PROFESSIONAL TRAINING : COURT SLAMS LIMITED ACCESS TO TEACHER COURSE IN SWEDEN.

A scheme devised by the Swedish authorities to train more special education teachers has been criticised by the EU Court of Justice for infringing EC treaty rules on the free movement of workers. In a preliminary ruling handed down on 11 January (Case C-40/05), the ECJ said that the authorities should not have restricted access to the training courses to those employed in schools in Sweden.

The case was brought to the Swedish courts by one Kaj Lyyski, a Swedish teacher working in a Swedish-speaking school in Abo, Finland. He applied to follow a course at Umea university in Sweden beginning in autumn 2004, which would have qualified him to obtain a permanent post as a special education teacher. However, he was turned away on the grounds that the school where he would be working while carrying out his training was not in Sweden. The ECJ had to weigh up two core EC treaty principles when providing guidance to the Swedish court that referred the case. The treaty requires that member states do not hinder the free movement of EU national workers in the single market. At the same time, it leaves it up to each member state to organise their education systems.

SPECIAL TEACHER SHORTAGE

In this instance, a specific scheme was introduced from November 2001 to December 2006 to tackle the problem caused by a shortage in Sweden of special education teachers. This had occurred due to a combination of too many teachers retiring, too few graduating, and a rise in the numbers of schoolchildren. Various universities received government funding to train around 4,000 special...