Doubly disadvantaged

Key findings

The SALSA model (the National Agency for Education's tool for local correlation analyses) calculates an expected merit value for each school based on parents' education level, the proportion of recently immigrated students and gender distribution. A negative SALSA score means the school performs worse than what the student composition predicts — regardless of how high or low the absolute level is.

Schools with a SALSA score below −10 are those that most noticeably miss their demographic potential. Combined with the Swedish Schools Inspectorate's supervision data — which shows that 92.8% of inspected compulsory schools have deficiencies in teaching and support — a pattern emerges of schools that not only underperform expectations, but also find themselves under supervisory pressure.

The Swedish Schools Inspectorate's supervision picture

Source: Swedish Schools Inspectorate planned supervision, latest available year. The percentages refer to the proportion of inspected schools that received at least one decision with deficiencies.

The 50 schools with the most negative SALSA score

The table shows schools sorted by SALSA score (most negative at the top). Municipal/independent status is shown to enable comparison with the supervision statistics above.

Showing top 50 of 433 schools with SALSA score ≤ −10. 20 independent and 30 municipal among these.

Comparison: the most successful schools

For contrast, the 5 schools with the most positive SALSA score are shown — schools that perform better than what the student composition predicts.

Methodology and limitations

The SALSA score is calculated per school as actual merit value minus model-predicted merit value. The model explains approximately 53 % of the variation in merit values — the remaining variance depends on factors such as leadership, resources and pedagogical quality.

The Swedish Schools Inspectorate's data in this analysis is aggregated — it refers to the proportion of inspected schools (by school form and organiser type) that received at least one supervision decision with deficiencies during the latest supervision round. It is not a school-level linkage: we cannot determine whether the specific schools with a negative SALSA score are the same schools that received deficiencies in the supervision. Such an analysis requires school-level data from the Swedish Schools Inspectorate.

The threshold of −10 SALSA score points is an analytical choice. Lower thresholds (e.g. −5) yield more schools but a weaker signal; higher thresholds (e.g. −20) yield fewer but clearer deviations.