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No Tests, No Homework! Here's How Finland Has Emerged As A Global Example Of Quality, Inclusive Education

Others/world,  15 may 2022 3:40 am gmt, editor : shiva chaudhary  | .

Shiva Chaudhary

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Student-oriented approach to education in finland has been recognised as the most well-developed educational system in the world and ranks third in education worldwide..

"A quality education grants us the ability to fight the war on ignorance and poverty," - Charles Rangel

The uniqueness of the Finnish education model is encapsulated in its values of neither giving homework to students every day nor conducting regular tests and exams. Instead, it is listening to what the kids want and treating them as independent thinkers of society.

In Finland, the aim is to let students be happy and respect themselves and others.

Goodbye Standardised Exams

There is absolutely no program of nationwide standard testing, such as in India or the U.S, where those exams are the decisive points of one's admission to higher education like Board Examinations or Common Entrance Tests.

In an event organised by Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat remarked, "It is because they teach their children to face life struggles and not score in an examination," reported The Print .

Students in Finland are graded based on individual performance and evaluation criteria decided by their teachers themselves. Overall progress is tracked by their government's Ministry of Education, where they sample groups of students across schools in Finland.

Value-Based Education

They are primarily focused on making school a safe and equal space as children learn from the environment.

All Finland schools have offered since the 1980s free school meals, access to healthcare, a focus on mental health through psychological counselling for everyone and guidance sessions for each student to understand their wants and needs.

Education in Finland is not about marks or ranks but about creating an atmosphere of social equality, harmony and happiness for the students to ease learning experiences.

Most of the students spend half an hour at home after school to work on their studies. They mostly get everything done in the duration of the school timings as they only have a few classes every day. They are given several 15 -20 minutes breaks to eat, do recreational activities, relax, and do other work. There is no regiment in school or a rigid timetable, thus, causing less stress as given in the World Economic Forum .

Everyone Is Equal - Cooperate, Not Compete

The schools do not put pressure on ranking students, schools, or competitions, and they believe that a real winner doesn't compete; they help others come up to their level to make everyone on par.

Even though individualism is promoted during evaluation based on every student's needs, collectivity and fostering cooperation among students and teachers are deemed crucial.

While most schools worldwide believe in Charles Darwin's survival of the fittest, Finland follows the opposite but still comes out at the top.

Student-Oriented Model

The school teachers believe in a simple thumb rule; students are children who need to be happy when they attend school to learn and give their best. Focus is put upon teaching students to be critical thinkers of what they know, engage in society, and decide for themselves what they want.

In various schools, playgrounds are created by children's input as the architect talks to the children about what they want or what they feel like playing before setting up the playground.

Compared To The Indian Education Model

Firstly, Finnish children enrol in schools at the age of six rather than in India, where the school age is usually three or four years old. Their childhood is free from constricting education or forced work, and they are given free rein over how they socialise and participate in society.

Secondly, all schools in Finland are free of tuition fees as there are no private schools. Thus, education is not treated as a business. Even tuition outside schools is not allowed or needed, leaving no scope for commodifying education, unlike in India, where multiple coaching centres and private schools require exorbitant fees.

Thirdly, the school hours in Finland do not start early morning at 6 am, or 7 am as done in India. Finland schools begin from 9.30 am as research in World Economic Forum has indicated that schools starting at an early age is detrimental to their health and maturation. The school ends by mostly 2 pm.

Lastly, there is no homework or surprise test given to students in Finland. Teachers believe that the time wasted on assignments can be used to perform hobbies, art, sports, or cooking. This can teach life lessons and have a therapeutic stress-relieving effect on children. Indian schools tend to give a lot of homework to prove their commitment to studying and constantly revise what they learn in school.

Delhi Govt's Focus On Education

The Delhi model of education transformed under the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) tenure in the capital. In line with the Finnish model, Delhi government schools have adopted 'Happiness Classes' to ensure students' mental wellness through courses on mindfulness, problem-solving, social and emotional relationships, etc., from 1st to 8th classes.

Delhi government also introduced 'Entrepreneurial Mindset Classes' in 2019 to instil business and critical thinking skills among students of 9th to 12th classes. The practical approach in this class is indicated in the 'Business Blasters', a competition started by the Delhi government to encourage students to come up with start-up ideas and students were provided with ₹1000. Approximately 51,000 students participated in the first edition of the competition, according to Citizen Matters .

Through these endeavours, India is steadily investing in creating human resources that can get employment and generate employment for themselves.

India is at its demographic dividend stage; more than half of its population is within the working-age group of 14 to 60 years. Education is an essential factor in utilising this considerable advantage to grow economically and socially. Finland's education model is how India can strive closer to its goal and progress as a nation.

Also Read: Connaissance! Delhi Board of School Education Pens MoU To Add French In Government Schools

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Homework in Finland School

How many parents are bracing themselves for nightly battles to get their kids to finish their homework every year with the beginning of a school year? Thousands and thousands of them. Though not in Finland. The truth is that there is nearly no homework in the country with one of the top education systems in the world. Finnish people believe that besides homework, there are many more things that can improve child’s performance in school, such as having dinner with their families, exercising or getting a good night’s sleep.

Do We Need Homework?

There are different homework policies around the world. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) keeps track of such policies and compares the amount of homework of students from different countries. For example, an average high school student in the US has to spend about 6 hours a day doing homework, while in Finland, the amount of time spent on after school learning is about 3 hours a day. Nevertheless, these are exactly Finnish students who lead the world in global scores for math and science. It means that despite the belief that homework increases student performance, OECD graph shows the opposite. Though there are some exceptions such as education system in Japan, South Korea, and some other Asian countries. In fact, according to OECD, the more time students spend on homework, the worse they perform in school.

Finnish education approach shows the world that when it comes to homework, less is more. It is worth to mention that the world has caught onto this idea and, according to the latest OECD report, the average number of hours spent by students doing their homework decreased in nearly all countries around the world.

So what Finland knows about homework that the rest of the world does not? There is no simple answer, as the success of education system in Finland is provided by many factors, starting from poverty rates in the country to parental leave policies to the availability of preschools. Nevertheless, one of the greatest secrets of the success of education system in Finland is the way Finns teach their children.

How to Teach Like The Finns?

There are three main points that have to be mentioned when it comes to the success of education system in Finland.

First of all, Finns teach their children in a “playful” manner and allow them to enjoy their childhood. For example, did you know that in average, students in Finland only have three to four classes a day? Furthermore, there are several breaks and recesses (15-20 minutes) during a school day when children can play outside whatever the weather. According to statistics, children need physical activity in order to learn better. Also, less time in the classroom allows Finnish teachers to think, plan and create more effective lessons.

Secondly, Finns pay high respect to teachers. That is why one of the most sought after positions in Finland is the position of a primary school teacher. Only 10% of applicants to the teaching programs are accepted. In addition to a high competition, each primary school teacher in Finland must earn a Master’s degree that provides Finnish teachers with the same status as doctors or lawyers.

High standards applied to applicants for the university teaching programs assure parents of a high quality of teaching and allow teachers to innovate without bureaucracy or excessive regulation.

Thirdly, there is a lot of individual attention for each student. Classes in Finland are smaller than in the most of other countries and for the first six years of study, teachers get to know their students, their individual needs, and learning styles. If there are some weaker students, they are provided by extra assistance. Overall, Finnish education system promotes warmth, collaboration, encouragement, and assessment which means that teachers in this country are ready to do their best to help students but not to gain more control over them.

The combination of these three fundamentals is the key to success of any education system in the world and Finns are exactly those people who proved by way of example that less is more, especially when it comes to the amount of homework.

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Finland’s education system is failing. Should we look to Asia?

• Finland scored high on the original PISA education assessment, but its scores have slipped in recent years.
• Critics argue that Finland’s success came from earlier education models, not from headline-making features like late start times, lack of homework, and absence of test assessment.
• Asia’s rigorous education system is now eclipsing Finland’s PISA scores. Which approach is the right one? Which is truly shortsighted?

In 2000, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) released the results of its first survey of education attainment. Administrated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the triennial assessment tested the skills and knowledge of 15-year-olds around the world.

That year , Finland handily came out as a top performer, scoring high in math and science, and number one in reading. The United States’ performance that same year, for comparison’s sake, could best be described as middling . These results led many to claim that Finland had the best education system in the world . Educators and politicians swarmed to the Nordic country in the hopes of discovering the source of their golden touch.

Then things took a turn, and Finland’s standings began to slip. Between 2006 and 2012, its scores in science, reading, and math fell sharply: 18, 23, and 29 points respectively. PISA 2015 saw further drops; meanwhile, other top performers have remained relatively steady.

“Finland was on a downwards slope, not an upwards one,” writes Tim Oates , director of assessment research and development at Cambridge Assessment. “All the assumptions in 2000 seemed to be of Finland at the top and on the rise, not on the way down. And that was mistaking PISA for a longitudinal study, rather than a cross-sectional one.”

While Finland remains a top performer, it has lost its luster in the eyes of many experts, bringing criticisms of Finland’s education system to the debate.

Gabriel Heller Shalgren argues that Finland’s educational successes have their origin with the economic and industrial growth that predates the 2000s.

(Photo: Andrei Niemimaki/Flickr)

The real lesson from Finland

Finland’s meteoric rise certainly had some cause. Looking in, many claimed it to be reforms dedicated to school autonomy and pupil-led education. They pointed to the system’s lack of centralized accountability and features like late start times, lack of homework, absence of test assessment, and a culture that celebrates the teaching profession.

For Gabriel Heller Shalgren, research director at the Center for the Study of Market Reform Education, this view lacks hard evidence. According to him, Finland’s initial successes resulted from educational standards instituted in the 1970s and ’80s, well before the above policies could take root.

In a monograph titled “ Real Finnish Lessons ,” he notes that Finland’s teaching system was centralized and teacher-dominated up until the ’90s, meaning decentralized reform came too late for it to be responsible. Instead, Finland’s late developments in industrialization and economic growth bolstered the country’s educational performance. Late developments, Shalgren points out, that mirror those in East Asia.

Shalgren does agree with some popular explanations, such as Finland’s reverence of teachers. However, he notes this is not a recent phenomenon and stems from the role teachers played in the country’s nation-building process, way back in the 19th century.

“Overall, the strongest policy lesson is the danger of throwing out authority in schools, and especially getting rid of knowledge-based, teacher-dominated instruction,” writes Shalgren. “[T]he story from Finland backs up the increasing amount of evidence, which suggests that pupil-led methods, and less structured school environments in general, are harmful for cognitive achievement.”

For Shalgren, the decline in Finland’s recent test scores results from reality finally catching up to Finnish fantasies.

Asian countries have outdone Finland’s education system in the most recent PISA surveys.

(Photo: Pixabay)

Asian education systems pulling ahead

As Singapore, China, and Japan overcome Finland, especially in math and science, countries like Taiwan are quickly closing the gap. This has led some to wonder if Asian education systems have improved over Finland’s in meaningful ways.

Finnish native and Asia correspondent Hannamiina Tanninen has attended schools in both countries. She agrees that Finland’s education system is one of the world’s finest, especially regarding its quality teachers. However, in her TED talk she argues that Finland must learn lessons from East Asia if it is to stay relevant:

• Students in Asia start their education earlier, work harder, and work longer. Simply put, the more time students put into developing skills and knowledge, the more of both they will acquire.
• Finland’s education system lowers the bar accordingly to match a student’s talent and skill set; East Asian systems require students to work to meet a universal standard and catch up if necessary.
• East Asian systems promote competitiveness and center educational strategies on excelling. In Finnish culture, such open competitiveness is less socially acceptable.
• Finland strives to make learning fun and creative; however, Tanninen argues that this approach may be disadvantageous. It may, for example, sacrifice long-term educational gains if success is always measured on a student’s instant gratification.

