{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022637013502779985, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004765687053216839, 'mean_word_length': 4.858139534883721, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Swedish Model for UK Schools

In Sweden, reforms enacted in the early 1990s allowed new schools to be set up that are independent of government control. A variety of educational providers stepped in, ranging from non-profit cooperatives and faith groups to for-profit corporations. These organisations are now running schools funded with public money through a voucher system. The Swedish system has been strongly praised by Conservative politicians, whose 'Advancing Opportunity' agenda proposes 'freeing up the system whereby new schools are established, to allow charities, livery companies, existing school federations, not-for-profit trusts, cooperatives and groups of parents to set up new schools in the state sector'. It has been suggested that an extended and reformed academies programme (initially introduced by the Blair government) would be the way to implement this approach in the UK. For some years, school choice and competition have been advocated as a mechanism for improving educational standards. It is argued that schools in the public sector might lack the right incentives to provide the best possible education, and the idea is that competition should put pressure on these schools to improve. But the evidence on this is mixed, and the most detailed study for England, carried out at CEP, finds no effect of choice and competition on primary school performance (Gibbons et al, 2008). There have been a number of studies of the effects of the Swedish reform. The most recent and careful study is by Anders Bohlmark and Mikael Lindahl (2008), who find evidence of only small positive effects. They speculate that one reason for this could be the fact that the entry of new private schools has not been followed by the closing down of state schools. It may be that increasing shares of school budgets have been devoted to the maintenance of poor quality state schools. This points to a general weakness in the application of market economics to the public sector. There is no natural mechanism for closing down poor schools (they do not literally go bust). Closing down schools can be slow, political and unpopular. The reality that governments will have to support simultaneously the new schools and the older 'bad' ones, and that the latter will not exit at an efficient rate, needs to be factored into the expected cost-effectiveness of a 'school creation' policy. Creating new schools can also be an expensive policy if large capital outlays are required. This is the case with academies …