IT in schools: time for concrete, nationally coordinated action!

In recent years, the use of IT in schools has finally started to take off, which is very encouraging. What is worrying, however, is that the initiatives are so scattered, with some enthusiastic schools and municipalities having come much further than others. Equality in distribution and use should be a matter of concern for the responsible ministries and authorities, but unfortunately the central decision-makers, with the Minister of Education Jan Björklund at the forefront, have completely abdicated the issue.

An organized and thoughtful roll-out of IT in schools, to support both pedagogy and administration, is an important issue for the Swedish IT industry, in several ways. First, it is good business. Even though school authorities are already spending billions in this area, it is not good for the industry that investments are made in the improvised way that is currently the case. To put it in our own words: the client competence is low, which both the "clients" - the schools and their students - and the industry suffer from.

Secondly, it is about the skills of the future. With an unstructured array of equipment and methods that are at best on par with the rest of society, at worst a couple of decades behind, we cannot ensure that young people acquire the 21st Century Skills that school developers around the world are chasing. We cannot have a workforce that will serve our future high-tech industry where perhaps the most important skills - digital skills - are largely acquired outside school.

During the spring, IT&Telecom companies will develop a proposal for a national action program regarding IT in schools, which will be presented in Almedalen. The focus is on concreteness - there are already plenty of visions (if we exclude the corridors of the Ministry of Education). In this work, we want to collaborate with all the parties(The Computer in Education, the Digitization Commission, etc.) who already possess great knowledge in the field. We welcome even more!

Regardless of whether the Ministry of Education sees value in central coordination or not, we in the industry want to make sure that everyone is pulling in the same direction.