Swedish School-age Educare Centres and German All-day Schools – A Bi-national Comparison of Two Prototypes of Extended Education

In Sweden and in Germany, an extensive system of extended education programmes and activities has been established within the last decades. Prototypic examples of this development are school-age educare centres in Sweden and all-day schools in Germany. In this article a bi-national comparison, aiming to find some similarities and differences by means of historical background, current questions of student learning, staff professionalism, and research findings, is presented. It can be shown that, though Swedish school-age educare centres and German all-day schools are based on pedagogical roots reaching back to the end of the 19 and the beginning of the 20 century, their historical developments are quite different. Whilst in Sweden the school-age educare idea became entrenched in the society and the collective beliefs about the necessity of learning outside the classroom, in Germany the all-day school model never prevailed. That only changed in the beginning of the 21 century when PISA showed that the German education system was not performing very well. Based on the different developments over time, both models established different features. With regard to student learning, the Swedish model is more oriented towards fostering creativity and imagination, whilst the German model is more oriented towards curricular learning. One difference concerning the students are that in Germany the all-day school embrace both children and youths up to the end of secondary-II level (up to 18/19 years), in Sweden young people older than 13 years old cannot participate in the school-age educare. In Sweden educators working outside of the classroom are academically trained in quite the same way as classroom teachers, whilst in Germany there is no such common regulation. Based on the more curricular learning centred view in Germany, some large scale effectivity studies were conducted within the last decade. Such comprehensive research programs are lacking in Sweden. We will give a short overview of some main research findings and discuss future


Introduction
In this article extended education programmes in Sweden and Germany will be described and analysed. Both are European countries with a long tradition of extended education. By comparing the Swedish and the German models, our article contributes to the mutual understanding of how extended education in different societies is historically entrenched and what problems have to be solved to make provisions and programmes in this educational field effective. We will see that there are quite different answers to this question. Our purpose is to promote an international discussion about different ways of developing extended education, both as an academic discipline as well as educational practice. In the following we take a closer look at the structure and features in Sweden and Germany with regard to (selected) state-run extended education programmes. This comparison does not deal with the field of extended education in the two countries as a whole. That would not be possible within the restricted frame of a journal article, as the field of extended education is too broad and includes not only state-run programmes and activities but also a wide array of private programmes and provisions. In the following we will focus on Swedish school-age educare centres and German all-day schools. On the one hand, Swedish school-age educare centres and German all-day schools both are widespread in each country and essential parts of the national education system. On the other hand, from our point of view, school-age educare centres and all-day schools can be seen as kind of prototypes of extended education. Most of the aspects, research questions and problems extended education is confronted with can be explicated using both examples.
Our article starts with a short history of the development of school-age educare centres in Sweden and all-day schools in Germany and a description of both national models with regard to selected constituting aspects.Due to the little space available, we will focus on three constituting aspects: Firstly, we focus on the question concerning what students should learn in the activities provided in Swedish school-age educare centres and extracurricular activities at German all-day schools. Secondly, we will deal with the question concerning how educators in both models are trained to meet the aims mentioned in the previous section (professionalism of the staff). Thirdly, we will describe the offers and activities provided in both models in addition to regular classroom teaching. At the end of the article, we will sum up the research findings and discuss several aspects of research needed in the future before we conclude with a summarizing reflection of the comparison between the Swedish and the German case.

History of the development of the extended education sector in Sweden and in Germany
Though school-age educare and all-day schooling have developed over the last decades differently, both models are in some respects based on quite similar historical roots. Let us start with Swedish school-age educare.