“When did [Finland] subscribe to an idea that there is a glass ceiling that says, ‘Good enough’?” Tanninen said. “Where as in Asia, I don’t remember any of my professors saying, ‘Okay, good enough.’ It would be, ‘Okay, Hannah, work hard; you can go further.'”

Girls report that they enjoy reading more than boys the world over, but in Finland’s education system, the gender gap is significantly wider.

The gender gap in Finland’s education system?

Despite Finland’s dedication to equality, its performance gap score continues to languish below the OECD average.

In an analysis titled “ Girls, Boys, and Reading ,” Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, notes Finland’s gender gap in reading is twice that of the U.S. While Finnish boys score the average, Finnish girls score nearly double that, meaning the country’s superiority in reading literacy rests solely with one gender.

Interestingly, boys typically score higher on math and science, both in Finland and other OECD countries. However, Finland’s latest PISA scores have girls outperforming the boys in both subjects (though the score differential was significantly less than in reading).

“Finland’s gender gap illustrates the superficiality of much of the commentary on that country’s PISA performance,” writes Loveless. “Have you ever read a warning that even if those policies contribute to Finland’s high PISA scores—which the advocates assume but serious policy scholars know to be unproven—the policies also may be having a negative effect on the 50 percent of Finland’s school population that happens to be male?”

This gap extends beyond PISA scores. In Finland, more women enter higher education and obtain higher levels of education overall.

No doubt many factors are at play, but one pointed out by Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish educator and scholar, is that boys simply don’t read for pleasure. “Finland used to have the best primary school readers in the world until the early 2000s, but not anymore,” he told The Washington Post .

A time frame that matches Shalgren’s point that pupil-led pedagogy may have diminishing effects.

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Finland’s education system the best? Wrong question.

Of course, these criticisms and others are part of an open and ongoing dialogue—not just about Finland’s education system but about efficient pedagogy the world over. They make noteworthy points, but there are counterpoints on the other side, too.

For example, Andreas Schleicher, OECD director of education, disagrees with Shalgren’s analysis. He believes Finland’s recent declines are modest compared to the headway made when the country switched from traditional education.

While Asian education systems may be surpassing Finland’s, their uncompromising schedules and test-driven milieu may be shortchanging their futures for short-term gains. That’s the argument made by journalist and political scientist Fareed Zakaria.

“[We] should be careful before they try to mimic Asian educational systems, which are still oriented around memorization and test taking,” writes Zakaria . “I went through that kind of system and it’s not conductive to thinking, problem solving, or creativity.”

And Finland’s gender gap, though stark, is in keeping with larger trends. Girls outperform boys in all countries , and the debate is ongoing as to how social, biological, and cultural forces perpetuate the gap.

The point isn’t to argue that Finland’s education system isn’t valuable. Rather, it’s that “educational tourists” look to Finland, see what they wanted to see, and don’t bother to ask the questions Finland itself continues to grapple with. As Tim Oates points out, there are important lessons to be gained here. But insights should harmonize with an understanding of Finland’s culture, its history, and a wider range of evidence, not simply be a laundry list of fashionable factoids.

Oates’s conclusion is fitting: “In the case of [Finland’s education system], people have been seriously misled by stories told by people who have looked at Finland through their own, restricted lens. The real story of Finland is more subtle, more challenging, and far, far more interesting.”

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Spend five minutes in Jussi Hietava’s fourth-grade math class in remote, rural Finland, and you may learn all you need to know about education reform – if you want results, try doing the opposite of what American “education reformers” think we should do in classrooms.

Instead of control, competition, stress, standardized testing, screen-based schools and loosened teacher qualifications, try warmth, collaboration, and highly professionalized, teacher-led encouragement and assessment.

At the University of Eastern Finland’s Normaalikoulu teacher training school in Joensuu, Finland, you can see Hietava’s students enjoying the cutting-edge concept of “personalized learning.”

Related: Everyone aspires to be Finland, but this country beats them in two out of three subjects

But this is not a tale of classroom computers. While the school has the latest technology, there isn’t a tablet or smartphone in sight, just a smart board and a teacher’s desktop.

Screens can only deliver simulations of personalized learning, this is the real thing, pushed to the absolute limit.

This is the story of the quiet, daily, flesh-and-blood miracles that are achieved by Hietava and teachers the world over, in countless face-to-face and over-the-shoulder interactions with schoolchildren.

Related: Ranking countries by worst students

Often, Hietava does two things simultaneously: both mentoring young student teachers and teaching his fourth grade class.

“Finland’s historic achievements in delivering educational excellence and equity to its children are the result of a national love of childhood, a profound respect for teachers as trusted professionals, and a deep understanding of how children learn best.”

Hieteva sets the classroom atmosphere. Children are allowed to slouch, wiggle and giggle from time to time if they want to, since that’s what children are biologically engineered to do, in Finland, America, Asia and everywhere else.

This is a flagship in the “ultimate charter school network” – Finland’s public schools.

Related: Why Americans should not be coming up with their own solutions to teacher preparation issues

Here, as in any other Finnish school, teachers are not strait-jacketed by bureaucrats, scripts or excessive regulations, but have the freedom to innovate and experiment as teams of trusted professionals.

Here, in contrast to the atmosphere in American public schools, Hietava and his colleagues are encouraged to constantly experiment with new approaches to improve learning.

Hietava’s latest innovations are with pilot-testing “self-assessments,” where his students write daily narratives on their learning and progress; and with “peer assessments,” a striking concept where children are carefully guided to offer positive feedback and constructive suggestions to each other.

Related: In Singapore, training teachers for the classroom of the future

The 37 year-old Hietava, a school dad and Finnish champion golfer in his spare time, has trained scores of teachers, Unlike in America, where thousands of teacher positions in inner cities are filled by candidates with five or six weeks of summer training, no teacher in Finland is allowed to lead a primary school class without a master’s degree in education, with specialization in research and classroom practice, from one of this small nation’s eleven elite graduate schools of education.

As a boy, Hietava dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot, but he grew so tall that he couldn’t safely eject from an aircraft without injuring his legs. So he entered an even more respected profession, teaching, which is the most admired job in Finland next to medical doctors.

I am “embedded” at this university as a Fulbright Scholar and university lecturer, as a classroom observer, and as the father of a second grader who attends this school.

Related: Schools exacerbate the growing achievement gap between rich and poor, a 33-country study finds

How did I wind up here in Europe’s biggest national forest, on the edge of the Western world in Joensuu, Finland, the last, farthest-east sizable town in the EU before you hit the guard towers of the Russian border?

In 2012, while helping civil rights hero James Meredith write his memoir “ A Mission From God ,” we interviewed a panel of America’s greatest education experts and asked them for their ideas on improving America’s public schools.

One of the experts, the famed Professor Howard Gardner of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, told us, “Learn from Finland, which has the most effective schools and which does just about the opposite of what we are doing in the United States. You can read about what Finland has accomplished in ‘Finnish Lessons’ by Pasi Sahlberg.”

Related: While the U.S. struggles, Sweden pushes older students back to college

I read the book and met with Sahlberg, a former Finnish math teacher who is now also at Harvard’s education school as Visiting Professor.

After speaking with him I decided I had to give my own now-eight-year old child a public school experience in what seemed to be the most child-centered, most evidence-based, and most effective primary school system in the world.

Now, after watching Jussi Hietava and other Finnish educators in action for five months, I have come to realize that Finland’s historic achievements in delivering educational excellence and equity to its children are the result of a national love of childhood, a profound respect for teachers as trusted professionals, and a deep understanding of how children learn best.

Related: In Norway, where college is free, children of uneducated parents still don’t go

Children at this and other Finnish public schools are given not only basic subject instruction in math, language and science, but learning-through-play-based preschools and kindergartens, training in second languages, arts, crafts, music, physical education, ethics, and, amazingly, as many as four outdoor free-play breaks per day, each lasting 15 minutes between classes, no matter how cold or wet the weather is. Educators and parents here believe that these breaks are a powerful engine of learning that improves almost all the “metrics” that matter most for children in school – executive function, concentration and cognitive focus, behavior, well-being, attendance, physical health, and yes, test scores, too.

The homework load for children in Finland varies by teacher, but is lighter overall than most other developed countries. This insight is supported by research, which has found little academic benefit in childhood for any more than brief sessions of homework until around high school.

Related: Demark pushes to make students graduate on time

There are some who argue that since Finland has less socio-economic diversity than, for example, the United States, there’s little to learn here. But Finland’s success is not a “Nordic thing,” since Finland significantly out-achieves its “cultural control group” countries like Norway and Sweden on international benchmarks. And Finland’s size, immigration and income levels are roughly similar to those of a number of American states, where the bulk of education policy is implemented.

There are also those who would argue that this kind of approach wouldn’t work in America’s inner city schools, which instead need “no excuses,” boot-camp drilling-and-discipline, relentless standardized test prep, Stakhanovian workloads and stress-and-fear-based “rigor.”

But what if the opposite is true?

What if many of Finland’s educational practices are not cultural quirks or non-replicable national idiosyncrasies — but are instead bare-minimum global best practices that all our children urgently need, especially those children in high-poverty schools?

Related: China downturn, increased competition could affect supply of foreign students

Finland has, like any other nation, a unique culture. But it has identified, often by studying historical educational research and practices that originated in the United States, many fundamental childhood education insights that can inspire, and be tested and adapted by, any other nation.

As Pasi Sahlberg has pointed out, “If you come to Finland, you’ll see how great American schools could be.”

Finland’s education system is hardly perfect, and its schools and society are entering a period of huge budget and social pressures. Reading levels among children have dropped off. Some advanced learners feel bored in school. Finland has launched an expensive, high-risk national push toward universal digitalization and tabletization of childhood education that has little basis in evidence and flies in the face of a recent major OECD study that found very little academic benefit for school children from most classroom technology.

Related: In Brazil, fast-growing universities mirror the U.S. wealth divide

But as a parent or prospective parent, I have spent time in many of the most prestigious private schools in New York City and toured many of the city’s public school classrooms, in the largest public school system in the world. And I am convinced that the primary school education my child is getting in the Normaalikoulu in Joensuu is on a par with, or far surpasses, that available at any other school I’ve seen.

I have a suggestion for every philanthropist, parent, educator and policymaker in the world who wants to improve children’s education.

Start by coming to Finland. Spend some time sitting in the back of Jussi Hietava’s classroom, or any other Finnish classroom.

If you look closely and open your mind, you may see the School of Tomorrow.

William Doyle is a 2015-2016 Fulbright Scholar and New York Times bestselling author from New York City on the faculty of the University of Eastern Finland, and father of an eight year old who attends a Finnish public school.

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Enjoyed reading William Doyle’s piece on school education in Finland. Am independently developing a flexible, interdisciplinary, interactive, and affordable learning model for K-12 education in India that integrates concept learning, hands- on activities, and life skills. Look forward to read more on new thinking in learning and education!

> But it has identified, often by studying historical educational research and practices that originated in the United States, many fundamental childhood education insights that can inspire, and be tested and adapted by, any other nation.

Can you elaborate on this? Did Finland learn from specific research that originated from the USA or studies from the USA? If so, which ones?

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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.

Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey , conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.

And yet it wasn't clear that Sahlberg's message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.

During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather's TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an "intriguing school-reform model."

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

The irony of Sahlberg's making this comment during a talk at the Dwight School seemed obvious. Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented on Sahlberg's statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.

Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to education, because he's become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and physics in a junior high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a variety of positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent years as an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations.

Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred visits a year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want to know the secret of Finland's success. Sahlberg's new book is partly an attempt to help answer the questions he always gets asked.

From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: "Real winners do not compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg's comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don't exist in Finland.

