Skolpengen och skollokaler - En studie om kommunernas resursfördelning till skolor, vilka skillnader det finns och förhållandet mellan lokalersättningen och det totala bidraget

Sammanfattning: Background: The reforms of schools in the early 1990s meant decentralization of responsibility within the Swedish school system. The goal was to create freedom of choice and promote competition between public schools and at the same time make it possible for independent principals to establish new schools through a public resource allocation system funded mostly from the municipalities and the taxbase. Sweden's municipalities now have the entire operational responsibility where the local management, in addition to the responsibility for administration, is an educational and operationally controlling authority. The municipalities also have full responsibility for financing schools, both schools under their own management and private schools through the public distribution of financial resources, the school subsidy, named “skolpeng”. There is no statutory or developed universal model for how the municipalities should allocate resources to the schools. It is therefore interesting to investigate how the process works when the municipalities calculate and decide the school subsidy, but above all which differences it begets, especially the part of the funding regarding the schools’ premises. Purpose: This study intends to investigate how Sweden's municipalities’ works with the financial distribution to schools, especially the fundings related to the premises but also the rent and how they relate to each other. The study mainly deals with three sub-areas: ● The municipalities' organizational structure, especially regarding property management and rent principles. ● Differences in the school subsidies, both the total funding per pupil and for school premisses, between different municipalities. ● Differences between how school subsidies is calculated to public and private schools and what the private schools think about the subsidy system. Method: To gather the necessary data and find relevant theory for this thesis, a literature study was conducted which involves reading reports about the Swedish school, the funding system to the schools and the role of the municipalities. After this, the data collection could begin. The report is based on data and information obtained from Sweden's municipalities, principals for independent schools, private property owners, and from Statistics Sweden (SCB) and the Swedish National Agency for Education. When collecting data, questions about the funding, compensation for the premises and rent systems was sent out to all of Sweden's 290 municipalities, to 5 principals for independent schools and to 8 private property owners. During the initial two months of the study, continuous mail correspondence was held with all the mentioned actors for collecting data where a few telephone calls were made with certain actors. Conclusions: The lack of a precise regulations for calculating and deciding the school subsidies means that the municipalities' methods differ markedly. The municipalities mainly make use of cost-based rents, but where the rent models still differ a lot between the municipalities. These differences leads to great divergence in the size of the funding per student between the municipalities. The results also show that there are large differences between what is being paid out for to cover the costs of the premises and the municipalities' actual costs of premises, this can partly be explained by the lack of established calculation models. A consequence is that private schools risk getting an incorrectly funding, since the compensation is based on the municipality's average costs related to schools that they own and run themselves. Another explanation as to why funding differ so much between municipalities in total and for the premises may be that the municipalities' organizational forms are different in terms of property management. Some municipalities own and manage their properties centrally whereas some municipalities own their school properties through separate companies. The most common organizational structure is that the municipalities own the property on which the schools are located internally through municipality boards, where the property management and payment of premises is being made centrally without the schools being involved. The cost-based rent controls the market! The private side of the Swedish schools use market-based rents, but since the majority of the Swedish school properties are owned by the municipalities, which use cost-based rents, the market-based rent becomes a direct consequence of the cost-based rent.