What child wouldn’t dream of it? At the Internationella Engelska Skolan (IES), in the municipality of Upplands Väsby, a dormitory suburb of fifty thousand inhabitants north of Stockholm, the six hundred students, aged 6 to 16, are distributed in four houses, as in the saga Harry Potter. Each is named after a Norse god – Odin, Freya, Thor and Idunn – in homage to the neighboring Viking village. The school, a circular building, lined with artificial grass, is housed in the former administrative premises of the adjoining chocolate factory, where Marabou bars, the Swedes’ favorite chocolate, are made. Inside, the walls have been repainted in pastel shades and the offices transformed into classrooms.
In a display case at the entrance, among the trophies won by the students, sits Barbara Bergström’s book, Tough Love (“Cow love”, untranslated, Ekerlids, 2018). In this manifesto to the glory of private education, the founder of the school, aged 77, tells how, in thirty years, she managed to build an empire, becoming the owner of forty-six establishments in Sweden. Primary and middle schools which have brought in more than 85 million euros since 1993.
Gray suits and small glasses, Anna Kuylenstierna apologizes: coming from the public, the director of the IES in Upplands Väsby took office in August and only read a few pages of Barbara Bergström’s essay. But she sums up the message: “I think it’s a mixture of structure and tenderness. »
In a corridor, students wait in single file before entering class at the teacher’s signal. Here, children do not call teachers by their first name, as elsewhere in Sweden, but by their last name, preceded by “Mrs” or “Mister”. Because a good part of the courses are in English. “This is what also attracts parents,” assures the director, who also mentions the excellent results of the establishment: 97% of third grade students had grades good enough to be eligible for high school last year (compared to 85% for the national average). But the installation of the IES in Upplands Väsby, where now 55% of schoolchildren and college students are enrolled in the private sector, has not only made people happy.
Competitive spirit
To understand the controversies surrounding the Swedish school system, we must remember that in the early 1990s, barely 1% of children attended a private school. Thirty years later, 16% of students from CP to III and 30% of high school students are educated in a friscola (a “free school”). In France, private education under contract represented, in 2022, 17.6% of school enrollments, according to the Court of Auditors.
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