"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same."

Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public school district -- and the other "99 percent" is painfully plain to see.

Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems of other countries. All countries are different, and as many Americans point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the United States.

Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.

Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Teachers College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation's education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country: Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.

Indeed, Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute , a research organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than Finland.

What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.

With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.

Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn't meant to be a how-to manual, it is meant to be a "pamphlet of hope."

"When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's, many said it couldn't be done," Sahlberg said during his visit to New York. "But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn't be done."

Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.

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Unlocking Finland’s Secret: A Revolutionary Approach to Homework and Testing

• June 26, 2023

Did you know in recent years Finland has been hailed as a global leader in education? Well, yes Finland is consistently achieving top rankings in international assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). One of the key aspects that sets Finland apart from other countries is its unique approach to homework and testing. Unlike traditional systems that emphasize heavy workloads and high-stakes examinations, Finland’s educational philosophy promotes a balanced and holistic learning experience. In this blog post, we will explore Finland’s innovative strategies regarding homework and testing, and discuss how these approaches contribute to the remarkable success of the Finland education system .

1. The Role of Homework in Finland:

Finland takes a remarkably different approach to homework compared to many other countries. In Finnish schools, the emphasis is not on the quantity but on the quality of homework. Instead of assigning excessive amounts of homework, Finnish educators focus on promoting meaningful and purposeful assignments that reinforce classroom learning. Homework is viewed as a tool for self-reflection, consolidation of knowledge, and promoting independent thinking. Additionally, the Finnish system recognizes the importance of free time for children to engage in recreational activities, develop social skills, and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Consequently, Finnish students have significantly less homework compared to their peers in other nations, allowing them ample time for rest, relaxation, and pursuing extracurricular interests.

Also read: What is Finnish education System?

2. Assessments in Finland:

Moving Beyond Standardized Testing: Unlike many countries that heavily rely on standardized testing as a measure of student performance, Finland adopts a more comprehensive and holistic approach to assessments. The Finnish education system prioritizes continuous evaluation and formative assessments over high-stakes exams. Teachers regularly assess students’ progress through a combination of observation, classroom discussions, project work, and practical assignments. This student-centered approach allows teachers to understand each student’s unique learning style and adapt instruction accordingly. By focusing on individual growth and providing constructive feedback, Finnish educators foster a supportive and nurturing learning environment, free from the stress and pressure associated with high-stakes testing.

3. The Benefits of Finland’s Approach:

Finland’s approach to homework and testing has several notable benefits. Firstly, by reducing the emphasis on homework, Finnish students experience less academic stress and have more time for relaxation and extracurricular activities. This balanced approach promotes overall well-being and fosters the development of well-rounded individuals. Secondly, the shift away from standardized testing allows for a more comprehensive evaluation of students’ abilities, including their critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaborative skills. This holistic assessment aligns with the needs of the 21st-century workforce, which values creativity, adaptability, and teamwork. Additionally, the focus on formative assessments provides students with regular feedback, allowing them to understand their strengths and areas for improvement, and promoting a growth mindset.

Conclusion:

Finland has revolutionized the conventional notions of education through its unique approach to homework and testing. By emphasizing purposeful homework and prioritizing holistic assessments, Finland has cultivated an educational system that nurtures well-rounded individuals, fosters critical thinking, and instills a genuine passion for learning. While every educational system faces its own challenges, Finland’s remarkable success serves as an inspiration for other nations to reassess their approaches to homework and testing. By adopting a more balanced and student-centered methodology, countries can establish educational environments that prioritize well-being, stimulate creativity, and effectively prepare students for the demands of the future. Finland’s educational paradigm shift stands as a testament to the transformative power of reimagining traditional education systems, emphasizing the vital importance of continually questioning and improving our approaches to teaching and learning. If you are interested in providing your child with a Finnish education curriculum, look no further than finlandeducationhub.com – your comprehensive resource for all your needs.

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Education reform in Finland and the comprehensive school system

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The initiative

The challenge

The public impact

• Stakeholder engagement Good
• Political commitment Strong
• Public confidence Strong
• Clarity of objectives Good
• Strength of evidence Strong
• Feasibility Good
• Management Good
• Measurement Fair
• Alignment Good

Bibliography

Reforms to the Finnish education system were the result of many years of consideration and research. Three reform commissions after the Second World War lay the foundation for later reform. In 1968, parliament introduced legislation to abolish the two-tier system of grammar and civic schools and create a new, centrally managed comprehensive school system.

In the decade following the end of the Second World War, the Finnish parliament created three successive reform commissions, each of which aimed to create an education system that would provide equal educational opportunities for all Finns. The first, in 1945, considered the primary school curriculum and it “offered a compelling vision of a more humanistic, child-centred school”. [4] A decade later, the idea of the comprehensive school had gained traction, and the commission recommended that compulsory education in Finland should take place in a nine-year, municipally-run comprehensive school. In 1963, the Finnish parliament decided to officially reform the education system “after much committee work, experiments, pilot programmes, input from the elementary school teachers' union and above all, vast political support and consensus”. [2]  

In November 1968, parliament enacted legislation to create a new basic education system built around that common model. The Basic Education Act was passed in 1968, introducing the new comprehensive school system and replacing the existing two-tiered one. Students would now enter comprehensive school at nine years of age and remain until sixteen. In total, there were nine grades, divided into six years of primary school and three years of lower secondary school. [3] The new system was introduced gradually, starting with Northern Finland in 1972, “which was considered to require the reform most, and to resist it least”, and it reached the rest of the country by 1977. [3] The new system offered three academic levels in mathematics and foreign languages: basic, middle and advanced. What had been taught in civic schools corresponded to the basic level, while that in grammar schools equated to the advanced level. [4]

When the reforms were implemented in the 1970s, the education system was run centrally, and by “reflecting the radical change begot by the basic school reform, the first national curriculum for basic education in 1970 was very detailed and the steering system strictly centralised”. [5] In this early phase, the Finnish government had strict control over most aspects of the new system, including the curriculum, external inspections and general regulation, giving them “a strong grip on schools and teachers”. [6] However, educational reforms in the 1990s gave more authority and autonomy to municipalities. For instance, teachers were entrusted with planning their own curriculums and assessments. These reforms brought about “a new culture of education characterised by trust between educational authorities and schools, local control, professionalism and autonomy”. [6]

However, there was stronger state intervention in 2004 when a new core curriculum was introduced, which “reinforced anew state control by narrowing the licence of municipalities and schools in planning their respective curricula”. [5]

Finland found itself facing great changes after the Second World War, with a growing population and a changing economy. In the postwar period, Finland witnessed a rapid increase in population with the number of annual births reaching over 100,000 each year between 1946 and 1949. By comparison, in the prewar period from 1935 to 1939, the number of annual births ranged from 69,000 to 78,000. [1] What had previously been a “class-bound, farm-oriented society” underwent not only a growth in industry but also a significant shift in its very nature from traditional wood-processing to metal. “Traditionally, the wood-processing industry had dominated the economy. Soon after the war, however, the metal industry soon became the dominant driver.” [2]  

A growing population, coupled with a stronger economy, led to increasing numbers of parents seeking high-quality education for their children. Grammar schools had to accommodate unprecedented numbers of students, as enrolment increased almost tenfold in 15 years, from 34,000 in 1955 to 324,000 in 1970. [2] However, there were clear inequalities in who could access this kind of education. Children from agricultural and working-class backgrounds attended grammar schools in low numbers, making up only 4.8 percent and 8.9 percent of the grammar school population in 1940 respectively. Similarly, there was a stark urban-rural divide. In 1960, almost 62 percent of Finns lived in rural areas; however, only 20 percent of students living in the countryside attended grammar schools. Conversely, 38 percent of Finns lived in urban areas but 47 percent of children there attended grammar schools. [3] More than ever, parents wanted an “improved and more comprehensive basic education” for their children. [2] Both the increase in student numbers and inequality of educational access and attainment led to the need for serious reforms. It was necessary to provide quality education for all children regardless of their socioeconomic background or where they lived.

The success of the comprehensive education reforms is evident from the subsequent excellent student performance and national educational outcomes. These outcomes can be attributed to a number of factors, including the focus on providing equal access for all to quality education and the role of local municipalities and teachers in designing and implementing the curriculum to meet students' needs.  

Student performance at school has improved considerably since the implementation of comprehensive school reforms. While there are other factors at play - such as a more extensive build-up of the welfare state - the reforms are seen as at least partly responsible for the improvement. By the 1980s and 1990s, students educated in the comprehensive system performed better academically than those educated in the two-tier system of the 1960s and early 1970s. [2] In the early 2000s, Finnish students began to score exceptionally well in international assessments such as the Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA), which evaluates “the extent to which 15-year-old students, near the end of their compulsory education, have acquired key knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in modern societies” .[7] In 2000, 2003, 2006 and 2009, Finland took nearly all the top spots for mathematical and scientific literacy and reading. Although there has been a slight drop in its position in mathematical literacy since 2012, Finland still places highly overall. [8] In addition to an improvement in educational outcomes, the number of students staying longer in education has increased as a result of the comprehensive reforms and subsequent upper secondary school reforms in the 1980s. [4] In 1970, only 30 percent of Finnish adults had a minimum of an upper secondary diploma, but by 2010 this figure had risen to over 80 percent, while it was 90 percent for 24-35 year olds. [4]

The motives for the reforms were twofold: on the one hand, improving educational quality and access would provide an educated workforce for the increasingly industrialised, post-agrarian economy; on the other hand, there was a demand for greater social equality as Finnish society underwent considerable changes. The objective of reducing inequality within the education system was achieved by the late 1980s. [2] All Finnish children received the same basic education, and there were real opportunities for all students to progress to upper secondary school. [2] Equality of educational outcome is demonstrated by the small variation in results between different schools and high numbers of student enrolment. [4] Moreover, the gap between the highest and lowest performing schools was the smallest in all countries assessed by PISA. [2]

Another key aspect of the reforms' success was the eventual transfer of authority to municipalities and the schools themselves. Between 1985 and 1988, there was a shift from “external school inspection to self-evaluation of the profession”. [3] In 1994, there were reforms to the national curriculum which gave teachers more autonomy in how and what they taught. Before that point, Finland's performance in international education surveys had not been particularly notable. [3]

Not only has Finland scored highly in assessments such as PISA but also in the OECD's 2016 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The survey measures the performance of 16-65 year olds in key skills such as literacy, numeracy and problem-solving, which are necessary in social and work contexts and “for fully integrating and participating in the labour market, education and training, and social and civic life”. [9] Finland ranked in the top three for each skill. [9] Furthermore, Finns whose parents have low educational attainment are far less likely than their international counterparts to have lower levels of literacy or numeracy themselves. [9]

Although no research has confirmed a positive correlation between improvements in education and economic growth, it seems likely that they were mutually beneficial.[ 2 ] Between 2001 and 2004, Finland was ranked as the most competitive economy in the world three times by the World Economic Forum, which “suggests that the country boasts a very high level of human capital, widespread use of information and communication technologies, and education and research institutions that have been redesigned to foster innovation and cutting-edge research and development” .[2]  

Finally, teaching is a highly respected career choice in Finland with many more applicants than places on teaching courses. The president of the Finnish Teachers Union, Olli Luukkainen, explained that “the fact that teachers have so much independence and respect influences young people as they are deciding what programme they will follow in the university. If they choose teacher education they know they will be entering a profession that enjoys broad trust and respect in the society, one that plays an important role in shaping the country's future.” [4]

An interesting feature of the reforms is their implementation over the long term. Different waves of reform brought new changes in the decades following the first reforms of the 1960s. Despite differences of opinion and debate as to the nature of such reforms, the “current success [of the comprehensive schools] is due to this steady progress, rather than as a consequence of highly visible innovations launched by a particular political leader or party” .[4] Perhaps this success can also be attributed to a set of values that emerged among Finnish baby boomers in the postwar period. Pasi Sahlberg, Director of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation explained that “the comprehensive school is not merely a form of school organisation. It embodies a philosophy of education as well as a deep set of societal values about what all children need and deserve.” [4]

Written by Ella Jordan

Stakeholder engagement

The various stakeholders involved in the education reforms were supportive of the planned changes to the education system, although some did voice concerns about how they would be implemented and with what success. 