The Swedish school-age educare
Institutional care for children in the early school-years in Sweden have roots reaching back to the end of the 19 th century. In so called 'work cottages', poor children were taught different handicrafts and about proper upbringing, and they were given a meal. These institutions were founded in philanthropic ideas that strived for moral improvement and emphasised the value of learning a craft (Rohlin, 2001). As the poverty decreased and the Swedish society developed, these institutions were questioned and a new concept appeared that indicated that children should not work with different crafts but devote themselves to their studies in school. The 'work cottages' were followed by 'afternoon centres' where children's need for leisure was highlighted. In these centres the children were meant to do homework, play or participate in recreational activities. In the early 1960s the concept of education succeeded the concept of recreation (Rohlin, 2001). In these years the system with a nationwide care in so-called 'leisure-time centres' for children aged seven to twelve grew widely. It was both an educational question and an offer to the children from their perspective, but it was also caused by a need for childcare due to the demand for women in the labour market. In this period an extensive welfare system was constructed in Sweden and the school-age educare centres were, and still are, an important part of this system.
In the early 1970s the school system was criticized for having a strong theoretical bias and a national committee was appointed to elaborate suggestions to remedy this imbalance between theoretical and practical activities during the children's school day. The committee suggested extending the school day and setting up both practical and aesthetical activities in the school for all children, and not only for the children enrolled in the 'leisure-time centres' (SOU 1974: 53). The suggestion was sanctioned and the assignment was given to the leisure-time pedagogues 1 . The expectations were that the way of performing educational activity in 'leisure-time centres' could contribute to resolving the problems in schools. This could be seen as a strong recognition of the activities in the 'leisure-time centre' and a way to use the activity to complement school. An extended school day for all children aged seven to nine during 08.00-14.00, five days a week, was born.
School-age educare was organised as a social service until 1996, but since school and 'leisure-time centres' began to cooperate more closely and education became a stronger ground for the programme, the responsibility was moved from the social sector to the educational sector by 1998. School-age educare centres were now also located in the same buildings as schools.
Today Swedish school-age educare centres are well established all over the country and organised as whole-day activities complementing school. The centres are opened from early morning, usually from 06.00, to 18.00 in the evening, and the children are served breakfast, lunch and snacks in cooperation with the school. The activity is regulated by the national curriculum and staffed by university-educated teachers. Attendance of school-age educare centres is voluntary and about 84% of children between six to nine years old are enrolled (The Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018). 21 percent of children aged ten to twelve are also enrolled in school-age educare centres.
The number of children per school-age educare teacher has increased during the last 30 years. At the beginning of the 1980s, the average group consisted of 18 children per two school-age educare teachers. In 2017, an average group of children in school-age educare centre consisted of 39,7 children, while the number of teachers in school-age educare centres has not increased correspondingly (SNAE, 2018). Declining conditions in school-age educare centres are a consequence of a shift in political governance as well as in values. 1 Leisure-time pedagogue is an outdated term for the staff in leisure-time centres. Also the term for leisuretime centre has shifted over the years and the translations for the centres from Swedish to English is now school-age educare (Klerfelt & Rohlin, 2012;SNAE, 2011SNAE, , rev. 2018).
Teachers in school-age educare centres face dilemmas related to comprehensive decentralisation, the introduction of new public management systems, reduced resources and closer links between school-age educare centres and schools (Andersson, 2013). This change has not only affected the educational sector in Sweden but also other parts of the Swedish welfare system. As a consequence of these changes, developments in school-age educare centres are carefully monitored by The Swedish School Inspectorate (2018). In their reports they highlight how the quality can increase and how equivalence within and between educare centres can be enhanced. In 2016 the Swedish Government decided to increase financial resources to school-age educare for the years to come.

