What Stephen Twigg doesn’t understand about Sweden’s for-profit schools

As a Swede, I’m always intrigued to hear the British Labour Party say how Sweden’s free school system has been a disaster. Profit-making schools, says Stephen Twigg, are backfiring. But I’d like to pose a question. If Mr Twigg thinks that profitmaking state schools in my homeland are such a disaster – and one with “with dire consequences for parents and children” – then why does he think that the Swedes haven’t banned them? Has he, from his vantage point of Westminster, spotted a flaw that the Swedes have missed? Or could it be that he has grasped the wrong end of the stick?

Mr Twigg recently wrote a piece for the Independent, lashing out against Michael Gove’s supposed plans to allow profit-making companies to own and run schools in the English state-funded education system. (If only: but that’s another story). Twigg reveals that he visited Sweden. Yet, he seems to have emerged with a view not reflected in the Swedish political agenda – or, for that matter, in reality.