Finland has long employed the “Tripartite” concept in politics, which involves cooperation between the government, trade unions and employers' organisations. [2] This tripartite policy “came to education with the advent of comprehensive school reform”, and the key stakeholders were the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance, the new Teachers' Union, the three municipalities' central organisations, and teachers themselves. [2]  

There were many negotiations between the stakeholders when developing the policy. The National School Council and the Ministry of Education worked in tandem, and corporations also had an important role in the negotiations. Although there were different interests and priorities within these groups, thanks to Finland's “contract” society, “where important social policy decisions are accords between the government and labour organisations”, it was possible to come to a positive agreement on education reform. [2]  

Teachers had legitimate concerns before the launch of the reforms about changes to their salaries and professional autonomy. Not all teachers had the same employer: some worked for local municipalities, others for the state or private associations. Their salaries were directly linked to the type of school they were working in. For example, elementary school teachers typically earned less than grammar school teachers. [2] With the introduction of the comprehensive school system, teachers were concerned about the payscale that would be applied to their jobs. [2] Furthermore, some expressed concerns about the freedom they would have when teaching lessons, as they worried that “the reform's centralised planning and execution would stifle their traditional didactic freedom”. [2]

Despite their concerns, teachers were involved throughout the planning phase of the reforms, and committees such as the Comprehensive School Curriculum Committee (1966-1970) permitted collaboration between teachers and central government officials on key issues. [2] Reforms would affect “content and curriculum - not just teaching methods”, so it was essential to receive teacher input to ensure their commitment to the new changes .[2] One reason why the committees were successful was that when choosing committee members, the government “took pains to select a balanced mix of people with different political ideologies, professions, experience, and areas of expertise - including scientists and teachers”. [2]

Political commitment

There was sustained political commitment to implementing educational reform in Finland in the immediate postwar period and following decades. As early as 1945, the government started planning changes to its education system; however, it was not until the 1960s that the comprehensive school system began to take shape. [4]  

Increasing pressure from the Agrarian Party and from parents, who wanted high standards of education for their children, led parliament “to start building legislation to abolish the parallel school system and to replace it with the comprehensive school.” [3] In the 1966 parliamentary elections, left-wing parties gained power and formed a majority coalition, which consisted of the largest party in parliament - the Social Democrats - and the Finnish People's Democratic Party, which included the Communist Party and the Agrarian Party. [2] This new government “made education reform its primary goal, and set out to mould primary and lower secondary education into a comprehensive basic school for all children”. [2] Furthermore, many believed that improving the quality of education would advance social justice and stimulate economic development. [2]

Their commitment was evident: although “it would have been easy to tinker at the margins, crafting new in-service education and training for teachers,... Finland's policymakers understood that for comprehensive school reform to work, the entire teacher-education system had to change”. [2] In November 1968, parliament passed the Basic Education Act, which stated that “all children should attend the same school for the first nine years of education” .[10]

Public confidence

There was strong public confidence in the reforms to the education system, as Finns valued education highly. Moreover, as a result of economic growth and greater personal wealth, parents wanted to educate their children well, and they put pressure on the government to enable them to do so.

Finland has long considered education to be very important and has embraced values such as “a law-abiding citizenry, trust in authorities, and commitment to one's social group, awareness of one's social status and position, and patriotic spirit”. [2] Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish scholar and education expert, commented in 2010 that “over the last half-century we developed an understanding that the only way for us to survive as a small, independent nation is by educating all our people” .[4] Owing to such values, and parents' increasing interest in providing high standards of education for their children, public interest in educational reform was high. The governmental reports into reforms of the postwar period started to help “build public support and political will to create an education system that would be more responsive to the growing demand for more equitable educational opportunities for all young people in Finland” .[4]

As the generation of baby boomers reached school age, more and more parents were sending their children on to secondary education in grammar schools. In the academic year 1955-56, there were 34,000 students enrolled in grammar schools, and this figure climbed to 215,000 in 1960, rising further to 270,000 in 1965 and reaching 324,000 by 1970. [2] Such significant increases in enrolment numbers “reflected the aspirations of ordinary Finns for greater educational opportunity for their children, a message that the country's political leaders heard as well” .[4]

Clarity of objectives

There were clear, broad objectives set out at the start of the reform programme. Rather than proposing specific details, objectives focused on wide-scale goals at the national level. The primary aim of education reform was to establish social justice in Finland “to guarantee all children equal opportunity to a nine-year basic education regardless of their parents' socioeconomic status” .[2]  

As the Finnish economy developed, shifting towards a service-based economy in the 1970s, it was important to elevate “the population's general educational level and [to continue] to develop education in a scientifically, technologically, and socially sound manner”. [2] Further goals were “to reinforce educational equality and to reform educational content to reflect democratic values and attitudes” and “to reform the education system so that a larger proportion of citizens would be able to continue their studies at upper-secondary and tertiary levels and to become lifelong learners” .[2]   In a country with two official languages, it “was also important to secure the interests of the linguistic minority, the Swedish-speaking children” .[2] In 1981, the Ministry of Education reaffirmed that students could not be streamed into tracks based on ability or personal characteristics. [2] 

Strength of evidence

Legislators drew on a wealth of evidence as part of their approach to planning comprehensive school reforms. They considered information from a variety of sources, such as the pilot programmes of the 1960s, extensive consultations with key stakeholders from 1965-1970, and the Swedish education model.

In the 1960s, “legislators and educators rallied to craft a blueprint for reform”, using a combination of “committee work, experiments, pilot programmes, [and] input from the elementary school teachers' union” to develop a model for a system of comprehensive education. [2] Trials of the proposed comprehensive system were put in place in the 1960s, and by 1965, 25 municipalities where teachers had contributed to developing the new curriculum had partly adopted the new system. [2] The Swedish system also served as a model that had a distinct “influence on the structure of Finland's new comprehensive schools as well as on the teaching content”. [2]

Feasibility

Several mechanisms were in place to make the comprehensive school reforms feasible, including state funding, teacher training, and the implementation of reforms over a five-year period. However, owing to the scale of the reforms, challenges of some kind were likely during the implementation phase, such as restructuring teachers' payscales and providing suitable training for teachers about the new system.

Financing for the new comprehensive system was the responsibility of the Finnish government, which increased the proportion of its budget it spent on education from 9.1 percent in 1960 to 16.9 percent in 1975. [3] Municipal education institutions received high state subsidies to fund reforms. State subsidies covered 81 to 90 percent of teachers' salaries, 84 to 93 percent of school transport and pupil accommodation, and 5 to 77 percent of other expenses. [2] This funding allowed local governments to cover other costs without much difficulty. Since “teacher wages comprised 70 to 80 percent of total operating expenses, and the state subsidised as much as 81 to 90 percent of salary costs in communities that often had a 15 percent tax rate, hiring teachers could bring direct financial benefits” .[2]

To ensure the success of the comprehensive school system, it was essential that teachers were suitably trained to deliver the desired outcomes. As a result, in-service training was provided and “teacher training was transferred from teacher colleges and seminars to universities” .[3] In 1964, parliament enacted urgent measures to reorganise basic and continuing education, so that teachers could meet the new needs of comprehensive schools, and in the following years a committee was assigned to prepare and implement these reforms. [2] Once the comprehensive school system was introduced, “teachers had five days of in-service training for comprehensive school pedagogies including the social and administrative implications of the reform” .[11] The training, given by instructors regionally and nationally, helped teachers familiarise themselves with the new system, although there was some criticism that it was “too superficial and official”. [11]

As the reforms were to be implemented on such a large scale, “a multilevel guidance system was developed to gather input and connect the various national, regional, and local planning groups”. [2] The reforms were first introduced in remote, rural areas of northern Finland, “gradually spreading to the more populated municipalities and towns in the south. The last southern municipality to implement the new comprehensive system did so in 1977.” [4]

The management structure of comprehensive school reforms was clear at the outset and changed over time to respond to the emerging needs of the system. The National Board of General Education (NBGE) was initially responsible, before the eventual transfer of authority to local municipalities in the 1980s.

Enacting the 1968 legislation was the responsibility of the NBGE. [2] As part of the reforms, the NBGE was restructured into two branches, which each had its own role in the management of reforms. The School Department “generally oversaw school structure, network and planning for [schools] rebirth as nine-year institutions, and the Education Department became responsible for educational content, curriculum, teaching methods, learning materials, textbook approval, pilot programmes, research activities, and special education” .[2] In 1972, the majority of decision-making in relation to education was undertaken by the NBGE. By 1980, the Ministry of Education - which had been restructured in 1974 - increasingly had a role in decision-making, while by 2005, municipalities were the main decision-making authority. In 1991, the National Board of General Education (NBGE) merged with the National Board of Vocational Education (NBVE) to form the National Board of Education (NBE).

By the early 1980s, many considered the centralised management of the education system too restrictive and bureaucratic. There was increasing pressure to make changes to the system and give greater authority to municipalities and teachers. In 1984, the government set up a committee “whose goals were to decentralise management and reform the public administration apparatus in a way that would improve efficiency, democratic control, and legal protections” .[2] This marked a shift in the way the education system was structured, with local municipalities and authorities gaining control over decision-making processes: “central management steering systems were restructured, and the management structures rationalised. Norm and resource management was replaced by data-driven results based management.” [2]   

Measurement

Evaluation of student and school performance has changed over time. Currently, measurement of student performance is based on a system of “flexible accountability”, which eschews standardised testing in favour of teacher-made assessment at the classroom level. At a national level, there are some legislative provisions requiring evaluation of school performance; however, schools' high degree of autonomy means that evaluative processes are not homogeneous.

Rather than assessing all students through standardised testing, teachers currently evaluate student performance at the classroom level using teacher-made tests, which evaluate students' learning instead of standardised criteria. [4] This approach has been adopted in more recent years, replacing the previous system model of streamed classes, which prevailed in the 1980s and was based on students' ability. This change was made because studies had shown that streaming was a key factor in “maintaining and deepening regional, social, and gender inequality”. [4] Consequently, the three levels - basic, middle and advanced - were merged into heterogeneous groups in 1985, and the tracking system was abolished. [2] In 1999, the NBE released criteria for evaluating students at the completion of basic education, while in 2004 criteria for “early and middle-stage evaluation” was published in the Framework Curriculum. [12] However, municipalities and schools have a high degree of autonomy, which means they can design and administer evaluations as they choose.