The German all-day school
In Germany all-day schooling has a long history as well, reaching back to the beginning of the 20 th century. Based on the ideas of the 'Reformpädagogik' movement [progressive education movement], some reform schools (called 'Tagesheimschulen') were launched in the first two decades of the 20th century -for example the 'Erziehungsschule' launched by Kapf and the 'Wickersdorfer Tagesschule' launched by Wyneken (see Ludwig, 2008). In contrast to the traditional half-day school system, these schools were founded as all-day schools. From a Reformpädagogik point of view, an all-day school is a school where the students live 24 hours a day and 7 days a week (excluding school holidays). This farreaching definition of what an all-day school never dominates the German education system.This is due not only to the extensive costs a 24/7-school would incur but also because of families' scepticism towards an expanded institutionalized education system (for a detailed description, see Hagemann, 2009, pp. 217ff.). The number of all-day schools was marginal through the 20th century. This holds true for at least the western part of Germany. The development in East-Germany (until reunification of the German Democratic Republic GDR/DDR in 1990) was different. Here a high degree of all-day schools and family supporting public child-care institutions was part of the political interest (see Mattes, 2009). The situation changed for most (western) federal states in particular in the wake of PI-SA. The first PISA round in 2000 showed that German 15-year-olds were performing poorly compared to other countries -like Sweden or South Korea -in the fields of literacy, math, and science. The test also showed that academic achievement was more strongly connected with the student's family background, as in almost every other country participating in the PISA testing (Baumert et al., 2001;Tillmann, 2005). After these findings were published -which caused the so called 'PISA shock' in politics and media -the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education (KMK; due to federalism in Germany, each of the 16 federal states is in charge of its own school system) discussed how to react. The expansion of the number of all-day schools was one of the seven reform instruments all ministers agreed upon (Tillmann, 2005, p. 52). From 2003 to 2010 the federal government supported building up new all-day schools and developing existing ones with a sum of four billion Euros (Investment Programme A Future of Education and Care, IZBB; BMBF, 2003). This programme forced the federal states to define what an all-day school should be from their point of view. The KMK agreed on the following minimal standard: An all-day school is a school providing care and education for at least three days a week and seven hours a day, it offers lunch, the extracurricular activities are under the responsibility of the principal and the extracurricular activities should be connected to classroom teaching in terms of their content (KMK, 2006). All-day schools are implemented at the primary and the secondary level providing offers for children from grade one to ten (in some cases to grade twelve/thirteen).
The federal IZBB-programme and the various parallel initiatives of the 16 federal states caused a rapid rise in the number of all-day schools -from 5.000 in 2002 to more than 18.000 in 2016 (KMK, 2018). Currently two thirds of German schools are organised as an all-day school. Based on these figures, the German school system has changed within the last 15 years from a predominantly half-day school system to a predominantly all-day school system -one of the most extensive changes of the German educational system since the 1950s.

Selected constituting aspects of the programmes
As we have seen in the previous section, the historical development in Sweden and Germany was quite different, though both systems were rooted in similar concepts at the beginning of the 19 th century. We will see in the following that these different historical developments have resulted in different current features of both models of extended education. In this section we will describe the features of the Swedish and the German models based on some constituting aspects. This description includes, among other things, the question of what school-age educare and all-day schooling are aiming at with regard to students' learning and development and how in Sweden and in Germany the educators working outside the classroom are educated (question of staff professionalism).

