Easing the Way Into Schools

Free learning portal Clio Förberedelseklass gives teachers needed support in helping newly arrived students enter Swedish schools. After just four months, it’s now in over 400 schools.

In September 2016, Bonnier Education launched the digital learning portal Clio Online in Sweden, providing lesson plans, activities and exercises along with video, audio and photos in 10 different subject areas. Already then, work had begun on a portal for teachers of students newly arrived in Sweden who were taking preparation courses to ready them to enter regular Swedish classes.

The Clio Förberedelseklass – Clio Prep Course – was launched in January 2017, specifically for teachers and their students who have newly arrived in Sweden and are taking courses to help with language and culture so they are able to move into regular classes.

The prep course portal is offered free to schools in Sweden with funding from Bonnier Social Impact. Created to support corporate social responsibility initiatives within Bonnier companies, Bonnier Social Impact is jointly funded by Bonnier AB and the Bonnier Family Foundation. 

Now, just four months later, the portal is already being used by over 400 Swedish schools, with more than 600 teachers actively using the portal for their instruction. “We saw a fairly big bang at the launch, after which traffic has stabilized,” says Angelica Hedin, chief editor at Bonnier Education, the  and Clio Online in Sweden. “After the summer we expect traffic to rise even more.”

…the portal is already being used by over 400 Swedish schools, with more than 600 teachers actively using the portal for their instruction.

One teacher who is already using the Clio Förberedelseklass is Amela de la Cruz. With 7 years of experience, de la Cruz is currently at Nya Elementar school in the Stockholm suburb of Bromma, where she teaches students in grades 7–9 who have newly arrived in Sweden.

“Learning the language is the biggest challenge for my students when it comes to school,” says de la Cruz, who specializes in teaching Swedish as a second language and who emigrated to Sweden herself when she was 18. “That and just getting used to how Swedish schools work.”

For de la Cruz, one of the biggest challenges lies in the broad mix of students from very different educational backgrounds and levels. “It requires really adapting the lesson to the students.” One important tool that helps her in teaching is Clio Förberedelseklass. “The students like it, it’s easy to use and understand, and it helps that there are both easy and hard versions of the lessons,” says de la Cruz. “Students correct the lessons themselves, and it’s easy to see the areas that they need to work on. Clio really helps with my planning.”