At the national level, there are national learning result evaluations, which were created by the NBE in 1998. The following year, the Basic Education Act introduced statutory requirements for evaluation measures requiring municipalities to evaluate the performance of schools. [12] National evaluations are currently the responsibility of the Finnish Education Evaluation Centre (FINEEC), a national agency that evaluates education from early childhood to adult learning. [13] The evaluation focuses on objectives set out in the national curriculum, and schools that are sampled receive feedback in comparison with national averages. [13] Contrary to the practice in many countries, there is no mandatory standardised testing in comprehensive schools in Finland: only 5 to 10 percent of students in a given age group participate in FINEEC evaluations. In addition to these results, FINEEC evaluate schools through feedback from principals, teachers and students about learning methods and student experience. [13] Despite these evaluation mechanisms, it has been argued that they have little influence on the development of schools. [12]

The NBGE “endorsed the curriculum prepared by the Curriculum Committee as the basis for the national curriculum”, which was criticised by some for “limiting the autonomy of municipalities and local schools”. [2] However, the NBGE considered this necessary to ensure the punctual implementation of reforms as well as to prevent disagreements between teachers and special interest groups. Jukka Sarjala, who worked at the Ministry of Education from 1970 until 1995 and later became director-general of the NBE, was responsible for implementing reforms and he described the challenges they posed: “there were lots of municipalities that were not eager to reform their system, which is why it was important to have a legal mandate. This was a very big reform, very big and complicated for teachers accustomed to the old system. They were accustomed to teaching school with selected children and were simply not ready for a school system in which very clever children and not so clever children were in the same classes. It took several years, in some schools until the older teachers retired, for these reforms to be accepted.” [4]

To assist teachers in getting used to the new system, the government passed legislation that “mandated two days of teacher training in the first three years following their municipality's switch to the comprehensive school system”. In addition to this, teachers agreed to a further three days of in-service training, which meant that “during the comprehensive school's first three years, compulsory teacher training consumed five days each year”. This training was provided by “a network of instructors, led by so-called national level instructors… Each province had its own group of pedagogic instructors, and schools had mentors to assist and help teachers to adapt to the new school culture.” [2]

[1] Crude death rate and birth rate by Year and Information Live births, Statistics Finland's PX-Web databases,  http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__vrm__kuol/statfin_kuol_pxt_005.px/table/tableViewLayout2/?rxid=2c04c18e-bd6c-4dd3-912f-7e5eccf892b1

[2] Policy Development and Reform Principles of Basic and Secondary Education in Finland since 1968, Erkki Aho, Kari Pitkänen and Pasi Sahlberg, May 2006, The World Bank,  http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/124381468038093074/pdf/368710FI0Educa1es0May0200601PUBLIC1.pdf

[3] A Historical Insight on Finnish Education Policy from 1944 to 2011, Mika Risku, June 2014, Italian Journal of Sociology of Education,  http://ijse.padovauniversitypress.it/system/files/papers/2014_2_3.pdf

[4] Finland: Slow and Steady Reform for Consistently High Results, OECD, 2011, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for the United States,  https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46581035.pdf

[5] The Finnish Education System and PISA, Sirkku Kupiainen, Jarkko Hautamäki and Tommi Karjalainen, 2009, Ministry of Education Publications,  https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/75640/opm46.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

[6] Highly trained, respected and free: why Finland's teachers are different, David Crouch, 17 June 2015, The Guardian,  https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/17/highly-trained-respected-and-free-why-finlands-teachers-are-different

[7] PISA 2015 Results in Focus, 2018, OECD,  http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf

[8] Finland and PISA, Ministry of Education and Culture [accessed June 12, 2018],  https://minedu.fi/en/pisa-en  

[9] Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills, OECD Skills Studies, 2016, OECD Publishing,  http://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Skills_Matter_Further_Results_from_the_Survey_of_Adult_Skills.pdf

[10] The Finnish National Core Curriculum: Structure and Development, Erja Vitikka, Leena Krokfors and Elisa Hurmerinta, 2012, Miracle of Education.,  http://curriculumredesign.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Finnish-National-Core-Curriculum_Vitikka-et-al.-2011.pdf

[11] Twenty-five Years of Educational Reform Initiatives in Finland, Ari Antikainen & Anne Luukkainen Department of Sociology, University of Joensuu, Finland,  http://www.oppi.uef.fi/~anti/publ/uudet/twenty_five_years.pdf

[12] The paradox of the education race: how to win the ranking game by sailing to headwind, Hannu Simola, Risto Rinne, Janne Varjo and Jaakko Kauko, 29 August 2012, Journal of Education Policy Vol. 28 No. 5,  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680939.2012.758832

[13] Learning outcomes evaluations, Finnish Education Evaluation Centre. Accessed 31 January 2019,  https://karvi.fi/en/pre-primary-and-basic-education/learning-outcomes-evaluations/

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Education has been a national priority in Finland for over three decades, with the country developing a unique holistic approach that continues to evolve and has produced significant results; often being hailed as a world-class education system. One of the basic principles of Finnish education is that all people must have equal access to high-quality education and training. The same opportunities for education are available to all citizens irrespective of their ethnic origin, age, wealth, language, or location. The basic right to education and culture is recorded in the Constitution, while education is free at all levels from pre-primary to higher education. Key elements of Finnish education policy include quality, efficiency, equity, well-being and internationalization. Geared to promote the effectiveness of the Finnish welfare society, education policy is built on the lifelong learning principle. Education is also seen as an end in itself. Recent reforms aim to further develop schools as learning communities, emphasizing the joy of learning and a collaborative atmosphere, as well as promoting student autonomy in studying and in school life. Finland’s holistic and trust-based education system produces excellent results, ranked near the top in reading, maths, and science as well as in overall child well-being levels.

• The Basic Education Act covers all children of compulsory school age. The local authority has an obligation to arrange basic education for children of compulsory school age residing in its area and pre-primary education during the year preceding compulsory schooling.
• Key elements of Finnish education policy include quality, efficiency, equity, well-being and lifelong learning.
• Results from the international PISA tests comparing 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, mathematics and science, show that Finland has ranked near the top ten in all three competencies since 2000 and under the top three in Europe.

Last update: 2021

Finland’s Basic Education Act (1998) and amendments .

The National Core Curriculum for Basic Education  is one of the other key frameworks.

Education Reform 2016

Many aspects of the Basic Education Act are complemented by the devolved nature of decision-making in Finland whereby municipalities have control over strategic decisions and budgeting.

Finland’s Basic Education Act and general education policies won a ‘Silver Award’ in the 2015 Future Policy Awards for its unique, holistic approach to education. Key elements of Finnish education policy include quality, efficiency, well-being and life-long learning with an overarching goal that all people must have equal access to high-quality education and training irrespective of their ethnic origin, age, wealth, language, or location. Finland’s trust-based education system produces excellent results, both in terms of child well-being and international test scores for reading, mathematics and science where Finland has ranked near the top since 2000.

 Our “Best Policies” are those which meet the Future-Just Lawmaking Principles and recognise that interrelated challenges require interconnected solutions. The World Future Council’s unique research and analysis ensure that important universal standards of sustainability and equity, human rights and freedoms, and respect for the environment are coherently considered by policymakers.

    Sustainable use of natural resources

• Finland has maintained strong efforts to provide sufficient funds for education. The country increased its expenditure on education in absolute terms at all levels by 8% between 2008 and 2011. In 2018, the annual expenditure per student by educational institutions for all services for all levels of education was around US$11, above the OECD average of US$ 9,487. Likewise, levels of expenditure in education relative to GDP (6,3%) were above the OECD average (4,9%) in 2017. [1]
• However, there are concerns over the ongoing cutbacks in funds allocated for classroom sizes and the ongoing educational commitment of the government.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/527983/finland-education-expenditure-as-a-share-of-gdp/

    Equity and poverty eradication

• Promoting equity, equality and the well-being of children is a key pillar of the Basic Education Act. The country has one of the narrowest gaps in achievement between its highest and lowest-performing schools and continuing efforts are made to reduce differences in quality between schools. This happens inter alia through the financing system (tuition fees are banned and even the few independent schools are publicly financed.)
• The best interests of the child are also a central component that all educational decisions emanate from. Instead of working to memorize information for standardized tests, Finnish students are encouraged to think creatively and learn simply for learning’s sake. Creative play and problem-solving are central in the classroom, creating an informal and relaxed setting.

    Precautionary approach

• There has been significant focus on innovation and piloting new evidence-based approaches in the Finnish education system, including the use of combinations of alternative pedagogical approaches like the phenomenon approach [2] , where students are required to participate in at least one multidisciplinary module per Year to explore real-world phenomena that can be viewed from competing and complementary viewpoints.
• Many of the guidelines and principles that have been introduced are based on sound scientific evidence, such as the benefits of allowing children adequate free time between lessons and not overburdening them with too much homework. Finnish students do the least number of class hours per week in the developed world, yet get the best results over the long term.
• Long-term teacher-based assessments are used by schools to monitor progress and these are not graded, scored or compared; but instead are descriptive and utilised in a formative manner to inform feedback and assessment for learning.

[2] https://www.oph.fi/sites/default/files/documents/new-national-core-curriculum-for-basic-education.pdf

    Public participation, access to information and justice

• There is a very transparent and participatory process for formulating education policy involving all stakeholders, including children. For example, during the recent reform of the core curriculum, the National Board of Education sent a survey to all Basic Education and Upper Secondary students for feedback. Over 60,000 students participated. Municipalities are also asked to undertake similar participatory exercises.
• Over 60 civil society groups such as the Finnish Parents League and teachers’ unions were actively and widely consulted, continue to serve on education working groups and even wrote key sections of the core curriculum.
• There are a number of provisions for vulnerable groups and minorities in the law (for example, the statutory duty to provide education in a child’s native tongue, have education provided in hospital and have tailored religious education for minorities), although the NGO interviewee saw some room for improvement in terms of more active participation of all groups.

     Good governance and human security

• One of the innovations in Finnish education policy is the development of a ‘trust-based’ system that largely avoids monitoring, testing and inspections, though extensive evaluations occur. This has freed up resources to be spent on the many teaching innovations seen in Finland.
• Educational evaluations are undertaken every four years by the Ministry of Education and Culture. Evaluation tasks are then allocated to the Finnish National Board of Education for follow-up. Financial auditing is undertaken periodically by the National Audit Office.
• There is an active Ombudsman [1] for Children in Finland who represents and consults children and youth councils and has an action plan for children.  Since 2016 children are asked every two years in a survey what factors does good life consist of and in what way are these factors part of children’s own lives and the results of the survey are then incorporated into legislation and decision-making.

   Integration and interrelationship

• Child rights are very much mainstreamed through the Basic Education Act and the National Core Curriculum which explicitly states that the highest principles of how to work with children come from the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other relevant international agreements.
• The system is responsive and the Act, general education policy and core curriculum are all adapted based on ongoing evaluations. This has led to regular (at least 6) revisions and reforms.

   Common but differentiated responsibilities

• The law is well adapted to its cultural and historical context. Despite this, and its many innovations, key elements of the law could be transferred.

Starting in the 1970s, Finnish policy-makers realized that they could no longer rely on their natural resources or small industrial core to stay afloat economically, and instead started focusing on building a strong knowledge-based economy. The education system became part of a public mission to improve not just some of the students, but all of them. At the time Finland’s education system was in dire need of reform. Teachers had varying degrees of education, students didn’t have access to equal education resources and an emphasis on regular standardized testing and teacher tracking was showing mediocre results. Instead of focusing on creating schools that were the best, Finland’s education policymakers focused on creating a level playing field, where all schools offered excellent resources for learning. Since then, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location.

The purpose of education as defined by the Basic Education Act (1998) is: ‘to support pupils’ growth into humanity and into ethically responsible membership of society and to provide them with the knowledge and skills needed in life.’ Education, furthermore, ‘shall promote civilisation and equality in society and allow pupils to develop themselves during their lives, aiming to secure adequate equity throughout the country.’ There is a strong general focus on the all-around development of each child’s personality.

Alongside these aims in the Basic Education Act, education and research policy priorities are outlined in the Government’s five-year Development Plan for Education and Research. The Basic education plan (June 2011) and the Education Reform of 2016 aim to ‘strengthen the best comprehensive school system in the world to guarantee equal opportunities for all. Key objectives include:

• Promoting equality in education.
• Enhancing the quality of education at all levels.
• Supporting lifelong learning and education as an end in itself.
• Reducing gender and regional differences in skills and education levels as well as the impact of socioeconomic background on participation in education.
• Combatting unemployment and exclusion among young people through education.
• On the international stage, aiming for the top in professional expertise, higher education as well as research, development and innovation activities.

