Back to books: Sweden’s digital backlash

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1:08We were sort of the pioneers in terms of digitalization of schools and I think everybody just followed us. They were like, oh, this works so well in Sweden, we should do it as well. We jumped on that train very fast and now more and more people realize that we should not have done that.

1:26Maddy Savage:Sweden is one of the most tech-savvy countries on the planet and in schools, laptops or tablets for every student have been the norm for more than a decade but now, the country's changing track I'm Maddy Savage, I'm originally from the UK and I moved to the Swedish capital in 2014 at a time of rapid digitalisation I remember money transfer apps were already mainstream there was fast Wi-Fi on the bus from the airport I was shocked you could even submit your tax return on a smartphone. In this programme, I'll be sharing the story of how Sweden's school system became part of that digital trend and why the country's government is now unravelling its education policies and bringing books back to the classroom.

2:13Reading real books and writing on real paper is much better if you want kids to get the knowledge they need.

2:20Maddy Savage:I'll be discussing the shift with teachers, pupils and researchers and finding out who's championing and criticising the change. We can't go back wishing for a school system that it was like in the 1950s. Digital competence is actually needed. From the BBC World Service, this is Back to Books, Sweden's digital backlash.

2:52Maddy Savage:I've just arrived in Sikla, a former industrial suburb just outside Stockholm with shiny office blocks and a new wooden high school building Many of the students arriving are carrying laptops but I'm here to find out how lessons have evolved since a new right-wing government came into power in 2022

3:14Maddy Savage:in a common room i meet final year students alexis and ludwig in some classes for example mathematics i've noticed we've used more books during the later years than computers what about you for me there's definitely been a big change so basically my whole life i've been using tablets computers, phones, whether we have a pencil and a paper and a book, you need to do it all yourself. Well, I'm Sophie and I'm 18 years old. My teacher has started with printing all the texts that we used during the lesson. You're showing me a leaflet now, so this is for Swedish level three. Yeah. And that wasn't happening two, three years ago.

3:58No, I don't think so. We didn't have a lot of papers but now I feel like I go home from school with new books and papers often.

4:07Maddy Savage:In a nearby classroom teacher Karina Mikkel is with a class of younger teenagers who are planning short stories and songs using pencils and paper.

4:19Maddy Savage:Although Karina's specialist subjects are languages she's going to give me a quick history lesson. I first started teaching in 2009 here in Sweden. That was my first teaching job. And back then we had books and it was a two-to-one. So there was one laptop for two kids. And they didn't bring their laptops at all times. They didn't have them on them at all times. But then slowly but surely we got one-to-one system where all the kids had a laptop. So by the late 2010s everything was pretty much digital? Pretty much, yeah. We didn't have any books any longer as such. Everything was supposed to be online because it was the thing to do.

5:02They were supposed to take notes online. They were supposed to read everything online. And printouts were sort of not banned, but they didn't generally favour them.

5:16Maddy Savage:What did you notice when the new government came in in 2022? How has the messaging changed? There was a massive push for, like, laptops are bad, books are good. We got a grant for a lot of money to buy books for the kids. So we're going more towards the 60s again, which is a bit odd. But it is more books, pens, papers and classes where the laptops are an attribute. they're not the main focus. Very soon, I'm going to dig into the research that propelled Sweden to make such a big U-turn and share some of the divided reactions to the shift. But first, we need to rewind the clock a bit. Why did this small Nordic nation become a global pioneer for digital education in the first place?

6:15Maddy Savage:Back in the 1990s, Sweden had a population of less than 9 million people, but it was investing heavily in new technologies.

6:27Maddy Savage:That's what it sounded like when you went online then, an era of dial-up internet connected to phone lines. In 1994, Sweden's then Prime Minister, Karl Bildt, sent the first ever email to another head of government, the President of the United States, Bill Clinton. A few days later, he gave a speech setting out a vision for Sweden to be at the forefront of global technological development by 2010.

6:53Maddy Savage:This is him remembering that time in an interview for Sweden's Internet Museum, saying some Swedes thought he was crazy. But he was convinced the Internet would supercharge businesses and improve communication. A new IT commission was appointed, which recommended a tax break to help families buy home computers. Then successive governments on the right and left also poured money into broadband connectivity around the country. By the turn of the millennium, more than 45 % of Swedes had access to the internet, according to World Bank data. That's compared to less than 1 % of people in India or Nigeria and 26 % of people in the UK.

7:36I remember because I moved to England in the early 2000s. We had internet everywhere pretty much at that time. And they didn't.

