Sweden is rewriting the rules for how schools catch and support students who are falling behind. The government’s bill “Förbättrat stöd i skolan” (Proposition 2025/26:195) is part of what the government calls the biggest school reforms in thirty years, and it changes the whole early-support framework: out go the reading-writing-maths guarantee and the formal step of extra anpassningar, in come early screening tests and mandatory support teaching. The changes are proposed to take effect on 1 July 2028.
What the bill removes
Two things schools work with today would go away. The guarantee for early support interventions (the läsa-skriva-räkna guarantee) and the regulated step of extra anpassningar, the lighter adjustments a teacher makes inside ordinary teaching, would both be abolished as formal requirements. We explained how extra anpassningar and särskilt stöd work today in a separate post, and why the early-support guarantee has not been delivering. The reform is a direct response to the fact that the current system, on paper, has not reliably reached the students who need it.
What it puts in their place
Instead of those steps, the bill introduces earlier, more standardized identification. Standardized tests would be given at the start of the autumn term in certain grades so that students who need support are found early rather than after they have already fallen behind. Students would then get support teaching (stödundervisning) at an early stage in Swedish, Swedish as a second language, and mathematics, across compulsory school, upper secondary, and adapted upper secondary school.
What changes for särskilt stöd
The bill also tightens the more far-reaching support. A teacher or mentor would have to report to the rektor when a student’s need of särskilt stöd may need to be investigated, and those investigations would have to happen earlier than they do today. Decisions to teach a student in a smaller group or one-to-one would be made easier, while an adapted study program (anpassad studiegång), the most restrictive option, could only be used once all other forms of särskilt stöd are exhausted or judged inappropriate.
Why it matters, and where the hard part still sits
The direction is clear and welcome: find students earlier, act earlier, stop waiting until a child is already behind or absent. That is the same logic behind catching students before they become hemmasittare. But a screening test at the start of term only helps if what follows is real, individual support, and that is exactly where schools already struggle. Skolinspektionen found that two out of three inspected schools need to develop their teaching for students with neuropsychiatric difficulties. Earlier identification without the capacity to act on it just moves the bottleneck.
That capacity is what Nuro is built to add. Screening tells a school which students need support; Nuro helps a school actually deliver it, adapting the work to each student, keeping the follow-up in view, and turning “we identified a need” into support that reaches the classroom. The 2028 reform makes early identification the law. The work of meeting what it finds is the part schools will need help with, and it is the part we focus on.
Sources
- Regeringen, “Förbättrat stöd i skolan, Prop. 2025/26:195”
- Sveriges riksdag, “Förbättrat stöd i skolan (Proposition 2025/26:195)”
- Regeringen, “Regeringen genomför de största reformerna för skolan på 30 år” (2026)
- Skolinspektionen, “Två av tre skolor behöver utveckla undervisningen för elever med neuropsykiatriska svårigheter”