There are a number of educational methods and modalities, stipulated in the Basic Education Act, core curriculum, the education reform in 2016 and through general guidelines that are integral to Finnish education policy:

• Teacher Training: teaching is regarded as one of the most prestigious and hard-to-master professions in Finland. In order to be employed as a full-time teacher a master’s degree either in education (primary school teachers) or in subjects that they teach is required. Teacher training programmes are among the most selective professional schools in the country. Only one in 10 will qualify and be accepted to teacher preparation programmes, where they are trained to work with all types of students, including those with disabilities, language barriers, and other learning-related issues. Selection is focused on finding those individuals who have the right personality, advanced interpersonal skills, and the right moral purpose to become lifelong educators.
• Teacher Autonomy and Trust: Finnish teachers have a lot of autonomy over their classroom. While education policy is set at the central Ministry level, including very general guidelines about what children need to know at each grade level, schools are free to use their own methods to comply with national standards. A national curriculum set by the local government – with input from the national teachers union – explains what should be learned but not how to teach it. Teachers learn to develop their own curricula, methods and tools, assess their own pupils’ progress, and continuously improve their own teaching. Teachers are paid to spend two hours a week on professional development throughout their careers.
• Absence of strict monitoring: While learning outcomes are monitored, there are no external inspections of schools or teachers, league tables, or standardized testing to constantly monitor student progress. Instead, parents trust teachers as qualified professionals and teachers trust one another and collaborate to solve mutual problems.
• Student-centered approach: The local authority is obliged to provide education in each child’s native language (including Finnish, Swedish, Saami, Roma, or sign language). Unlike some countries, the Finnish education system has no ‘dead-ends’ where subject or specialism choices at one stage restrict future study or career paths. Students can always continue their studies at an upper level of education, whatever choices they make in between. Students are given guidance counseling. Pupils that temporarily fall behind in studies are entitled to remedial teaching while a learning plan is prepared, in collaboration with the pupil, for those children that require regular support in learning. The pupil’s workload in basic education must be such as to allow him or her enough time for rest, recreation and hobbies.
• Pre-primary education: A majority (98%) of 6-year-old children attend free pre-primary education. The emphasis is on learning through active play, the child’s individuality and the importance of acting as a group member. Pre-primary pupils, as with all pupils attending basic and upper secondary education, also get a free meal every day. Pupils who live over five kilometers from the place where pre-primary education is arranged are entitled to free transportation.
• The principle of lifelong learning entails that everyone has sufficient learning skills and opportunities to develop their knowledge and skills in different learning environments throughout their lives. This viewpoint is integrated into education policy and other policy sectors relating to education and training. The aim is a coherent policy geared to educational equity and a high level of education among the population as a whole.
• The Phenomenon-based Learning approach (PhenoBL) helps pupils to apply the learned course material to all kinds of problems in real life. Pupils learn to answer a real-life problem by researching and finding a solution by looking at the issue from different angles and perspectives. The focus of the approach is on subjects as the European Union, Climate change and Community being.

It is difficult to definitively point to causation when it comes to education policy. However, data from the OECD’s 2015 and interim 2018 education reports shows that Finland remains one of the top educational performing countries in the world and has one of the highest levels of educational attainment among OECD countries. In 2019, 44,3% of 25-64 year-olds had at least completed upper secondary education (against an OECD average of 41%) and 45, 9% [3] held a tertiary degree (OECD average: 38%). Results from the international PISA survey conducted by the OECD, comparing 15- year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science, show that Finland has ranked near the top in all three competencies since 2000, on par with South Korea, Singapore, China, and Estonia.

The average student-teacher ratio is 9 students per teacher compared with 14 [4] students per teacher, on the OECD average. While according to the World Economic Forum, Finland ranks third in the world for competitiveness thanks to the strength of its schooling.

 More than traditional educational achievements, however, our expert interviewees highlighted the all-around classroom experience and development of students into ‘good humans’ with an equal focus on arts, play and ethics. Finnish schools are founded on promoting the total well-being of children, requiring by law that each school provide free food, access to health care, and on-site counseling and guidance. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school, creating a safe, healthy environment conducive to learning. Outdoor, practical learning opportunities and health related physical activity sessions are a regular feature. Unsurprisingly, the most recent UNICEF child well-being report card (2020) ranked Finland in the top 5 [5] globally amongst advanced economies for overall child well-being.

 The system has also benefited teachers, who are generally respected and considered trusted professionals who have earned the freedom to teach with a large degree of autonomy. At both primary and secondary schools, Finnish teachers spend over 100 hours [6] less per year teaching than on average across OECD countries while often achieving better results and they are paid to develop their skills throughout their careers.

Striving for equality also seems to have paid off. International studies have shown differences between Finnish schools in terms of quality and attainment are comparatively small, and the percentage of dropouts in compulsory education is negligible. This compares favourably with neighbours like Sweden who have striven for a different, market-based, educational model in the last decade and have seen inequality across schools rise and international education rankings fall sharply.

There are concerns from experts over maintaining educational excellence, equity and equality since there were recent cuts in the budget at state, municipal and local levels and at the National Board of Education. Socio-economic more advantaged students outperformed more disadvantaged students by 61 points compared to 79 points in 2009 (OECD average 89).  Only 6% of disadvantaged students were the top performers in reading (compared to 26% of advantaged students). In addition, 13% of the less advantaged students performed in the top quarter. But in contrary to the OECD average girls outperform boys in Mathematics in Finland [7] .   It is undeniable, however, that thus far Finland’s holistic model of education has led to remarkable results in the areas of child well-being, educational attainment and economic competitiveness that serves its students, communities, and country very well.

[3] https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/adult-education-level.htm

[4] https://data.oecd.org/teachers/students-per-teaching-staff.htm

[5] https://www.unicef.org/media/77571/file/Worlds-of-Influence-understanding-what-shapes-child-well-being-in-rich-countries-2020.pdf

[6] https://data.oecd.org/teachers/teaching-hours.htm

[7] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/PISA2018_CN_FIN.pdf

While many aspects of the policy could be readily adopted by any country with a well-functioning system of state-provided education, all the expert interviewees expressed the view that some elements of the Finnish model could not be fully appreciated without examining Finnish (or Nordic) culture. They suggested the widespread use of a trust-based system using consensus techniques based on ‘the common interest’ without recourse to unnecessary competition, exams, school inspections and league tables is closely tied to Finnish cultural values and a Nordic way of operating. One of the interviewees was skeptical that this Act could be replicated in other countries that did not have similar societal attitudes towards education unless it was preceded by a broad national conversation and agreement on a change of direction in education policy (like the one that happened in Finland itself in the 1970s).

In August 2019 the first school-based on finish pedagogical approach has opened in Vietnam. The project has been supported by Education Finland, a programme operating in the Finnish National Agency for Education. The private school with 200 pupils covers grades 1-9 and the teaching staff is supported by teachers from Finland. Finish education experts and architects helped to build up the school and designed the learning environment. [8] The Vietnam Finland International School (VFIS [9] ) is also the first not-for-profit international school belonging to a public autonomous university in Vietnam and aims to reinvest all incomes back into the school to develop the programmes, learning environments, facilities and professional staff.

[8] https://www.oph.fi/en/news/2019/first-school-based-finnish-pedagogical-approach-has-opened-vietnam

[9] https://vfis.tdtu.edu.vn/home

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Is Homework Necessary for Student Success?

Readers argue both sides, citing Finland, the value of repetition, education inequity and more.

To the Editor:

Re “ The Movement to End Homework Is Wrong ,” by Jay Caspian Kang (Sunday Opinion, July 31):

Finland proves that you don’t need homework for education success. Students there have hardly any homework, and it has one of the top education systems in the world. In America, there is ample time for students to do in class what is now assigned as homework.

Whether a student attends an expensive private school, an underserved public school or something in between, being burdened with hours of additional work to do after school unnecessarily robs them of time for play, introspection, creative thinking, relaxation and intellectual growth.

Mr. Kang regards the demonstration of diligence and personal responsibility as an important raison d’être of homework. He sees schools as places where students can distinguish themselves and pursue upward mobility. But ranking students on homework production favors students with quiet places to go home to, good Wi-Fi, and access to tutors and parents who can provide help. In other words, it favors students of higher socioeconomic status.

It follows that making homework an important part of a student’s evaluation perpetuates both educational inequalities and the myth of meritocracy. A first step toward improving our educational system is indeed the abolition of homework.

Dorshka Wylie Washington The writer is an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of the District of Columbia.

Homework’s value is unclear for younger students. But by high school and college, homework is absolutely essential for any student who wishes to excel. There simply isn’t time to digest Dostoyevsky if you only ever read him in class.

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Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World

Why were Finnish schools so successful with distance and in-person learning during the pandemic?

The Future of Schools and Teacher Education: How Far Ahead is Finland?

• By Eduardo Andere
• August 30 th 2021

On 18 March 2020, schools in Finland closed. On 14 May 2020, they reopened successfully. Why was Finland successful in transitioning to distance education and then back to face-to-face learning and teaching?

There is an a priori answer. Finns have a view of education and learning that often contradicts common wisdom (such as worrying less about the standardized performance of children and teachers’ accountability) to truly serve the wellbeing of children by empowering the highly selective and trained teacher force with trust.

Finns are passionate about face-to-face education even in the age of technology-driven educational services. They have invested heavily in new or refurbished twenty-first century superschools, which create superb and highly resourced teaching and learning environments that facilitate the face-to-face and digital interactions between teachers and students. Together with a serendipitous policy mix of national, local, and school decisions, the school is no longer only a place to teach and learn subjects but also a phenomenon where the whole learning experience and children’s growth occur. They put a lot of effort into making sure that the children feel safe under a relaxed culture of interaction between students and teachers.

The Finns have invested in two structural foundations to facilitate the pedagogic interaction: a powerful teaching force and a technological infrastructure (sound broadband internet access and educational tools so that teachers can navigate different pedagogic proposals and environments). They have reduced the number of smaller, less well-resourced schools, and instead, they have established large superschools to house more resources for many students. Fewer, well-resourced schools, rather than many low-resourced schools, is one of their key ideas.

Digitalization in schools followed digitalization in life—but schools went one step further. More screen time is not learning. Therefore, Finnish schools decided to provide digital access for everyone and train teachers and students with skills on how to use this technology for learning and wellbeing. They don’t force digitalization but make sure that if teachers and students want to explore digital means, all the schools are ready for them.

Since collaboration among all school agents (teachers, students, and parents) has always been essential in the Finnish model of education, and since the society and parents have a high value of education (for example, the teaching profession is one of the most highly demanded fields of university studies by high school students), it was not very difficult for schools and teachers to communicate with parents and students during the pandemic.

The pandemic accelerated the turn-of-the-century trends: more digitalization, flexible technology, teamwork, and a focus on the wellbeing of students and teachers. So, what should we expect in the future? In the short term, new spaces for outdoor activities, more digital skills, more constant formative evaluations for students, and more strategic planning for future crises in the long term.

Here are the key learnings shared by Finnish teachers, experts, and principals during the pandemic:

• The need to keep the information and communication channels open and frequent among all people.
• The need to bring the newly acquired skills into daily lives, perhaps with remote sessions once a week or per school term, as modern technology companies do.
• The knowledge that we are living, in part, the normality of the future.
• The pandemic is a phenomenon with solid consequences: loneliness kills.
• A school is a place to learn academic skills and, perhaps more importantly, grow and share with others. A school is a place where one can safely fail and recover.
• Teachers took a tremendous digital leap.
• The majority opinion seems to be that closing schools hurt students.
• Face-to-face teaching and learning is the correct form of education and deep learning.
• Although the pandemic has driven the digital leap at all educational levels, the coronavirus will not change school curricula. The issue is how to approach rather than change the school curricula.
• Education has been, and continues to be, the number one priority in Finland.
• When everyone (students, parents, teachers, community) works together, we can get the best results.
• Lifelong learning is not just a phrase; it is a necessity for every one of us.