Aims at the students' level
School-age educare in Sweden is highly regulated in several governing documents. It is implemented in every school in Sweden and all school-age educare centres follow the same regulations. First we have the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). The Education Act (2010: 800) stipulates that the activity is based on values which focus on equality, understanding and compassion for others. In the curriculum (The Swedish National Agency for Education [SNAE], 2011, rev. 2018) we can read that the education in schoolage educare shall stimulate the pupils' development and learning and afford meaningful leisure. School-age educare is addressed individually in the curriculum, where it specifies its goals and formulates that learning shall be situated, experience-based, group-oriented and based on the pupils' needs, interests and initiatives. The curriculum (SNAE, 2011(SNAE, , rev. 2018) highlights the duty for school-age educare to complement school and support children with regard to their experiences and resources. The school-age educare centre should encourage all children to discover their own uniqueness as individuals and should thereby enable them to participate in society via responsible freedom. Teaching aims at promoting the children's imagination and ability to learn together with others through play, physical activities and art, and includes aesthetic learning processes as well as exploratory and practical learning processes.
In Sweden there are explicitly expressed formulations on what school-age educare shall afford children regarding education, care and meaningful leisure, and these formulations are directed towards all children. However, there are inequalities when it comes to these affordances because the quality between different school-age educare centres differs in the country concerning the number of children in the groups and the quality of education based on staff education. It is true that the school-age educare activity is implemented all over the country and that all children aged six to nine years take part in educare activities during the school-day. But there is also an old formulation in the policy documents stipulating that, in order to take part in early morning and late afternoon activities, parents must work or study. Thus, in order for children to receive service, there should be a need for care. Though most parents in Sweden work, this regulation may exclude some, though not many, children from school-age educare during mornings and late afternoons. Among those excluded might be children living in families with parents on parental leave, unemployed or newly arrived parents. And some of these children might also be in need of the activity in the school-age educare, even though their parents stay at home. This situation is highlighted by teachers and some of these excluded children are now allowed to participate part-time in afternoon activities. This is a contradiction in the Swedish system, which aims at inclusion and integration of all, and thus a change of the regulation is needed.
In our opinion, school-age educare has the capacity to contribute even more to children's learning, joy and well-being, but also to other educational practices like school and preschool, as well as to the educational system and society as a whole. We see the revision of the Swedish curriculum as a step in clarifying this potential of the school-age educare.
Based on the PISA-shock mentioned before, it can be said that one of the major objectives of all-day schooling in Germany aims at improving learning. Most scientists and politicians dealing with all-day schooling are convinced that, to reach this goal, the all-day school should not do the same as traditional schools. All-day schooling is not about prolonging the hours students attend classes; it is about a new way of making school and about establishing a new culture of learning. This new culture should provide expanded learning opportunities based on the individual interests of the students and their individual needs, and it should be based on an inclusive learning concept acknowledging the heterogeneity of students (Horstkemper & Tillmann, 2014, pp. 93, 98). This expectation towards all-day schooling is based mainly on the pedagogical potential of the extracurricular activities at all-day schools complementing and supplementing classroom teaching. Extracurricular activities, on the one hand, offer more time for pedagogically effective activities, they offer the potential of using new learning and teaching methods and they enable schools to structure the day in a new way with regard to learning and recreational phases during the day (based on students' needs). On the other hand, the extracurricular activities expand the content the students are dealing with beyond the border of the curriculum. That makes it possible to address the various individual interests of the children better than during regular lessons. Additionally, some activities "…are often organized in mixed-aged groups" (ibid.) that enable new forms of peer learning and social experiences. Furthermore, usually no grades are given by the teachers in extracurricular activities. This enables teachers/instructors to develop a new perspective on their students because they are not forced on assessing student performance or development.
The new learning culture attributed to all-day schools does not aim only at improving academic learning and academic achievement. If we follow the publications of the federal ministry of education and research (BMBF) in the wake of the aforementioned investment programme (IZBB), social competencies should be fostered by all-day schooling in addition to curricular ones. Furthermore, cultural learning (including drama and music) and the individual development of effective learning strategies (for example self-directed learning) should be systematically supported by the activities offered by all-day schools (BMBF, 2009). If we dig deeper into the public and scientific debate about the potential advantages of all-day schooling, more aims appear. For example, one advantage is that all-day schools can foster physical health and health consciousness through expanded opportunities for sports or movement games in extracurricular activities (Hildebrandt-Stramann & Laging, 2013).

