When will we have a skills ministry?

"Sweden needs a skills policy rather than an education policy," said Associate Professor Nils Karlsson at the well-attended Ratio seminar in Almedalen on the shortcomings in companies' skills supply. With this, he wanted to highlight that skills are about so much more than formal education, and that as long as the education system ignores the fact that modern working life requires more abilities and skills than those you get in classrooms, we will have a serious mismatch in the labor market.

Education policy is one of the many splendid stumbling blocks in the Swedish administration, where the Ministry of Education's perspective conveniently and predictably sticks to its familiar territory in the form of the National Agency for Education, the Schools Inspectorate and the National Agency for Higher Education. It may sometimes be said that education policy has an important purpose of equipping citizens for a future working life, but this is hardly ever put into practice. Issues of importance to industrial and labor market policy (e.g. how to ensure that both teachers and students achieve a decent level of digital literacy) are kept at a safe distance.

For a number of months, IT&Telecom companies have requested an audience with the Minister of Education to discuss two issues at the intersection of education and industrial policy. One is the glaring lack of IT skills among teachers, the other the influx of international students which has largely stopped since the introduction of fees. On the first issue, we already know the Minister's categorical rejection of modern learning materials, which might be seen as comical if it did not have a devastating long-term effect.

On the second question, how to get the necessary injection of international skills into our universities, an interesting seminar was organized by the Stockholm Academic Forum and the Mälardal Council. A study confirms that the number of international students has fallen sharply since the introduction of fees, and the discussion at the seminar clearly showed that there was no coordinated policy to deal with the impact of the introduction of fees.

"Everyone" was at the seminar, but was the Ministry of Education there? No, you thought right.