overarching purpose well as such an approach does not bring forward the complexities that are not easily identified for someone who is not already an expert in the field. The paradox is that a thorough analysis is the best point of departure for a simple and straight forward strategy for improvement.

Due to the ambition to deepen our understanding of the important endeavour of educating teachers, this chapter has contextualized recent developments not only historically but also in terms of contemporary politics. Since antiquity, education has been identified as a central governmental obligation; Montesquieu and others rooted in the Enlightenment forwarded such an understanding of the necessity, for democracies to design educational models purposefully so that citizens would come to cherish their constitution: “to preserve it we must love it”.²³¹ Modern democracies like Sweden operate their educational systems accordingly, however debatable the level and sincerity may be, and because of that teacher education becomes not only central for such policy but also possible to view as a lens on contemporary society and some of its inner processes. This role explains much of the interest in the contours of the debate on education in general and teacher education in particular.

In this chapter we have pointed to the continuity of criticism of teacher education despite many reforms and changing practices.²³² It cannot be ruled out that recurring political demands to reform teacher education still rest on unclear or inadequate grounds, badly crafted information on the quality of these programmes or are essentially politically conditioned – and in the worst case, a combination of all three. We simply do not know. The myriad statements about the societal importance of well-educated teachers should in themselves compel a responsible approach to teacher education.

An indispensable aspect of such a sincere approach to teacher education is that knowledge is systematically developed about the necessary, valuable and desirable properties and qualities in these programmes and how they vary over time due to reforms, how they vary institutionally and between different forms of operation and forms of distribution. Without establishing such a solid foundation of knowledge, it is difficult to see how institutions can be held accountable, or for that matter, the other way around: without a solid knowledge base, we as citizens cannot hold politicians accountable for providing our schools with (in)adequately educated teachers! In addition, without such information, how is any programme development supposed to be successful?

The national systems for quality assurance of higher education that have been in operation in recent decades are likely insufficient.²³³ From a developmental perspective, it would be preferable if this area of education, on its own basis, would initiate development programmes for higher education and teacher education based on the concrete approach established in what is now called improvement science and address the following issues as starting points in the work to “get better at getting better”:

• “What specifically are we trying to accomplish?

• What changes might we introduce and why?

• How do we know that a change is actually an improvement?”²³⁴

It has long been noted that there is an ongoing homogenization and mainstreaming of educational systems worldwide.²³⁵ We must ask why; one response could be that this feature of educational development since the mid-1900s mirrors wider societal processes and shares properties like an increasing division and specialization of labour, the development of the welfare state and so on. An alternative explanation could be that homogenization is caused by an increased exchange of knowledge among different countries and school systems combined with the increased internationalization of research in the field. As a result, “national” policies have become more international in its outlook, and this is equally true of education policy.²³⁶ With increased opportunities to visit other countries for on-site studies of educational systems and the abundance of globalized information, it is now more or less required of municipalities and the local leadership of school districts to study international examples of successful schools rather than in a nearby county. In addition, it is obvious that what could be called the industry of large-scale assessments of educational system, like PISA, to a large extent is part and parcel of this process.²³⁷

Such explanatory models indicate that the alternatives can be of varying nature, partly oriented towards fundamental structural changes and partly towards more individual-oriented and actor-based explanations. It is also plausible to explain the development as conditioned by the increased bureaucratization of an older and more hands-on tradition of improvements in developmental activities based on extensive schemes for quality assurance. Max Weber argued that bureaucracy was largely caused by competition and that development was driven by efficiency requirements. Moreover, institutional theory has pointed out that competition works in different ways in different sectors and that organizations like higher education institutions and schools compete for legitimacy, which in itself can lead to homogenization: because of their need to obtain broad legitimacy, they have to appeal to wide interests.²³⁸ From such a perspective, dimensions are also added to the complexity, and development can be driven by both endogenous and exogenous processes.