Professionalism of the staff
In Sweden most of the staff members have (or should have) a teaching degree similar to the degree of their colleagues working in school. The training to become a "Teacher towards work in school-age educare centres" is a three-year university-based teacher education. In 2017 39% of the staff had a pedagogical university-based education (SNAE, 2018). Others may have a different educational background, while some staff are without teacher education. There are large differences between centres in different parts of Sweden in terms of the level of education. In one year, 2016, there was a decrease in education by five percent. Employment is regulated and most teachers work full-time -that is 40 hours a week with five weeks paid holiday. There are no volunteers in school-age educare centres in Sweden.
In a study, Klerfelt (2017) investigates whether there is a shared general discourse in the educational traditions that provide the basis for a commonly shared professional identity. The results from the study indicate that there is an inner core within the profession of school-age educare teachers. The teachers, although exposed to stated and unstated demands, lack of vision and unclear claims, and although subjected to a decrease in resources, still speak with a common voice, indicating that they still maintain a unified professional identity. This identity can be considered a collective identity, and factors contributing to these identity processes are grounded in the fact that the professional role is handed down in practical work, that the policy documents are a regulating component, that research contributes to new knowledge and that teacher education acts as an organiser of common dialogues.
But a changing practice is challenging the core of the profession. Now, newly graduated teachers also get a qualification to teach pupils in grade 1-3 and grade 4-6 in practical/aesthetic subjects. This implies that the same person now has a threefold task: firstly, to carry on the educational tradition originated in the school-age educare centre, secondly, to take a starting point in the children's perspectives and in a practice where the children are perceived as actors with their own intentions and, thirdly, to create meaning in their lives from their own experiences and interests. However, the same person shall also act as a teacher within the school culture in the compulsory school, should follow curricula for different school subjects and is responsible for assessment and grading. This means that the teachers in school-age educare centres actually have to master three positions: the first as a teacher in the school-age educare centre with the assignment of creating a practice for children's meaningful leisure, care, learning and meaning making, the second as a teacher with the assignment to complement and cooperate with the teaching in the school, and the third with the mission of being a teacher in one of the practical/aesthetic subjects governed by the regulations and traditions in the compulsory school. And here is where we have an important discussion. Is it possible for the same person to shift between these different educational attitudes during the same day, together with the same children? In Sweden these questions are discussed under the label "schoolification". These newly graduated teachers with this complex competence will probably renew the work teams in schools and bring in new constructions of the profession (Klerfelt & Andersson, 2017).
In Germany the situation is more heterogeneous. The extracurricular activities are provided partly by teachers (with a teacher degree), partly by other professionals (like social pedagogues), semi-professionals (like sports coaches), and laymen. There are nearly no common regulations with regard to the qualification of additional staff in Germany. Figures  from 2009 show that 39% of additional staff members do not have a pedagogical degree (Coelen & Rother, 2014, p. 133). Not only is the educational background of the additional staff working at German all-day schools very heterogeneous, but so are the weekly working hours of staff members at school and their employment contracts. Some instructors are employed only for a few hours a week, some 40 hours a week (for example, at the secondary school level only 11% of the additional staff members work 40 hours a week at their school; ibid., p. 116), some are employed based on short term employment contracts only and some have a permanent position. The high level of part-time staff and of short term employment contracts, in addition to the heterogeneous educational background, can lead to serious problems regarding the cooperation between teachers and the additional staff and regarding the continuity of pedagogical work (ibid., pp. 120ff.).
Additionally, there is no common 'mission' for teachers working in extracurricular activities at all-day schools in terms of their pedagogical work, like mentioned earlier in the Swedish case. This is due to many factors. In Germany the federal states are in charge of their own schooling system, making it difficult to formulate common missions on a federal level that all 16 federal states agree on. Some of the federal states have set quality guidelines for all-day schools. For example, in the federal state of Hesse, these guidelines determine that every all-day school has to have a pedagogical concept that encompasses all extracurricular activities. Though some of these guidelines explicitly govern pedagogical aspects such a concept has to address (Serviceagentur Hessen, 2018), the method for putting them into practice depends mostly on the conceptual work of each individual school.

Extracurricular Activities
In both countries there are different discourses due to the relation to the existing school culture and the basic starting points of considering children's perspective and shielding their rights.
The Swedish school-age educare centre is a linguistic practice as well as an aesthetic practice, a democratic practice and a practice for play. The activity is characterised by communication and dialogue. There is a focus here on verbal communication between chil-dren and teachers, specifically on talking, discussing, joking and negotiating. This interaction is often placed in different linguistic, aesthetic expressions. Children focus on drawing, singing, playing and dancing together with each other in the same room. Swedish schoolage educare teachers are also obligated to be conscious about children's participation, their right to make decisions concerning their own daily lives, as well as their need to learn to understand and feel compassion for each other. According to the Education Act (2010: 800), this approach fosters democratic thinking. Teachers often talk about the importance of democratic values and possibilities of perceiving oneself as a world citizen (Klerfelt, 2017). Play, games, outdoor activities, humour and happiness are all guarded in school-age educare.
In Germany there is a wide range of activities forming the extracurricular part of schooling in all-day schools. Some of them are structured very similar to classroom lessons (with regard to didactics, methods and curricular oriented content), while others are structured explicitly in contrast to classroom lessons (like leisure time activities; see Hopf & Stecher, 2014). The standard programme of extracurricular activities at German all-day schools encompasses support with homework, curriculum-oriented fostering activities concerning specific subjects (mostly focused on low performing students), sports, musical and leisure-time activities (ibid., p. 71). From the students' point of view, leisure-time activities are most popular (ibid., p. 73f.).
To conclude this section, we would like to point out some important differences between school-age educare centres in Sweden and all-day schools in Germany along the three constituting aspects we used in this section. One of the differences concerns the aims of both models on the students' level. As we have seen, there is a curricular regulation in Sweden focusing on the question of what students should learn in school-age educare. In Germany there are some programmatic papers about the pedagogical aims of all-day schooling but no obligatory regulations exist. With regard to learning, school-age educare and all-day schooling are focused on a wide array of learning goals, but for the German case we find an approach focused more on academic and social learning. It is surprising that although explicitly formulated goals, youths are not included in the school-age educare in Sweden, as they are in Germany. When it comes to questions of staff professionalism, the differences are considerable. In Sweden there is a special university-based education for becoming a "teacher towards work in school-age educare centres" and the staff mostly work full-time, whilst the working conditions in Germany differs. In Germany there is no special teacher-education for working in extracurricular activities in all-day schools and the professionals have different training. There are also volunteers involved in this activity. In both countries a wide array of activities outside the classroom is provided, encompassing leisure time activities and -at least in the German case -academic fostering services. Regarding these three constituting aspects of comparison, we can conclude that both systems, though similar at first sight, exhibit significant differences of respective aspects upon closer inspection.

