Fridolin's school development program: Digitization is fluffed, coding is completely missed

The government mandates the National Agency for Education to develop and implement national school development programmes in six areas, only one of which explicitly addresses digitization, and only IT as a pedagogical and administrative tool. Programming and other IT-related knowledge are still conspicuous by their absence from the curriculum in the country that claims to be a leading IT nation.

There has long been pressure on the government to develop a national strategy for school digitalization, even more so after the Alliance presented its proposal for a strategy in early June this year. On Thursday 9 July, Minister of Education Fridolin presented, in the form of a press release, a proposal for a national school development program, where the Swedish National Agency for Education receives in the order of 140 million per year to develop and implement national initiatives in a number of areas. For those of us who have been deeply concerned about the shortcomings in the school when it comes to digitization, the proposal can be nothing but a disappointment. Most of the points deal with general development issues for schools: general skills development, reducing administration, changing working methods and systematic quality work. Only the last one explicitly addresses IT.

Are we who want to promote digitization only narrow-mindedly fixated on digitization as an end in itself? Can we not see that the other five points are also linked to digitization, as IT systems can be tools for these as well? The answer is no.

As the Digitalization Commission and others have shown in their thorough mapping of IT in schools, the lack of and greatly varying IT maturity is a problem in itself, which requires special efforts. Everyone who has been involved in the development of IT systems in any way knows that it is complicated and sometimes also thankless, and in order to successfully implement digitization, clear leadership is required. As the government's assignment to the National Agency for Education is formulated, there is now every opportunity in the world for the Agency to fluff away the "tough" digitization issues.

An important dimension of IT in schools that both the Alliance and Fridolin's proposals completely miss is IT as a field of knowledge, i.e. learning programming and other forms of digital creation. Most other countries are now introducing different variants of "Computer Science" as compulsory parts of the primary school curriculum. But not so in Sweden, which otherwise likes to beat its chest about being so prominent in IT. Can you call this anything other than a fear of contact?