Our member for Sweden is the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket), it acts as the national authority for the public school system, the preschool system, for school age and for adult education.
Educational portals: http://itforpedagoger.skolverket.se/in_english/; www.programkontoret.se/etwinning.
Contact details:
Alströmergatan 12
SE-106 20
Stockholm
Sweden
Tel:+46 8 52733573
Fax: +46 8 244420
Description of activities:
The Agency steers, supports, follows up and evaluates the work of municipalities and schools with the purpose of improving quality and the result of activities to ensure that all pupils have access to equal education.
In the decentralised Swedish school system the responsibility for ICT is shared. The role of the municipalities is to see to good accessibility to computers and the Internet in schools as well as that the educationalists are highly skilled in using ICT as a pedagogical tool. The role of the state is to promote the use of ICT in education, mainly by supporting the municipalities in their task.
The state authorities promote the use of ICT in education by developing user-friendly ICT tools for in-service competence development and school improvement as well as by stimulating the educationalists to increase their knowledge and competence. Furthermore the government will continue to work for good accessibility in all areas of education although mainly by supporting the municipalities in their task. An important task on a national level is to spread the use of ICT to all concerned groups in education and all over the country.
The Agency is responsible for promoting the use of ICT in schools. One of the main activities is to facilitate schools with access to digital learning resources both in terms of stimulating production by different actors (teachers, museums, publishers etc) and in terms of easy discovery and access to these resources. One of the results is the Spider, a federated search service that provides access to resources in a number of Swedish repositories.
The Agency has participated in a number of EU projects where Swedish resources are shared at European level and Sweden is contributing resources to the Learning Resource Exchange.
Information about the Swedish education system and ICT policies:
Insight country report: http://insight.eun.org/country_reports/sweden
