What Sweden and Germany Teach Us About the Future of Extended Education

By Gil G. Noam, Harvard Medical School and PEAR

One of the great limitations in educational thinking today is how nationally isolated many of our conversations remain. In the United States, for example, we often compare Massachusetts to California or New York to Texas, while paying far too little attention to the profound educational innovations happening internationally.

This is unfortunate, because some of the most important developments in extended education and youth development are currently taking place outside the United States. Sweden and Germany, in particular, have become global laboratories for rethinking the relationship between schools, communities, children, and time.

Reading the blogs of Karin Lager from Sweden and Wolfram Rollett from Germany reinforced for me that these two countries are addressing one of the defining educational questions of today:

What should happen during the many hours when children are no longer in formal lessons but are still developing, learning, socializing, struggling, exploring, and becoming?

This question is much larger than after-school programming. It is really a question about childhood itself.

For decades, many countries approached this issue through relatively simple solutions. Some extended the formal school day dramatically. Others created separate after-school systems with little connection to schools. Still others left families largely on their own to navigate fragmented arrangements of care, recreation, tutoring, transportation, and supervision.

Sweden and Germany represent two different but highly sophisticated attempts to move beyond those fragmented models.

The Swedish system is remarkable for its integration of care and education. The very term “educare” reflects a philosophy that children’s emotional life, relationships, leisure, participation, and learning belong together. Sweden has institutionalized the idea that what happens outside formal instruction is not secondary to development but central to it.

In many ways, Sweden has gone further than almost any country in professionalizing this work. Educators in the Swedish system are specifically trained for leisure-time pedagogy and are viewed as part of the broader educational mission of schools. The aspiration is not merely to supervise children but to create developmental environments where relationships, play, identity, and agency flourish.

Germany, by contrast, illustrates the enormous complexity of scaling extended education across a highly decentralized educational system. The German full-day school movement has expanded with extraordinary speed over the past twenty years. What is particularly impressive is that Germany has not framed this simply as a childcare solution. Instead, the discussion increasingly focuses on educational quality, student experience, participation, and well-being.

What struck me most in Wolfram Rollett’s blog was the centrality of student perception. German research demonstrates something many youth development scholars have long argued: developmental impact depends not only on structure but on lived experience. If young people experience adults as caring, activities as meaningful, and environments as supportive, then positive developmental outcomes become more likely.

This may sound obvious, but historically educational systems have often paid surprisingly little attention to student voice. Policymakers tend to focus on infrastructure, schedules, staffing, accountability, and measurable outputs. Yet young people themselves are often the most accurate interpreters of whether a setting is emotionally safe, engaging, and developmentally meaningful.

For me, this is where youth development enters the conversation in a powerful way.

Youth development asks us to see children and adolescents not merely as students acquiring academic skills but as whole human beings navigating relationships, identity, resilience, motivation, belonging, and purpose. Extended education becomes transformative when it recognizes this complexity.

At PEAR, Partnerships in Education and Resilience incubated at Harvard University much of my and my team’s work over the past two decades has focused precisely on these questions. We have argued that social-emotional development, engagement, and resilience are not “soft” outcomes existing beside academic learning. They are deeply connected to whether young people thrive.

What both Sweden and Germany show us is that time itself is not the solution. Additional hours alone do not create developmental gains. In fact, badly designed extended days can produce exhaustion, disengagement, and institutional fatigue.

The real question is: What kind of experiences fill that time?

Sweden’s challenge today is maintaining quality and equity across a large national system. Germany’s challenge is ensuring coherence and professionalization across diverse local models. Both countries are discovering that scale introduces tensions around staffing, training, leadership, and consistency.

Yet despite these challenges, both systems represent something deeply hopeful.

They represent societies attempting to rethink schools not as isolated instructional factories but as developmental ecosystems connected to children’s broader lives.

I believe the future of education will increasingly depend on this broader ecological vision. Schools alone cannot meet the full range of children’s developmental needs. At the same time, out-of-school systems disconnected from schools often struggle to achieve continuity and coherence.

The future lies somewhere in the bridge between these worlds.

That bridge requires new professional roles, new partnerships, new forms of leadership, and above all a new respect for the lived experiences of young people themselves.

Sweden and Germany are not perfect models, but they are courageous innovations leading the way. They are asking the right questions and have found a way to implement national policy and funding that makes for a system for millions of children and adolescents.  And for those of us working internationally in youth development and extended education, they offer invaluable lessons about what becomes possible when societies decide that children’s full days—and full humanity—matter.