Face-to-face education is so important to achieve. Digitalization is an instrument, a means to an end. Digital technology complements the work of teachers. The dual vision of digital preparedness and children’s wellbeing, backed by the already-in-place teachers’ pedagogic command, facilitated the successful transition back and forth between distance and face-to-face learning during the 2020-2021 coronavirus crisis.

Eduardo Andere has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston College, an MA in Economics from Boston University, and an MPA from Harvard University. He's a researcher and writer of comparative education and learning. He is the author of The  Future of schools and teacher education: How far ahead is Finland?  ,  Teachers' perspectives on Finnish school education: Creating learning environments , and  The lending power of PISA: League tables and best practice in international education .

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I love how scandinavian schools manage education. Not only in Finland, but in sweden, norway too. Other country with an awesome school program is Japan.

Do you think Scanvinavian school model is the best in the world?

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Finland has no private schools – and its pupils perform better than British children

Finland ranked seventh in the world in oecd's student assessment chart in 2018, well above the uk and the united states, where there is a mix of private and state education.

Labour’s plan to add VAT to private school fees has refuelled a long-standing debate over state versus private education.

Rishi Sunak has accused Labour of stoking a “class war”, while the independent sector has warned of widespread closures if the plans take effect.

This system is replicated in many countries across the world. Finland , however, has no fee-paying schools at all.

Everyone from six to 18, whether in a state-run or independently-run school, is entitled to it free of charge. It’s a policy of which the Finns are particularly proud.

And it’s proven to be successful, with Finland ranked seventh in the world in 2018 on its Pisa score (the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment), well above the UK and the United States, where there is a mix of private and state education.

Parents do not contribute financially to their children’s education, and textbooks, materials, and school meals are provided free – all funded by taxpayers.

‘Education is a human right’

Pasi Sahlberg, a former teacher and policymaker in Finland turned professor of educational leadership at the University of Melbourne, Australia said Finland’s system was built on the idea “ education is considered a public service and a human right” with “equal opportunity of access to schools and universities regardless of who students are or where they live”.

He told i : “This was considered to be the central idea in having an equitable and well-functioning education system.

“In Nordic countries in general, education has been the driver of social mobility and equality in society.

“The current model of Finland’s education is still based on those common values and ideal of Nordic values where there is not much room in education for profit, especially in school education sectors.”

A relatively young nation, only gaining independence in 1917, Finland does not have embedded traditions in its education system of centuries-old public fee-paying schools.

Compulsory schooling in Finland starts at the age of seven rather than five and goes up to 18.

It began a comprehensive reform of its school system in 1970 and two years later, primary and lower secondary education (grades one to nine) became free of charge across the board. Further reforms in the early 2020s saw six-year-olds in pre-primary and upper secondary school students included in this.

It means education in Finland is now free for all Finnish citizens from pre-primary up to higher education.

Siru Korkala, senior specialist at the Finnish National Agency for Education, described the policy as the “cornerstone” of the nation’s educational policy.

“Finland’s commitment to equal access to education for all children and young people, regardless of their socioeconomic background, has been a cornerstone of its educational policy,” she told i . “By providing free education, Finland ensures that all students have equal opportunities, which can help improve overall educational standards.”

The only areas that do require any parental outlay are optional, non-compulsory activities or services, such as school trips or extracurricular activities.

Private schools in Finland

Private schools (those not operated by the government or local authorities) do exist in Finland but are mostly faith-based, Steiner, Montessori or university-run.

Of 2,100 institutions providing primary and lower secondary education, only 65 of them are private and the majority of their funding comes from the government.

They must follow the national curriculum guidelines and cannot be run for profit – charging for tuition in basic education is prohibited by the Finnish constitution.

There is one exception to this: the Helsinki International School is a fee-paying institution.

Mr Sahlberg, author of the 2021 book Finnish Lessons 3.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland , said: “Most schools are funded by local governments, they employ the teachers and run the schools.

“Central government’s funding formulas stipulate the levels of funding at local levels and provide subsidies to those local governments with less wealth.

“Efficiency is therefore a big driver of the economics of education that means schools try to do more with less funding based on their circumstances.”

World class schooling

Finland’s education system gained global attention in 2000, with the first ever published Pisa results in 2000.

The survey of 15-year-old students around the world in maths, reading and science found Finland topped the chart in reading, and came third in science and fourth in maths.

In 2018, results remained higher than most other Western nations’ in seventh place overall, just behind Canada, South Korea and Japan. The UK was ranked in 10th place and the US in 21st.

Within Finland, disparity in results between schools is negligible. “Student performance is similar across all schools in Finland,” said Mr Sahlberg.

What lessons can be learnt?

Mr Sahlberg said what the UK could take away from the Finnish model is a “complex question” and depended on what people in different parts of the UK want.

How Finnish schools teach every child to spot fake news - and what UK parents could learn

“I know Scotland and Wales are moving ahead in different ways than England, for example”, he said. “Both of those jurisdictions in the UK have produced education policies and reforms that are building more equitable education systems than they have had before.”

He maintained the best way to get higher performing education systems is to have policies which put “enhancing equity of education as a priority”.

“It is possible to have a two-tier system of schools [private and government] in this approach, but governments should, just like the OECD has advised over and again, manage school choice in the two-tier system so that state schools don’t turn out to be a second choice for parents,” he said.

Ms Korkala highlighted five key areas of focus: equality and inclusivity, fewer standardised tests, teacher education and professional respect, less homework and stress and pupil and student welfare.

She said in Finland all students, regardless of their background or learning difficulties, receive “the same high-quality education”, emphasis is on continuous assessment rather than standardised tests and teachers are “highly respected in society” with a high standard of education.

The amount of homework had been reduced to relieve pressure on pupils and all have access to student welfare services, including psychologists and school social workers and healthcare services.

Could this be the way forward in the UK?

Dr Jennifer Chung, from University College London’s Institute of Education, has studied Finland’s education system in depth. She said transferring that model would be a “challenge”.

“The issue is really the ecosystem that education system exists in,” she said.

Although Finland has “many things right” in its education policy, she pointed out that other social, economic and cultural factors in the country must also be taken into account in its success, such as: viewing teaching as a university-educated profession rather than a vocation, a high value placed on education in society and political consensus over education policy.

Whereas a “powerful private sector” and political involvement in education “makes it much tougher to exact change” in England, she said.

“There’s continuity and there’s change but if there’s too much change you won’t know if the policy is working or not.

“England’s education policy is very politically charged. You have to decide whether it’s about the policy or is it about the politics.”

A comment from the Independent Schools Council, representing more than 1,400 independent schools in the UK and overseas, would suggest it is still the latter.

Its spokesperson said: “It is our understanding that no political party in the UK is currently suggesting that they would wish to emulate this model.”

Most Read By Subscribers

Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?

The country’s achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework

LynNell Hancock

Photographs by Stuart Conway

It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.

Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.

“I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn .

Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. “You helped me,” he told his former teacher. Besart had opened his own car repair firm and a cleaning company. “No big fuss,” Louhivuori told me. “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”

This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools.

“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”

The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. “I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good.”

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.

Still, there is a distinct absence of chest-thumping among the famously reticent Finns. They are eager to celebrate their recent world hockey championship, but PISA scores, not so much. “We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a former math and physics teacher who is now in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture. “We are not much interested in PISA. It’s not what we are about.”

Maija Rintola stood before her chattering class of twenty-three 7- and 8-year-olds one late April day in Kirkkojarven Koulu. A tangle of multicolored threads topped her copper hair like a painted wig. The 20-year teacher was trying out her look for Vappu, the day teachers and children come to school in riotous costumes to celebrate May Day. The morning sun poured through the slate and lemon linen shades onto containers of Easter grass growing on the wooden sills. Rintola smiled and held up her open hand at a slant—her time-tested “silent giraffe,” which signaled the kids to be quiet. Little hats, coats, shoes stowed in their cubbies, the children wiggled next to their desks in their stocking feet, waiting for a turn to tell their tale from the playground. They had just returned from their regular 15 minutes of playtime outdoors between lessons. “Play is important at this age,” Rintola would later say. “We value play.”

With their wiggles unwound, the students took from their desks little bags of buttons, beans and laminated cards numbered 1 through 20. A teacher’s aide passed around yellow strips representing units of ten. At a smart board at the front of the room, Rintola ushered the class through the principles of base ten. One girl wore cat ears on her head, for no apparent reason. Another kept a stuffed mouse on her desk to remind her of home. Rintola roamed the room helping each child grasp the concepts. Those who finished early played an advanced “nut puzzle” game. After 40 minutes it was time for a hot lunch in the cathedral-like cafeteria.

Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers. Teachers use the extra time to build curriculums and assess their students. Children spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of winter. Homework is minimal. Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.

Even so, Rintola said her children arrived last August miles apart in reading and language levels. By April, nearly every child in the class was reading, and most were writing. Boys had been coaxed into literature with books like Kapteeni Kalsarin (“Captain Underpants”). The school’s special education teacher teamed up with Rintola to teach five children with a variety of behavioral and learning problems. The national goal for the past five years has been to mainstream all children. The only time Rintola’s children are pulled out is for Finnish as a Second Language classes, taught by a teacher with 30 years’ experience and graduate school training.

There are exceptions, though, however rare. One first-grade girl was not in Rintola’s class. The wispy 7-year-old had recently arrived from Thailand speaking not a word of Finnish. She was studying math down the hall in a special “preparing class” taught by an expert in multicultural learning. It is designed to help children keep up with their subjects while they conquer the language. Kirkkojarvi’s teachers have learned to deal with their unusually large number of immigrant students. The city of Espoo helps them out with an extra 82,000 euros a year in “positive discrimination” funds to pay for things like special resource teachers, counselors and six special needs classes.

Rintola will teach the same children next year and possibly the next five years, depending on the needs of the school. “It’s a good system. I can make strong connections with the children,” said Rintola, who was handpicked by Louhivuori 20 years ago. “I understand who they are.” Besides Finnish, math and science, the first graders take music, art, sports, religion and textile handcrafts. English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth. By fifth grade the children have added biology, geography, history, physics and chemistry.

Not until sixth grade will kids have the option to sit for a district-wide exam, and then only if the classroom teacher agrees to participate. Most do, out of curiosity. Results are not publicized. Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,” Louhivuori teased, as he rummaged through his closet looking for past years’ results. “Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

I had come to Kirkkojarvi to see how the Finnish approach works with students who are not stereotypically blond, blue-eyed and Lutheran. But I wondered if Kirkkojarvi’s success against the odds might be a fluke. Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s PISA scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade.

To get a second sampling, I headed east from Espoo to Helsinki and a rough neighborhood called Siilitie, Finnish for “Hedgehog Road” and known for having the oldest low-income housing project in Finland. The 50-year-old boxy school building sat in a wooded area, around the corner from a subway stop flanked by gas stations and convenience stores. Half of its 200 first- through ninth-grade students have learning disabilities. All but the most severely impaired are mixed with the general education children, in keeping with Finnish policies.

A class of first graders scampered among nearby pine and birch trees, each holding a stack of the teacher’s homemade laminated “outdoor math” cards. “Find a stick as big as your foot,” one read. “Gather 50 rocks and acorns and lay them out in groups of ten,” read another. Working in teams, the 7- and 8-year-olds raced to see how quickly they could carry out their tasks. Aleksi Gustafsson, whose master’s degree is from Helsinki University, developed the exercise after attending one of the many workshops available free to teachers. “I did research on how useful this is for kids,” he said. “It’s fun for the children to work outside. They really learn with it.”

