This strong culture is an essential component of IES’ success. The most important duty of the organisation’s leaders is to inspire people and ensure they uphold the core principles that form the foundation of our culture. That’s why IES places great emphasis on recruiting principals – the key leaders of each school – whose role it is to ensure that IES’ core values are converted into actions.
Principals have full responsibility for their individual school and staff. It is a principal’s duty to unfailingly foster our students’ academic and social development, recruit competent staff and ensure that staff members comply with IES’ core values. They are to recruit teachers who are passionate about their subjects, and who inspire their students. IES principals must also be present throughout the school day, from welcoming students in the morning to being visible in the corridors and the dining hall during the course of the day. In other words, our principals have a clear role with a great deal of responsibility.
So that new school principals have the best possible start and a chance to live up to the high expectations placed on them, they attend a number of introduction courses during their first few months. These are focused on important matters including student health, labour law, quality, the Education Act and safety. Since IES currently runs 46 compulsory schools and one upper secondary school, and thus has 47 leaders, the principals have a unique opportunity to collaborate and share experiences. Along with the other leaders, and with the same focus and conviction, they are expected to constantly and consistently develop their schools. All new principals are also allocated a mentor who supports them.
Leadership programme
For the past few years, IES has run a leadership programme for future leaders within the organisation. This year, 15 employees participated in the Advanced leadership programme (ALP) and another 25 participated in the School leadership programme (SLP). One of the main purposes of these leadership training courses is to ensure that our leaders feel confident in their roles, even when they take on new and more complex roles. The meetings also give them a chance to build networks to exchange knowledge and experiences. In addition to the leadership programmes, IES offers ongoing training for principals through group discussions, online meetings and dedicated conferences. These aim to keep everyone up-to-date in a field that is constantly changing and evolving, and also to enable everyone to work in accordance with IES’ core principles.
Every year, a quality survey is carried out in every IES school to find out how our employees feel about a range of different parameters that are crucial to effective school operations. In addition to this we carry out a workplace environment survey. This focuses on the organisational and social workplace environment and areas such as leadership, clarity and sustainability work are evaluated over time. The results of these surveys are subsequently communicated to the schools, and action plans for the year are created. The objective is to share knowledge, inspire and create best practices.
An attractive and safe place to work
IES works actively to be an attractive employer, a place where competitive employment terms, a clear salary policy and a good working environment are a given. During this year, a new HR and payroll system was implemented to ensure that employment and payroll management is carried out efficiently and securely for employees. IES regularly analyses employee salaries to ensure that there is no unjustified unequal pay between women and men. In 2024/2025, salaries for IES teachers were equivalent to, or in some cases exceeded, the national average in all age categories.
Providing a safe and stimulating working environment is of vital importance in attracting competent and engaged employees to our schools. A good working environment for teachers requires clarity in how things are done so that everybody works according to the same principles, inside and outside the classroom. It also means ensuring that teachers never feel alone in their professional role, which can sometimes be a vulnerable position. In the past academic year, an incident reporting system was implemented to enable early detection of threats and violence against employees. Each school also has a safety representative. Training for safety representatives is conducted three to four times a year.
IES works with a partner for preventive and rehabilitative healthcare and offers employees a support hotline that is available 24/7. To promote transparency and responsible behaviour, IES uses a whistleblower function provided by an independent third party. IES strives for the highest possible level of transparency, honesty and accountability within the organisation, and the whistleblower function aims to highlight any irregularities quickly. For a case to be considered whistleblowing in the legal sense, the misconduct must be of public interest, such as human rights violations, corruption, conflicts of interest, misuse of public funds, violations of official regulations, violations of competition rules or generally unethical behaviour.
Unique organisation
The IES schools also include heads of departments and heads of year to ensure quality in teaching and in the school environment. This type of organisational structure is unique compared with other schools in Sweden. It is also one of the keys to our good academic results and high number of students who qualify for upper secondary school. Every academic year begins with an introductory week when we bring all staff together to ensure commitment to IES’ core values and focus on the areas of improvement for the year ahead. For international teachers, the programme also includes the Swedish school system and national curriculum.
IES recruits many talented teachers from other countries and helps them to settle in so that their introduction to Sweden goes as smoothly as possible. For instance, IES gives them information on how Swedish society works and how to find somewhere to live. We also help with arranging visas. Many of our international teachers choose to remain at IES and make Sweden their long-term home. Teachers from other countries are attracted to Sweden by the beautiful nature and secure conditions the country offers, and to IES due to our profile and culture. Recruiting teachers from outside of Sweden is also a way to cope with the teacher shortage in Sweden.
IES’ employees mainly come from Sweden and English-speaking countries such as Canada, the US and the UK. 85 per cent of our teachers have a teaching degree, of whom just over half were educated at a Swedish university, and the rest hold a degree in teaching from another country. Across Sweden’s compulsory schools as a whole, an average of 68 per cent of teachers have a teaching degree from university. IES encourages teachers from other countries to obtain a Swedish teaching qualification, and enables them to do so, for example through opportunities to study Swedish during working hours. Furthermore, an online course in Swedish is available to employees to help them learn Swedish. We are pleased to see that more and more of our international teachers are engaging in these efforts.
