Privatizing Education: Free School Policy in Sweden and England

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate why Sweden, the epitome of social democracy, has implemented education reforms leading to an extraordinary growth in Free Schools in contrast to liberal England, where Free School policy has been met with enormous resistance. Conventional wisdom would predict the contrary, but as a matter of fact Sweden has bypassed England by far in outsourcing schools to private providers. The comparative argument promulgated in this article is that the combination of three interconnected variables—(1) type of political system, (2) party policy changes along the Left-Right dimension, and (3) the responses of the Left toward market-led reforms of education—are key in explaining this difference in Sweden and England.