Research findings and perspectives
In Sweden there are statistics for almost every sector of society, and the educational sector is monitored carefully using quantitative data. It is known, for instance, how many children are enrolled in school-age educare in every part of the country, year by year, and record is kept on the level of teacher education in every community. Parents' views are revealed by questionnaires every other year, and the same process is undertaken with principals. This is a great service for researchers. Much data is openly published online, as access to this data is seen as a public right. School-age educare centres are also critically monitored by the Swedish Schools Inspectorate. This is necessary since there has been a severe cut in the resources devoted for school-age educare, resulting in larger group-size and less educated staff. There is a strong need to track the consequences of this worsening situation.
In Sweden, school-age educare is already implemented. It is highly recognised but also taken for granted, no evidence of effectiveness is needed for implementing this kind of activities. School-age educare is based on values which are not questioned. While there is no well-funded research programme, research does exist. This research is often financed by the state through the universities or different municipalities, meaning that it is mostly performed by doctoral students. While these studies are interesting, cover a wide range of important questions, are well carried-out and contribute with important information, they are not initiated by the Swedish Government and are not systematic. One reason for this unsystematic research might be that the societal expectations surrounding the contribution of the school-age educare to integration and education are unclear. Clear political expectations and well-planned, systematic funding are necessary, as this is a research field still under construction (Klerfelt & Pálsdóttir, 2014). Here the consequence of absent societal expectations can be seen.
Though comprehensive research programmes are lacking, a number of small studies do exist. Examples of researched areas are socialization, professional identity, inclusion, didactics, friendship, interaction, children as citizens, play, newly arrived children, and also studies linked to systematic quality development and differences reproduced by school-age educare -to name only a few. The findings from different studies are directed at different areas: at the children and the teachers participating in the school-age educare centres, parents, policy makers and science. Researchers use different theoretical starting points, depending on their different purposes and different academic traditions. All studies are much needed and contribute to establishing school-age educare as a scientific field of research and field of knowledge.
All in all, there was little research on the effectiveness or the pedagogical potential of extracurricular activities at all-day schools in Germany before 2000. That changed with the aforementioned funding programme of the German Government that was launched in 2003 (IZBB; Holtappels et al., 2007;Prüß, Kortas, & Schöpa, 2009;Stecher et al., 2009;Stecher, Krüger, & Rauschenbach, 2011). The money was not only used to support schools but also to launch a massive evaluation project -the Study on the Development of All-day Schools. In the wake of this study, a national network for research on all-day schooling, extracurricular activities and (all-day) school development was launched, bringing together more than 100 scientists and practitioners on a regular basis to discuss new developments in the field. The research performed within this network has led to a huge body of research and differentiated findings which cannot be summarized here in whole. The following will focus on the most important one, the StEG-Study. This study has been carried out since 2005 and is divided into three phases. The focus of the first phase (2005 to 2010) was on representative data answering research questions concerning the first stage of the nationwide development of all-day schooling. The second phase (2011 to 2015) was focused on the students and how their learning is fostered effectively by participating in extracurricular activities. The third -and current -phase (2016 to 2020) focuses on the question of how the practices of all-day schooling can be improved on a content-specific level. For example, one question the StEG is currently dealing with focuses on how cooperation and collaboration between the teachers and the additional staff members can be improved to interlock curriculum-based classroom teaching and extracurricular activities effectively Holtappels et al., 2007).
Additionally, the principals of all-day schools have responded every two years since 2013 to standardized questionnaires to core aspects of all-day schooling, like opening hours, participation rates and staff composition. Based on this nationwide representative data monitoring, information on development in Germany is available.
The findings of the StEG-study show (only selected findings can be mentioned here; (for more see Holtappels et al., 2007;StEG-Konsortium, 2016): Participating in extracurricular activities • fosters social competencies of students (Fischer, Kuhn, & Züchner, 2011) • improves -to a small extent -the grade average of students (if they are participating on a regular basis and in activities with a high educational quality;  • reduces the risk of not being transferred to the next class (Steiner, 2011) • does not affect students' competencies (based on standardized test scores) in reading and science (StEG-Konsortium, 2016) To sum up we can state that participating in extracurricular activities at all-day schools fosters the social development of students. That holds true only if the pedagogical quality of the activities is high and if the students participate in these activities on a regular and long term basis. There are some hints that participating in extracurricular activities fosters academic achievement, but the effects are usually low in size. With regard to standardized tested competencies, there are no such effects.