7:46Maddy Savage:And I was like, what? How does this work? By the mid-2000s, things were going even better than Carl Bild had hoped. Swedes were launching global tech giants like the video calling platform Skype, digital payments company Klarna and Spotify, which transformed the music industry. It was this digital infrastructure that paved the way for the education policies in the 2000s and 2010s that Karina mentioned earlier, putting laptops and tablets into the hands of every student.

8:20Maddy Savage:This is a former education minister, Gustav Fridolin, speaking in Sweden's parliament in 2017 when he was part of a social democrat green coalition. He promised to improve digital competences amongst every age group in Swedish schools to help prepare students for an increasingly digital world, at home and in the workplace.

8:47Maddy Savage:My next stop is visiting a researcher affiliated with the Karolinska Institute, one of Sweden's top universities. She's going to tell me more about the country's digital strategy.

9:02Maddy Savage:Cecilia Nutley has a PhD in neuroscience and runs digital health programs in schools. Today, she's working from home in northern Stockholm, surrounded by snowy forest. There was a very strong political push to accelerate the digital transformation in schools. So it was written into the curriculum that children, even as young as in preschool, and it was mandatory to use digital tools. Was there much controversy around this at the time? There was not much pushback at all in my recollection. So it was quite well adopted and people thought that it was in line with the ambition to have Sweden as you know one of the front runners in digital transformation.

9:52Maddy Savage:So it fitted in with Sweden's self-image of being progressive, egalitarian society, tech for everyone. Definitely. But in the late 2010s, Dr. Nutley and other researchers around the world were starting to argue that digital devices in classrooms could bring challenges as well as possibilities. One worry is that some children get easily distracted if they're using the internet for schoolwork, because they can also access social media, videos or games instead. And that usually causes a chain reaction in the classroom. So if one kid loses their focus and starts going on YouTube or something else, everybody who's in the field of view of that screen is also distracted.

10:36Maddy Savage:Schools can install technology designed to limit what sites students can see and keep them within specific educational programs or platforms. But... It's not always efficient for all sites and so on, So kids tend to be quite savvy in finding their way around these systems as well. Another core concern is how using screens compared to books impacts how children process information. So just by the format that a screen introduces information is a little bit more difficult for us to process than analog equivalent information. And I think most of us adults notice that during the pandemic as well. it's quite tiring to sit and have meetings on a screen compared to having a real meeting.

11:23Maddy Savage:And as a brain researcher, a big concern for Dr. Nutley is young children's development. Because of their nature and the difficulties of understanding what's happening on a screen for a very young child, if you use that a lot during this very expansive phase, you can block other important developmental stages. So too much screen during this very critical developmental phase can essentially impact your language development, your cognitive development, impulse control. As Swedish schools and preschools became more and more digital in the 2010s, Dr. Nutley called for deeper debates about how and when lessons should include laptops and tablets.

12:11So I started raising questions and getting involved and I essentially tried to stop this and went to the media and so on. But it was too late and no critical voices were heard at that time, basically.

12:26Maddy Savage:Before we fast forward to the recent shift in direction, I need to share some important context about what else was going on in Swedish schools in the 2000s and 2010s. You happy for me to record this, Andreas? Yes, yes, absolutely. Andreas Schleicher lives in Paris and is Director of Education for the OECD, an independent global policy forum that studies social and economic well-being. Sweden used to be a kind of star performer on almost any form of international comparison when it comes to education. The OECD conducts the world's largest and most influential international survey of 15-year-old pupils, called PISA, comparing their abilities in maths, reading and science.

13:09Over the last two decades, it has seen a steady decline, beginning in the 2000s and then accelerating. Over the last years, we've seen, particularly in the area of reading, a market drop in the quality of outcomes.

13:25Maddy Savage:And how does Sweden's trajectory compare internationally? Is this just happening in Sweden? There were sort of many countries that saw that same trend, but not as pronounced as Sweden. Andrea says one likely reason is the marketization of some schools in Sweden since the 90s so they're run by private companies rather than local municipalities and that's been more successful in some places than others resulting in a wider variation of test scores Sweden also experienced increased migration and rising inequality during this period Yeah but this socio-economic factors you know whether it's disadvantage or migration You could observe them in many other countries as well.

14:07Sweden is not unique in that.

