Swedish School-age Educare Centres and German All-day Schools – A Bi-national Comparison of Two Prototypes of Extended Education

Abstract

In Sweden and in Germany, an extensive system of extended education programmes and activities has been established within the last decades. Prototypic examples of this development are school-age educare centres in Sweden and all-day schools in Germany. In this article a bi-national comparison, aiming to find some similarities and differences by means of historical background, current questions of student learning, staff professionalism, and research findings, is presented. It can be shown that, though Swedish school-age educare centres and German all-day schools are based on pedagogical roots reaching back to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, their historical developments are quite different. Whilst in Sweden the school-age educare idea became entrenched in the society and the collective beliefs about the necessity of learning outside the classroom, in Germany the all-day school model never prevailed. That only changed in the beginning of the 21st century when PISA showed that the German education system was not performing very well. Based on the different developments over time, both models established different features. With regard to student learning, the Swedish model is more oriented towards fostering creativity and imagination, whilst the German model is more oriented towards curricular learning. One difference concerning the students are that in Germany the all-day school embrace both children and youths up to the end of secondary-II level (up to 18/19 years), in Sweden young people older than 13 years old cannot participate in the school-age educare. In Sweden educators working outside of the classroom are academically trained in quite the same way as classroom teachers, whilst in Germany there is no such common regulation. Based on the more curricular learning centred view in Germany, some large scale effectivity studies were conducted within the last decade. Such comprehensive research programs are lacking in Sweden. We will give a short overview of some main research findings and discuss future research topics.