Politicians are planning to entice private schools to accept the children of immigrants in order to reduce their presence in public schools.
According to a report published by DR, politicians want to entice private schools to accept more students of non-Western immigrant origins, because the number of students of non-Western origin is increasing in public schools at the expense of private schools, so politicians want to “reward schools that promote integration.”.
According to figures released by Statistics Denmark, the proportion of students of immigrant origins from non-Western backgrounds in public schools in 2021 was 11.1%, while the proportion in private schools was 7.1%. The proportion in public schools specifically increased by 13% since 2014 with the influx of Syrian refugees, while the proportion decreased by 4% in private schools. In addition, parents of students of Danish origin chose to transfer their children from schools where the proportion of students from non-Western backgrounds increased, as they believe that the quality of education is decreasing due to differences in the educational level between students.
The SF party wants to offer incentives to private schools to accept the children of immigrants.
According to Jacob Mark, the SF party's education spokesperson, the SF party wants to provide financial support to independent and private schools that accept more students who are not of Danish ethnicity, and on the other hand, support should be cut off for schools that do not contribute sufficiently to improving society.
The money paid by the government is called the pairing ratio (koblingsprocenten), and since 2018 the pairing ratio has remained constant at 76%, the highest level ever reached by this figure, which politicians want to increase in order to incentivize private schools to accept students of non-Danish ethnicity and reduce their proportion in state schools.
The head of the private schools association expressed his opinion, but the minister declined to comment.
The president of the Danish Private Schools Association, Carsten Suhr, commented: “I don’t think punishment or reward is the way forward here… In our constitution, parents have the right to choose the school their child will attend.” The head of private schools in Denmark believes that the reason for the low percentage of immigrants and their descendants in private schools today is simply that parents who belong to a minority do not choose private schools. Therefore, he believes that instead, free places should be made available where pupils can benefit from all or part of the expenses covered by the municipality, in response to the fact that a large proportion of that group are low-income.
Pernille Rosenkranz-Theil, the acting Minister for Children and Education in the current caretaker government, declined to be interviewed about the “distorted distribution” of pupils while government negotiations are ongoing. It is worth noting that this idea is not new to the SF party, which previously put it forward under the idea of “providing support to schools based on how much they provide socially” and failed to implement it. The party is now putting it forward again in the current negotiations on forming the new government with Mette Frederiksen.