Future Research Perspectives
We have pointed out that there is research on all-day schools in Germany and school-age educare centres in Sweden. But, at the same time, we can see that some questions about both extended education programmes still lack empirical answers. Research needed in both countries can be divided into four levels: the child's level, the family level, the school level, and the national/international level.

Research needed on the child's level
Though in most research projects dealing with learning outside regular lessons the perspective of the learner/the children is taken into account, some questions regarding the effects on the child's level are still open. For example, negative effects of attending extended education provisions have not been properly addressed. At least for the German case, we can say that research on all-day schooling has a very biased view towards the desired -and therefore positive -outcomes. An explicit view towards negative experiences, which can have a considerable influence on learning, is in general rather rare. But internationally scattered findings show that, in some cases, participating in extracurricular activities can also affect the participants in an undesirable way. Larson, Hansen, and Moneta (2006) show that the stress level in the inclusion in organized activities of sports is significantly higher than the average stress level in other organized activities, and experiences of social exclusion are also more frequent there than normally reported by young people, to name only one finding. The advantage of Larson's study is that he and his colleagues explicitly asked the adolescents about negative experiences. In qualitative research we can easier disclose such experiences -if we do not close our eyes to them.
In Sweden, research on the child's level is needed, not to legalise the activity (as is often the case in Germany), but rather to investigate in what way school-age educare contributes to children's wellbeing and making of meaning. Also, a critical review of the core of the educational attitude in extended education is needed. Societal expectations of the potential of the school-age educare centres' contribution to integration and "Bildung" is unclear. We need information due to children's changing conditions to understand and elaborate the possibilities of the contributions from extended education to compensate children and complete their education in elementary school.

Research needed on the family level
All-day schooling in Germany, among other things, is focused on fostering students who are academically in need of support and on reducing the achievement gap between children from different family backgrounds. This aim of reducing social inequality can only be met if all students from all families participate at the same rate in the extracurricular activities. The StEG-study shows that, at least with regard to the primary level, families with a high educational background are more willing to send their children to the extracurricular activities. This finding shifts the research perspective from the question of how to effectively design extracurricular activities to the question of how families from different social backgrounds 'use' extracurricular provisions as part of their social reproduction strategies. This research perspective should also encompass other fostering activities outside the regular classroom and outside the school -that means it should encompass the broad area of extended education as a whole and how families use the provisions within this area to foster their children.
In Sweden, research on the family level is needed to understand how the different practices the children participate in are related to each other with regard to specific outcomes. Under which circumstances is it beneficial for the children to participate in the school-age educare centre, the elementary school and different leisure activities outside school and ed-ucare centres? Just as in Germany, there is a need to construct knowledge about how school-age educare can contribute to equal education.

