Short answer: when a Swedish school does not give a student with a disability the reasonable adjustments they need to access their education, it is not only failing its duty under Skollagen. It can also be committing unlawful discrimination under Diskrimineringslagen, a specific form called bristande tillgänglighet, lack of accessibility. That is a legal wrong with a price attached, and in March 2026 a municipality paid 220,000 kronor over a single student.
What bristande tillgänglighet means
Since 1 January 2015, “bristande tillgänglighet” has been one of the recognised forms of discrimination in Diskrimineringslagen (2008:567), added through proposition 2013/14:198. The idea is straightforward: a person with a disability is discriminated against when they are disadvantaged because an organisation fails to take reasonable measures to give them access on equal terms with others.
For a school, that means the duty is not satisfied by treating every student identically. If a student’s funktionsnedsättning means they cannot access teaching the way it is delivered, the school is expected to make the reasonable adjustments that close the gap. When it does not, and the student is disadvantaged as a result, that is discrimination in the legal sense, enforced by Diskrimineringsombudsmannen (DO). This sits alongside, and complements, the pedagogical accessibility duty that SPSM describes.
The Trollhättan case
In March 2026, DO determined that Trollhättans stad had breached Diskrimineringslagen through bristande tillgänglighet toward a student with autism, ADHD, språkstörning (a language disorder) and epilepsi. According to Riksförbundet Attention and reporting by local paper TTELA, the student had gone six years without the support and adaptations the school is legally required to provide, and the shortcomings were serious enough that the student missed large parts of their education.
The municipality admitted there had been serious deficiencies in the school’s work and chose to end the dispute through a settlement (förlikning), paying 220,000 kronor in diskrimineringsersättning. It was not a court judgment, but it is a concrete, recent marker of what this leg of the law can cost. Attention’s chairman, Eric Donell, commented: “Det här fallet är allvarligt, men tyvärr inte förvånande för oss i Attention.” This case is serious, but sadly not surprising to us at Attention.
Two legs of the same duty
For a school leader, the useful way to read this is that the same failure can be wrong twice over. Skollagen sets out the duty to map a student’s needs and provide extra anpassningar and särskilt stöd. Diskrimineringslagen then makes the failure to make reasonable adjustments an act of discrimination with its own remedy. A student and their family can pursue the Skollagen route through the school, the huvudman, and Skolinspektionen, and separately pursue the discrimination route through DO. The compliance risk a school carries when support does not reach the child is therefore not abstract. It has now been priced.
This is also why families increasingly know their options. A parent whose child is not getting the support they need is not limited to asking the school nicely. The right to an education exists in law; the discrimination route is one of the ways it is enforced when the ordinary support process fails.
Where this connects to the work
The lesson of a case like Trollhättan’s is not that schools are acting in bad faith. The municipality that paid did not set out to fail a child for six years. The failure was one of capacity and follow-through: a support need that was known, and support that never reliably arrived. That is the exact gap Nuro is built to close. Seeing each student’s needs from the start, adapting the material to how they learn, and keeping a clear record of the support actually given is how a school makes sure the adjustments the law requires are real, ongoing, and documented, rather than something a family has to litigate to obtain.
Sources
- Riksförbundet Attention, “Elev med NPF får ersättning för bristande tillgänglighet” (10 July 2026)
- TTELA, “Trollhättans stad betalar 220 000 kronor efter sex års diskriminering av elev”
- DO, Diskrimineringslagen (2008:567)
- Proposition 2013/14:198, “Bristande tillgänglighet som en form av diskriminering”