Publicly funded, but privately run schools in Sweden are under fire after one of the country's biggest private education firms filed for bankruptcy this year and abandoned 11,000 of its students, according to a Reuters report.
JB Education, owned by Axcel, a Danish private equity firm, is one of the biggest school shutdowns this year since the Scandinavian country reformed its education sector. It cut 1,000 jobs and left banks and suppliers with debts of almost $150 million.
"I was furious," Margarete Grugel, 56, whose 16-year-old daughter Tina had one week left of her first term of a hair styling course at the JB school in Jonkoping when it folded, told Reuters. "Tina was absolutely shattered by it."
"I think we have had too much blind faith in that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality," Tomas Tobé, head of the parliament's education committee and spokesman on education for the ruling Moderate party, told Reuters.
Formerly a socialist country that edifies the welfare state, Sweden experimented with capitalism and instituted free market policies two decades ago. It deregulated its tightly regulated education system by providing funds for school that private companies run and has been the darling of other countries, like Britain that has emulated the Swedish experiment.
Early in the 1990s, parents were given a choice for the first time which private schools they want their children to attend. The parents were given tax-funded vouchers to help them make the decision.
However, a deregulated school system reared its ugly head.
"Of course we could have been better at managing the schools," Joachim Sperling, Axcel's, senior communication advisor, told Reuters. "Many of the schools were in bad shape and even though we knew that from the start, we did not manage to deal with the challenges in due time."
One in four secondary schools is losing profit since 2008 and many risk of getting insolvent which rose 10 188 percent.
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