In the interest of giving parents more control over their children’s education and addressing quality concerns, Sweden implemented a voucher system in 1992.

This meant that parents were able to choose any school for their children, regardless of where they lived and without worrying about tuition. And since then, more and more of them have been choosing to put their children in independent charter schools.

Before the voucher system was implemented, fewer than 1% of all students in Sweden attended these charter schools. That number jumped to 4% in 2003, 14% in 2012, and 18% in 2019. This suggests that charter schools were always more desirable than their attendance numbers indicated… but beyond the reach of many families because of the cost.

They are called friskola – “free school” – to distinguish them from private tuition-based schools. They have to be approved by the Swedish National Agency for Education, and they follow the same national curriculum as the municipal public schools.

They can be owned and operated by profit-oriented private companies as well as non-profit organizations. And as economist Milton Friedman has pointed out, this has introduced an element of competition into the entire Swedish school system that should improve the overall quality of education and drive down costs.