Around one in four students in Swedish schools now come from a foreign background as schools across the country are becoming more and more segregated, according to a new report.
The new report claims that while the school system across Sweden has seen a growth in the number of foreign-background students, it has also seen segregation to the point where in one municipality there exists a school with students who are 90 percent from foreign backgrounds and another in which they are only four percent, SVT reports.
The statistics in the report come from the Swedish National Agency for Education and show schools such as the Sunnadal School in Karlskrona have a student population of entirely migrant background children, in Borlänge several schools have foreign-background populations of over 80 percent, and in Linköping several schools have an over 90 percent foreign-background student body.
One result of the segregation, according to the report, has been a difference in school performance between heavily migrant-background schools and other schools.
“We have an increased concentration of pupils based on social background and migration background, and we see that we have increased disparities in school results,” Peter Fredriksson, director general of education, said.
In some heavily migrant populated areas, such as the “vulnerable” Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby, results in some schools are far below the average. At schools in both Rinkeby and Hjulsta students were found to be underperforming to the extent that half of the students were not able to pass into high school.
Amin Ahmed, the father of one of the students at one of the schools said that he and other parents had considered moving their children to different schools in order to improve their education.
Another major issue in Swedish schools has been the increase in violence, with the Swedish Work Environment Authority claiming in October that the reports of incidents of threats, robberies, and physical violence had increased by 129 percent from 2012 to 2017.