Towards the top?

During the last few years we´ve got reports constantly that tell us that Swedish student´s results are not in the top on the lists comparing with other countries in Europe. It seems to be very important to have the best students and our politicians have tried to analyze the causes of the low results. They sometimes talk about that the Swedish pupils’ don´t have enough demands in school and that makes affects on the knowledge. Now there will be changes, when schools can give written reports to parents from first grade, national tests in third grade and earlier grades. The expectations of these measures are high.

One affect would be that grades in 6th grade will motivate pupils to perform better. I believe it´s true that many children will do the very best and that the grades will be important because of this. This will also make it important to let the pupils and also their parents familiar with the goals. Maybe it´s easier to understand and talk about the goals when they get grades earlier.

The parental support will be determined for many children if they will pass or not. The new reform seems to make parents more participated in school than before. We know that parents are able to push and give their children support if they are interested and have enough time to help them with homework and so on. On the other hand we know that all children don´t have this support and sometimes parents want to help their children but circumstances don´t make it easy for them to do it.

Will all pupils be winners at the end with the new reform? Everyone wants to succeed but unfortunately we know that everyone can´t. In our schools there are lots of pupils with difficulties and how about them? Will they be the losers? I suppose we want children to believe in themselves and don´t give up. If schools can´t give support to all these children we will fail in our ambitions to get a better school.

To summarize my thoughts about all this, I think it´s important to find pupils with special needs as early as possible and much can be done, if we do it in early ages. Therefore, I believe in all these early tests and I think it´s good if we involve parents from start. The parental support is something useful. Many years ago I didn´t believed at all in early grades but I have changed my mind and have come to the conclusion that grades is something clear that both pupils and parents understand. From my point of view we could have taken small steps and it would have been enough with grades for Swedish, English and mathematic in 6th grade.