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Based on the wide-ranging liberal reforms introduced in the early 1990s, Sweden has become one of the most prominent realizations of Milton Friedman's proposal for market-based schooling. From 1991 to 2012, the percentage of Swedish ninth-grade students attending independent, voucher-financed, private schools increased from 2.8% to 14.2%. A recent study using municipality-level data claimed that the resulting increase in school competition positively affected student performance in both private and public schools. In this study, using data on 2,154,729 school leavers, we show that this result does not hold when controlling for individual-level background factors and differences in the peer composition of schools.

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Against the background of a liberalization of Swedish compulsory education, this paper analyses post-1991 shifts in the way compulsory education performance in Sweden has been shaped by parental background, residential context and school context. We can document increasing school and residential segregation of foreign background students and, after 2008, increasing segregation by income, employment status, and social allowance reception. Over time, educational performance has become increasingly linked to family, neighbourhood and school context. The greatest change has been for parental background, but the importance of school context and neighbourhood context has also increased. A noteworthy finding is that residential context consistently has a stronger effect on student performance than school context. Student grades were found to be most strongly influenced by the closest (12 or 25) residential peers of the school leavers as compared to larger peer groups. The increase in the influence of family, neighbourhood and residential context has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the between-school variation (ICC) in student performance, but it was not until after 2005 that this increased variability became clearly linked to the social composition of the schools. This study's results suggest that the restructuring of Swedish compulsory education has had consequences for equality, possibly because disadvantaged social groups have not been as able as advantaged groups to navigate and benefit from the educational landscape created by the school reforms.