Which municipalities have the best school results?
Sweden's 290 municipalities display large differences in school results. By colouring the municipality map by merit value in year 9, a pattern emerges that does not always match the picture painted by the media.
The major cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo certainly have many schools with high merit values, but they also have schools with very low results. The wide spread within the cities is hidden when we look at the municipal average.
The surprises are found in central Sweden and along the Norrland coast: smaller municipalities where one or two well-run schools lift the entire municipal average. Municipalities like Lomma, Danderyd and Lidingo consistently rank at the top — but it has at least as much to do with the socioeconomic profile of the residents as with the quality of the schools.
Switch the metric to teacher certification and the map changes dramatically. Municipalities that rank highly in merit value can end up mediocre in the share of certified teachers. That shows that school quality is not one-dimensional — it depends on what you measure and why.
Statistics: academic year 2023/24. Source: Skolverket open data, Kolada and SCB. Processed by Skolkoll. Glossary · About the data.