Swedish School-age Educare Centres and German All-day Schools – A Bi-national Comparison of Two Prototypes of Extended Education

Abstract

In Sweden and in Germany, an extensive system of extended education programmes and activities has been established within the last decades. Prototypic examples of this development are school-age educare centres in Sweden and all-day schools in Germany. In this article a bi-national comparison, aiming to find some similarities and differences by means of historical background, current questions of student learning, staff professionalism, and research findings, is presented. It can be shown that, though Swedish school-age educare centres and German all-day schools are based on pedagogical roots reaching back to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, their historical developments are quite different. Whilst in Sweden the school-age educare idea became entrenched in the society and the collective beliefs about the necessity of learning outside the classroom, in Germany the all-day school model never prevailed. That only changed in the beginning of the 21st century when PISA showed that the German education system was not performing very well. Based on the different developments over time, both models established different features. With regard to student learning, the Swedish model is more oriented towards fostering creativity and imagination, whilst the German model is more oriented towards curricular learning. One difference concerning the students are that in Germany the all-day school embrace both children and youths up to the end of secondary-II level (up to 18/19 years), in Sweden young people older than 13 years old cannot participate in the school-age educare. In Sweden educators working outside of the classroom are academically trained in quite the same way as classroom teachers, whilst in Germany there is no such common regulation. Based on the more curricular learning centred view in Germany, some large scale effectivity studies were conducted within the last decade. Such comprehensive research programs are lacking in Sweden. We will give a short overview of some main research findings and discuss future research topics.

Domestication outside of the domestic: shaping technology and child in an educational moral economy

“…First, we too apply the notion of domestication to a new social context, specifically, the institution Swedish leisure-time centres (LTCs). We will introduce the institution in further detail below, but briefly put, it is an integrated part of the Swedish education system and provides education and care for children (6–12 years of age) before and after school (Klerfelt and Stecher, 2018). It thus constitutes an intersection between leisure time and school time as well as the private and the public for young people.…”

“…In 2019, 84% of children aged 6–9, and 20% of 10- to 12-year-olds, were enrolled in LTCs (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2019). The LTC is an integrated part of the education system both legally and physically; it is regulated by the Education Act and the national curriculum, and LTCs are most commonly located in school buildings (Klerfelt and Stecher, 2018). At the same time, LTCs are commonly constructed as a different space compared to compulsory school, with a different pedagogy (see further below), and with a more home-like environment with, for instance, sofas and toys (note that the institution in Swedish is called fritidshem , that is, ‘leisure-time home’).…”

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“…Having a comprehensively implemented extended education gives Sweden, and to some extent the other Nordic countries as well, a special position from an international point of view. Having one curriculum that steers all school-age educare centres makes the curriculum a unifying tool that can support equality throughout the country (Klerfelt & Stecher, 2018).…”

“…Discussing school-age educare when termed as a didactic arena is under debate in Sweden, with reference to the alternative approach to life and learning that characterise the content in the programme (Klerfelt & Stecher, 2018). An evaluation made by the Swedish Agency for Education 2018 (p. 42) shows that some teachers towards work in school-age educare centres criticize concepts used in the part of the curriculum regulating the schoolage educare centres (SNAE, 2011(SNAE, , rev.…”

“…There is a worry that the school-age educare with a tradition of emphazising care in combination with education will weaken and teaching and supervision increase (Andersson, 2014;Lager, 2015). There is also a worry that the teacher profession towards work in school-age educare will gradually more and more be dominated by the school tradition and lose characteristic features from the school-age educare tradition (Klerfelt, 2017a;Klerfelt & Stecher, 2018;Ljusberg & Holmberg, 2019). The school-age educare's point of departure in the child's perspective also argues to counteract the ongoing process of schoolification.…”