Sweden has a long history of offering public guidance services. Already in the 40 ìs the employment offices started to offer vocational guidance for their clients. The underlying principle has always been that counselling is an individual right that should be free of charge and available to as many groups as possible. Today educational and vocational guidance is provided throughout the entire educational 1system, in compulsory and upper secondary schools as well as within adult education, where guidance services are offered in municipal adult education, advanced vocational education, folk high schools and universities and university colleges. Guidance practitioners usually work within the schools or other educational institutions, but there are also examples of municipalities that offer guidance for schools through an external guidance centre instead of within each single school. Guidance services are also offered within the 418 Employment Offices around Sweden and in local municipality guidance and information centres for adults. The private sector is quite limited in Sweden, but there are private employment offices and some companies that specialise in career coaching and helping companies with reorganising or downsizing.

There are no overall statistics of the number of guidance practitioners in Sweden, but a recent evaluation of guidance within the Swedish school system, conducted by the Swedish National Agency for Education, shows that an average Swedish guidance counsellor within compulsory school handles about 522 pupils. The figure for upper secondary level is 479 pupils for every guidance practitioner. Within the municipal adult education (Komvux) there were approx 323 students for each full-time working guidance counsellor. No figures are available for study counsellors at the universities or job counsellors within the employment offices.

Educational and vocational guidance and information is also offered through publicly funded web services. There has been great investments in new web based tools for guidance and information in the last years. One of these new tools is the national education portal Utbildningsinfo.se. It is a web site for students, parents and professionals in the field of education. Another of these tools, Vägledningsinfo.se (Guidanceinfo.se), is a national web-based guidance service for adults and the "Choose profession or education" part of the Swedish Public Employment Service site provides information on different professions and gives an idea of which educational background that is needed for different professions.

Career fairs are arranged regularly in different parts of Sweden. They are often organised in cooperation between local employers and upper secondary schools, where pupils in the ninth grade is the target group, but there are also the big SACO fair every year, which informs about university educations for pupils from secondary school and adult education. It is often possible to get personal guidance during these events (SACO - The Swedish Confederation of Professional Associations is a confederation of 25 independent associations that together have over half a million members, all of whom are academics or graduate professionals with a university or college degree)

Sweden has a very decentralised system for decision-making and there is no central organisation coordinating or governing guidance activities. This is done on a local or regional basis. The local municipal authorities plan their services of guidance and counselling separately, in line with appropriation documents and school curricula. The guidance that takes place at university level and other higher education institutions is to a great extent the local responsibility of each university, in line with national goals and ordinances, and the counselling services for those in search of work is designed at the local employment offices, in accordance with the guidelines from the National Labour Market Board. Financing of guidance services is part of the total funding for the local municipality, the local university and/or the local employment office. No sum of money is specifically designated for guidance and counselling. In 2007 the National Agency for Education published a big evaluation of the quality of guidance in Swedish schools. It showed that there is a problem of weak supervision of guidance activities in the schools, which leads to big differences in the distribution of recourses between schools, depending on the municipality in charge. Also the National Agency for Higher Education conducted an evaluation in 2007, where they looked into the study and career guidance offered at the Universities on the initiative of the Student Union. This evaluation also showed lack of a comprehensive, overall view and guiding principles or goals for the services offered.

In spite of the negative results from these evaluations there are also actions taken to improve Swedish guidance. Since 2006 there is a big research project called “Career choice and guidance”. It is based on a network of researchers from the Universities in Sweden that offer a bachelor degree in career counselling. This network aims, among other things, at identifying urgent research areas and initiating research on career development and counselling. In 2007 The Government gave The Swedish National Agency for School Improvement the task to support municipalities in their work with developing the quality in vocational and educational guidance. This task is to be finished in 2008 and the Agency is working with specially chosen pilot municipalities that can act as good examples for others. Sweden also joined the European Lifelong Guidance Policy Network in 2007, where the Ministry of Education has chosen to get involved in the work package working with support for policy development and implementation at national level.

(Source: Euroguidance, Sweden)