Tombola and green lawns: Danish inspiration for IT in schools

Yesterday, a hearing was held in the Second Chamber of the Danish Parliament, organized by, among others, Datorn i Utbildningen and MPs Camilla Waltersson Grönvall and Roza Güclü Hedin, on how the Danish school system has worked to integrate the use of IT in school education. Representatives from the Danish Ministry of Education, Aarhus University and a digital textbook publisher gave presentations, which were followed up with questions from panels of Swedish counterparts. However, our own Ministry of Education was not present to learn from the Danish experience.

Perhaps we should be careful about judging how much better things seem to work in other countries and how bad everything is here at home. Of course, digital initiatives have had their ups and downs in Denmark too, the invited Danish guests admitted. However, there is no getting away from the fact that the grass is much greener on the other side of the Öresund. There, a completely different strategic approach has long been in place, backed by billions in government funding.

The message is quite clear: we need a concerted national approach in Sweden. There are a few snags, however. One of the most troublesome is the "project-tombola" that Swedish schools have already been subjected to for a long time, as one of the Swedish panelists put it. In its desperate eagerness to fix this and that, the Ministry of Education has bombarded the schools with various programs, incentives and initiatives, and a new national IT initiative risks becoming just another one of many if it is not implemented in a well thought-out way.

A forum under SKL, in which we from IT&Telecom companies have also participated, has developed a framework for a national strategy for school digitization. It is a promising first step, but needs to be supplemented with more concrete content. In 2013, Datorn i Utbildningen and IT&Telekomföretagen presented the Decision Book, which identifies five areas for a national action program.

It is time to build on this, in a strategic, non-random way. A first step is, like Denmark, to give the issue of school digitalization a higher political priority in general. As usual, the Ministry of Education was absent from the hearing yesterday...

For an overview of the Danish experience, see the Danish Digital School Development report by Datorn i Utbildning.