Here we have to consider that these processes impact on the one hand the educational system as such (schools and higher education, including teacher education) and on the other teacher education as a somewhat foreign part of both higher education and schools. It appears plausible to understand this homogenization process in education as pushed by both exogenous and endogenous developments. We can understand the trajectory as a consequence of adaptations to de facto power structures and social realities and as related to more individual-based conditions and to different forms of institutional logic. However, these overarching explanations of educational reforms have a common tendency to be aligned with ideas of transformation through top-down and outside-in processes. The increased structural similarities are perceived to be caused by systems’ transformation over time and based on overall decisions. Input for these changes may have come from different directions, as indicated here, but as education is often the responsibility for large entities like a nation, region or state, the alignment is primarily thought to have occurred through centralized decisions.

At the same time, possible scenarios call into question the effectiveness of such models for transformation. External and top-down reforms run the risk of not only being badly designed due to insufficient understanding of the complex nature of educational issues but also, due to the inherent features of traditional implementation procedures causing something like policy sediments with separate layers of understandings and, for that matter, perhaps false notions of failure. Every reform sends the message (sometimes only implicitly) that what was previously done was flawed in one respect or another and thereby create barriers to concrete and actual development.²³⁹ It may also be the case that political argumentation is exaggerated to justify the implementation of a reform, a strategy that in the long run undermines not only the operation but also public confidence in the system as a whole.²⁴⁰

The recurrent reform of Swedish teacher education certainly reflects this conjunction of problems. Society is constantly changing, and information about this change and how it affects schools will inevitably reach teacher education programmes in one form or another. Individual teacher educators do what they are supposed to do; that is, they teach and try to do so in a way that they perceive as responding to both students’ needs and societal demands. At the same time, the system rationale expects academic leaders, who hopefully are active as researchers and engaged in international research communities and thereby gain insights into teacher education cross national borders, and to be dedicated to working strategically towards improvement.

In Sweden, as in most other countries, there is no political agreement on the future, so politicians do not seek to establish consensus on educational policy or teacher education issues. Due to that, we have witnessed a long series of politically initiated teacher education reforms that, because of their weak foundation and rather detached point of origin from an educational point of view, have not led to much positive change; ironically, their low impact causes repetitive reform behaviour among politicians.²⁴¹ Together, these forces create something of a downward spiral rather than a shared effort for improvement.

Hence, there is a profound need for a renewed paradigm to perform the essential task of providing schools with the very best teachers. The challenge is not about finding some expert teachers to perform the task but about collective competence within the teaching profession as a whole. It is about how the enhancement, recognition and use of that competence can be arranged systematically.²⁴² The challenge is not to develop a good school or excellent teacher education but to create an excellent system that delivers both high and equal quality.²⁴³ And this has to be on a scale and at levels in accordance with what can be expected in a globalized society that urgently needs to transform to meet the challenges that the global community has articulated in the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

The form of government pertaining to one of the set of Swedish laws that together comprise that country’s constitution states that “public institutions shall promote sustainable development leading to a good environment for present and future generations” and “promote the ideals of democracy as guidelines in all sectors of society.”²⁴⁴ Without including this perspective in our analysis of teacher education in Sweden, the picture would be fatally incomplete. This perspective is easily lost in the general debate that tends to focus on a much narrower understanding of education. It is also the case that educational elements that are pursued due to the profound democratic ambitions of education are criticized as being slack, as they do not focus on what’s perceived as traditional schooling, (like math, reading etc) which is deeply unfortunate.

At the same time, it is also likely that one dimension of the problem involves the fact that teacher education is delivered in a traditional academic context that might conflict with central dimensions of teacher education. Simply stated, teacher education have a wider purpose, aligned with compulsory education, to contribute not only to students qualification for working life and their capabilities as citizens, but also to “happiness, human wellbeing, growth of human capabilities and the diversity of understandings of what it is to be human and what a desirable society looks like, as Dewey once wrote ‘…democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.’ ”²⁴⁵ As such, teacher education also includes normative guidelines; a teacher must be the bearer of the values ​​that the school system should promote, while the academic ideal of being independent and critical is easily is perceived as conflicting with a more profession-oriented foundation that includes values and democracy.²⁴⁶ The history of teacher education in Sweden indicates how difficult it can be to reconcile these two traditions.²⁴⁷ It is certainly essential to respond to both requirements as also this is crucial for high quality teacher education.