To Örebro University

The historiography of state intervention generally, and the historiography of state subsidies in particular, has indicated that state intervention may have a wide variety of effects on school systems, depending on the kind of intervention and its context. A centralization of the school systems funding and organization have been perceived as resulting in increased regional equality in Massachusetts (Kaestle & Vinovskis, 1980, 199) and France (Grew & Harrigan, 1991, 227). Matching grant formulas have, on the contrary, been said to increase differences between poor and rich school districts, since they allocate funding depending on how much districts spend on their schools (Swanson & King, 1991, 197). Studies have also shown of state grants have been used to increase the funding gap between schools for the white and the African-American communities in the USA (Margo, 1982), and that cost per pupil did not seem to converge after the introduction of payments by results in England and Wales after 1862 (Mitch, 2010).

This paper examines the efforts to reform and centralize the funding of the Swedish primary school system in the early twentieth century. From the 1870s and onwards, the funds of the Swedish primary schools had been distributed according to a matching grants system. In 1871, previous state subsidies were replaced with a system of matching grants that covered half of school teacher salaries (with a maximum subsidy of 250 SEK per primary school teacher (folkskollärare) and 75 SEK per junior school teacher (småskollärare). In 1875, the grants were made more generous to match two-thirds of teacher salaries with a maximum of 400 SEK for primary school teachers and 125 SEK for junior school teachers. This was later followed by minor adjustments of the maximum level of the subsidies.

In 1913, this system of matching grants was reformed. After parliamentary debate on raising the level of state subsidies, starting already in 1878, the Swedish parliament decided in 1913 that the state was to cover 90% of teacher minimum salary and all of the add-ons that teacher received after a certain number of years. As a result, the government grants increased from contributing to 30 percent of the local school districts’ revenues in 1910 to 49 percent in 1920 (Westberg 2017).

By examining available statistical data, and contemporary parliamentary debate, this paper studies the intentions behind this reform, and the impact that this reform had on regional disparity of Swedish schooling in the early twentieth century. As a result, this paper contributes to the historiography of state subsidies, and the literature on the centralization of primary school systems during the end of the nineteenth century in Sweden and elsewhere in the West.