Research needed on the staff/school level
With regard to the staff working at all-day schools in Germany, more research is needed on the question of how to train teachers to work effectively at an all-day school (for example regarding cooperation with additional staff members) and how to train additional staff to offer activities with high pedagogical quality (a question focused in particular on the nonpedagogically trained staff members). Which norms and values do teachers and additional staff members have towards all-day schooling? Do all of them wholeheartedly support the idea of all-day schooling?
In Sweden, some of the recent research has been focusing on professionality, conditions and quality, and, as already mentioned, this is much needed. Questions on how the complex, threefold mission of the school-age educare teachers challenges the inner core of the profession and directs the development of the professionality needs to be followed. Little focus has been put on the need to develop the activities in the school-age educare centres in line with changes in contemporary childhood, and research is now needed to construct knowledge concerning children's play, language expressed in different modes, competence to build new cultures together with newly arrived children, and how to continue developing democratic competences. The fact that Sweden does have precise formulations in the newly revised curriculum of 2018 actually also raises the need for research to study how the legislation documents are interpreted and how the resources are distributed and utilized. It is important to construct knowledge about how the activities in the centres are put into practice.

Research needed on the national level
On a national level more research on representative participating rates with regard to the socioeconomic background of the participants (monitoring studies) is needed -that implies (on a nationwide level) research on the question whether participating in extended education provisions reduces or widens the social gap. This need holds true for Sweden as well as for Germany. Furthermore, more international comparative research is needed for countries to learn from each other. Until now there is no research in this direction. For example, there is a heated debate about social inequality and the so-called shadow education in Asia, for which parents pay a lot of money (Bray, 2007), and there is debate whether it could be replaced by a new way of learning culture carried out by extended education activities similar to the activities in Sweden and Germany.

New Methods in Research on Extended Education
Since extended education in Sweden and Germany is a specific practice with a specific pedagogy, new methods to understand this practice are also needed, and special attention must be directed towards children. If children's perspectives are respected, then children should also be involved in the research. Then questions about taking others' perspective, intersubjectivity and interculturality can come into focus. This demands research methods using participating methods.

Conclusion
As we have seen with regard to the historical background, there is a long tradition of ideas to supplement the traditional way of schooling in Sweden as well as in Germany. In both countries these traditions are based in pedagogical (reform) concepts and ideas that put the child's perspective in the centre of learning activities. Whilst in Sweden, based on these concepts, the educare concept has been entrenched in the school system -and the society as a whole -, all-day schools in Germany did not play an important role in the educational system until the beginning of the 21 st century. This relatively recent change in Germany was not due to reflecting back on the pedagogical core concepts available and the child's perspective, but rather to the lack of competitiveness that the German educational system suffered from internationally. If the development in Sweden can be described as a kind of a bottom-up development, then the rise of the all-day school in Germany could be described as top-down.
Because of this top-down strategy that is based on the notion that all-day schools are a kind of an educational remedy, it is comprehensible that, in German all-day school research, quantitative, effectiveness-oriented studies dominate. This question makes it necessary to fund large effectiveness studies like the aforementioned StEG-study. On the contrary, in Sweden there is a lack of funding and, as a consequence, a lack of systematic, planned long-term research projects initiated by the Government, though there are plenty of individually initiated studies.
It is astonishing that in Germany, implementing all-day schools as an educational remedy and focusing research on the effectiveness of this remedy has not led to elaborated rules concerning the professional training standards of staff members working in the extracurricular activities at all-day schools. That holds true on the nationwide level as well as on the level of most federal states. In most cases it is up to the individual school to decide if someone is well-trained to work with children in extracurricular hours. Laymen and volunteers can be employed at all-day schools in the extracurricular sector. In Sweden the situation is all in all different. Usually no laymen and volunteers are allowed to work with children. Teachers working in educare centres are academically trained like their counterparts working in the classroom (but due to shortage of educated teachers nowadays uneducated staff are also employed to some extent).
In Sweden the same policy documents for every school-age educare centre in every municipality unify the pedagogy of the whole country and contribute to equal education. Though there are documents dealing with the pedagogical quality of all-day schools on the level of the 16 federal states, there is no common standardizing document in Germany. These documents usually are very abstract so every single school (the principal) must decide what pedagogical quality is and how it can be ensured. To ensure uniform standards, a system of nationwide advanced training would be necessary. The bi-national comparison between Sweden and Germany this article deals with makes these conclusions visible and contributes to establish extended education as a scientific field of research and a field of knowledge.