14:10Maddy Savage:Andreas believes the most significant factor in falling test scores is likely to be the digitalisation of education, which happened more quickly and extensively in Sweden than most other countries. It's always hard to pin down cause and effect because we just see the result. But since that decline over the last years is quite consistent and related generally with technology intensity in classrooms, I would say over the last years, probably that technology component has overtaken other factors in Sweden.

14:45Maddy Savage:In 2022, more than 70 % of pupils in Sweden surveyed by the OECD reported using a laptop or desktop computer at school every day or almost every day. That's compared to an average of around 36 % in other countries. And 42 % of Swedish students said they used educational software, games or apps almost every day or more, compared with a 25 % average. Andreas argues many digital tools can be effective in assisting pupils' learning. But he describes Sweden's early adoption of classroom technologies as too unstructured. You know, what I would say Sweden has done is it just, you know, put a lot of devices, technology into classroom without clear pedagogical intent, without clear goalposts, without, you know, very good training of teachers.

15:37That's the real main lesson. Technology in the hands of teachers is a very powerful kind of tool. It can create, you know, it can give teachers much better insight how different students learn differently. It can make the learning of students more granular. It's an amazing power for students with special needs. So all of those things are there. But the lesson really is if you want to reap those benefits, you have to have clear pedagogical intent.

16:02Maddy Savage:The OECD's research also points to Swedish students being frequently distracted by personal devices in classrooms. The vast majority of pupils have their own phone before they turn 10. That's according to data from the Swedish Internet Foundation. You have about 40 % of students in Sweden who say I can no longer concentrate because of my smartphone or somebody else's smartphone. Plus, we see also clear negative relationships with social and emotional outcomes. Students feel more isolated, less happy. So there are a number of relationships that we observe, but determining cause and effect is really hard.

16:42Maddy Savage:I'm outside Sweden's parliament now a huge round building that's been surrounded by ice recently during an especially cold winter when Sweden's current government was sworn in here in 2022 moving away from digitalisation in schools wasn't initially a core policy the country's education agency was actually working on a strategy to ramp up digitalisation even more but by this point policymakers in Sweden were aware of the wide-ranging concerns about the potential impact of screens on learning and the nation's falling test results. They gave scientists and educators the opportunity to send in feedback, including Dr.

17:18Maddy Savage:Nutley. I was part of one of those organizations that was Arts and Hearts and we wrote a response, probably 30 pages or so, going through all the research and what was missing in this strategy, which basically was pushing more and more use of digital tools into the classrooms just for the sake of using more digital tools. Some of Sweden's top universities including the Karolinska Institute and Lund University also issued warnings about the impact of screens and digital tools especially on younger children and so did the country's association for school doctors.

18:03Maddy Savage:After the review, Sweden's schools minister Lotte Edholm and employment minister Johan Persson held this press conference, announcing they were switching their approach based on feedback from experts. From skärm till pärm. It's a catchy rhyme in Swedish, and in English it literally means from screen to binder. In other words, it's about a return to books and paper, as I heard about in the school in Sickler earlier. So, my name is Jor Föschell, and we're in the Swedish parliament, just outside the chamber. Yeah, we're looking out over the frozen ice, so it's nice to be in the war. Jor is a newly appointed education spokesperson for Sweden's Liberal Party.

18:48Maddy Savage:It's part of Sweden's current right-wing coalition and oversees the country's education ministry. When I was in school, everyone got their own computer, but it didn't work. So we're trying actually to get rid of screens as much as possible. Of course, with higher ages in school, you might use them a little bit more, but with lower ages in school, I don't think we should use screens at all, really. In 2025, the government changed the law, so preschools are no longer required to use digital tools and tablets aren't given to kids under the age of two. Teachers have been asked to be more selective when using digital devices and programmes for older children, basing this on a documented educational added value.

19:32Maddy Savage:And compulsory changes to the school curriculum are due in 2028, designed to enforce more textbook-based learning. We're pumping in money for books, for real books, and also for having libraries. And we're also changing the law so that schools need to have a library with a librarian. Jor says he hopes the changes will improve students' skills and knowledge and boost Sweden's rankings in the next round of international school tests. You admitted that you feel Sweden took a wrong turn and went too digital, but your party, and indeed most of the parties, supported the idea of digitalisation. Why do you think it got to this point where nobody questioned it and now there's a lot of questioning going on?

20:18I think Sweden is usually early adopters and we're pricing our own innovative capability. We think that's a competitive edge for Sweden. So I think we jumped on that train very fast. And now more and more people realise that we should not have done that. We see that the impact on students, the impact on how schools work has been very bad. So, I mean, we agree that that was a mistake, but we're changing it back.