Gustafsson’s sister, Nana Germeroth, teaches a class of mostly learning-impaired children; Gustafsson’s students have no learning or behavioral issues. The two combined most of their classes this year to mix their ideas and abilities along with the children’s varying levels. “We know each other really well,” said Germeroth, who is ten years older. “I know what Aleksi is thinking.”

The school receives 47,000 euros a year in positive discrimination money to hire aides and special education teachers, who are paid slightly higher salaries than classroom teachers because of their required sixth year of university training and the demands of their jobs. There is one teacher (or assistant) in Siilitie for every seven students.

In another classroom, two special education teachers had come up with a different kind of team teaching. Last year, Kaisa Summa, a teacher with five years’ experience, was having trouble keeping a gaggle of first-grade boys under control. She had looked longingly into Paivi Kangasvieri’s quiet second-grade room next door, wondering what secrets the 25-year-veteran colleague could share. Each had students of wide-ranging abilities and special needs. Summa asked Kangasvieri if they might combine gymnastics classes in hopes good behavior might be contagious. It worked. This year, the two decided to merge for 16 hours a week. “We complement each other,” said Kangasvieri, who describes herself as a calm and firm “father” to Summa’s warm mothering. “It is cooperative teaching at its best,” she says.

Every so often, principal Arjariita Heikkinen told me, the Helsinki district tries to close the school because the surrounding area has fewer and fewer children, only to have people in the community rise up to save it. After all, nearly 100 percent of the school’s ninth graders go on to high schools. Even many of the most severely disabled will find a place in Finland’s expanded system of vocational high schools, which are attended by 43 percent of Finnish high-school students, who prepare to work in restaurants, hospitals, construction sites and offices. “We help situate them in the right high school,” said then deputy principal Anne Roselius. “We are interested in what will become of them in life.”

Finland’s schools were not always a wonder. Until the late 1960s, Finns were still emerging from the cocoon of Soviet influence. Most children left public school after six years. (The rest went to private schools, academic grammar schools or folk schools, which tended to be less rigorous.) Only the privileged or lucky got a quality education.

The landscape changed when Finland began trying to remold its bloody, fractured past into a unified future. For hundreds of years, these fiercely independent people had been wedged between two rival powers—the Swedish monarchy to the west and the Russian czar to the east. Neither Scandinavian nor Baltic, Finns were proud of their Nordic roots and a unique language only they could love (or pronounce). In 1809, Finland was ceded to Russia by the Swedes, who had ruled its people some 600 years. The czar created the Grand Duchy of Finland, a quasi-state with constitutional ties to the empire. He moved the capital from Turku, near Stockholm, to Helsinki, closer to St. Petersburg. After the czar fell to the Bolsheviks in 1917, Finland declared its independence, pitching the country into civil war. Three more wars between 1939 and 1945—two with the Soviets, one with Germany—left the country scarred by bitter divisions and a punishing debt owed to the Russians. “Still we managed to keep our freedom,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a director general in the Ministry of Education and Culture.

In 1963, the Finnish Parliament made the bold decision to choose public education as its best shot at economic recovery. “I call this the Big Dream of Finnish education,” said Sahlberg, whose upcoming book,  Finnish Lessons , is scheduled for release in October. “It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive."

Practically speaking—and Finns are nothing if not practical—the decision meant that goal would not be allowed to dissipate into rhetoric. Lawmakers landed on a deceptively simple plan that formed the foundation for everything to come. Public schools would be organized into one system of comprehensive schools, or  peruskoulu , for ages 7 through 16. Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions. Besides Finnish and Swedish (the country’s second official language), children would learn a third language (English is a favorite) usually beginning at age 9. Resources were distributed equally. As the comprehensive schools improved, so did the upper secondary schools (grades 10 through 12). The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers. Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive. In 2010, some 6,600 applicants vied for 660 primary school training slots, according to Sahlberg. By the mid-1980s, a final set of initiatives shook the classrooms free from the last vestiges of top-down regulation. Control over policies shifted to town councils. The national curriculum was distilled into broad guidelines. National math goals for grades one through nine, for example, were reduced to a neat ten pages. Sifting and sorting children into so-called ability groupings was eliminated. All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind. The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”

To be sure, it was only in the past decade that Finland’s international science scores rose. In fact, the country’s earliest efforts could be called somewhat Stalinistic. The first national curriculum, developed in the early ’70s, weighed in at 700 stultifying pages. Timo Heikkinen, who began teaching in Finland’s public schools in 1980 and is now principal of Kallahti Comprehensive School in eastern Helsinki, remembers when most of his high-school teachers sat at their desks dictating to the open notebooks of compliant children.

And there are still challenges. Finland’s crippling financial collapse in the early ’90s brought fresh economic challenges to this “confident and assertive Eurostate,” as David Kirby calls it in  A Concise History of Finland . At the same time, immigrants poured into the country, clustering in low-income housing projects and placing added strain on schools. A recent report by the Academy of Finland warned that some schools in the country’s large cities were becoming more skewed by race and class as affluent, white Finns choose schools with fewer poor, immigrant populations.

A few years ago, Kallahti principal Timo Heikkinen began noticing that, increasingly, affluent Finnish parents, perhaps worried about the rising number of Somali children at Kallahti, began sending their children to one of two other schools nearby. In response, Heikkinen and his teachers designed new environmental science courses that take advantage of the school’s proximity to the forest. And a new biology lab with 3-D technology allows older students to observe blood flowing inside the human body.

It has yet to catch on, Heikkinen admits. Then he added: “But we are always looking for ways to improve.”

In other words, whatever it takes.

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LynNell Hancock | READ MORE

LynNell Hancock writes about education and teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Stuart Conway | READ MORE

Stuart Conway is a photographer based in southeast England.

School's out

A critical take on education and schooling

Finland is throwing away everything that made its schools the best in the world

Professor of Education, University of Derby

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It easy to lampoon education reforms in Finland that aim to scrap the teaching of traditional subjects in favour of broader topics. The new initiative could see history, geography and languages replaced for periods by interdisciplinary “phenomenon-based” projects on topics such as the European Union. Instead of sitting in rows learning facts about the world, pupils can rush around corridors or the web and collect information in a spirit of “joyful learning”.

Ridicule was my immediate response but what is happening has serious and sad consequences. It will ultimately waste not only children’s time, but their education.

The reasons given in Finland for the reforms are a familiar: this set of initiatives is necessary to meet the challenges of working life in “modern society”. What it means is that education is no longer valued for its own sake but is seen as having instrumental value for the economy. This is often supported by claims about how to stop education being boring and make it more relevant through new pedagogic practices . The pattern is the same across the world and we are seeing a shift from a concern with classroom content to a concern with practice.

There is a lesson here for every teacher and parent. Even in a country often lauded as an educational success story, if you do not understand why your education system was excellent you can still throw it away.

Knowledge and skills

The idea of being “modern” and promoting projects, multi-disciplinary activities and communication skills instead of traditional subjects is a rejection of education. But some people, including a few of my colleagues, celebrate this shift and one praised it as “thinking outside of the box”. I was even invited to celebrate this change by watching a live streamed event which would emphasise “Finland’s recent decision to de-silo”.

Any ridicule or celebration needs to be understood in the context of the major educational debate of the 21st century between education as subject-led or as skills-led. Finland is clearly making a turn towards skills. Despite a recent article on The Conversation in which Harvard scholar Pasi Sahlberg argued that subjects in Finland will not be scrapped altogether, we should be worried.

The mistake that educationalists and politicians make about education in Finland, China, or whichever country comes top in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, is to assume that the reason has something to do with the peculiarities of the education system. In Finland’s case the quality of teaching, the teacher education system , the absence of examinations, the training, professional freedom and status of teachers , have all been advanced as some of the many and varied reasons why the education system was outstanding.

High expectations matter

Both the detractors of the changes in Finland and those who embrace them may think success depends on the technical design and teaching of the educational system. But it is not the activities that go on in the classroom that determine excellent outcomes. I’d argue that it is ultimately down to social and cultural factors .

My view is that the decisive factor in Finland’s educational success is the high expectations of children expressed by politicians, teachers, parents and communities. This is well known since the decision in the 1960s to make education the focus of economic success – although also criticised as Stalinist because of it reliance on teacher-centred, textbook-led education.

Whatever criticisms people make of these developments, what was distinctive about Finland in the latter part of the last century was high educational expectations and 75% of Finnish people recognise the historical importance of the move to comprehensive education. There was, however, concern in the mid-1990s that these high educational expectations were so demanding that they were damaging to pupils’ self-esteem .

These cultural expectations will determine the structure of the education system and subject-based teaching was the form that high educational expectations took in Finland’s schools. The move away from subjects towards topics that is part of Finland’s new National Curriculum Framework (NCF) is, therefore, a signal that those high educational expectations are going from Finnish culture.

It is tempting to say that the methods don’t matter if general expectations are high; but if the there are no expectations that children will come away with specific knowledge, then they have little chance of being engaged with learning, however they are taught.

Work-ready, not knowledge-based

The reforms are an attempt to offer something that just gets pupils ready for work. Those who think that “phenomenon-based” teaching won’t get rid of knowledge, but will just restructure the way it is taught for some periods of the year, are turning a blind eye to the fundamental nature of the shift that is occurring. If it accelerates, as it may without opposition, it will make education in Finland – whether it is labelled “vocational” or “academic” – just training for a job.

Finland may be cut up about its drop in the PISA rankings, but wanting to rise again in a league table is not a sign of high expectations but of panic. The new policy shift does not focus on education as an important way to transform society but seeks to transform education to meet perceived new economic demands and, perhaps even more narrowly, to remedy Finland’s position in the league tables. This may show high expectations of an instrumental sort, but these are not high educational expectations.

If Finnish teachers are as educated and independent as we are told they are, the first step towards defending high educational expectations would be for them to oppose the NCF and campaign to keep knowledge in and kick “phenomenon-based” meddling out of schools.

Senior Laboratory Technician

Manager, Centre Policy and Translation

Newsletter and Deputy Social Media Producer

College Director and Principal | Curtin College

Head of School: Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences

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'Why I believe homework should be banned', by one primary school student

As the discussion around state exams through the Covid-19 shutdown continues, a separate debate about the very need for homework itself rumbles on. Over the years, many have argued that homework for students in busy modern-day family structures is no longer workable.

This year, the Green Party sought to open a discussion about the banning of homework in future. Here, primary school pupil Misha McEnaney, a fifth class student from Dublin, outlines why he believes homework is more of a hindrance than a help.

IRISH CHILDREN SPEND around 274.5 hours on homework in a year. Is it a waste of time? Generally speaking, homework does not improve academic performance among children, although it may improve academic skills among older students especially lower-achieving kids. Homework also creates stress among students who could be doing other things.

I think it is a waste of time. Here’s why I think so. 

Many students think homework is extremely boring and hard so it increases our stress levels. You might fight with your family or friends and that gives the impression you are angry and irritated when often it’s just because your homework is increasing your stress.

Also, a study by scholar Denise Pope at Stanford shows that out of 4,300 students at high-performance schools, 60% stated that their homework was their primary source of stress.

Movement is more important

I believe that homework eliminates time when you could be exercising, playing sports, carrying out hobbies, reading etc. So when your friends are playing outside or something exciting or important is happening you can’t go out because you’re stuck inside doing your homework. 

Homework messes up your sleep cycles and it causes you to be more tired. After school when you’re tired from working you still have to do your homework, so you don’t deliver your full concentration and that makes your performance not as acceptable as it should be. This can cause your grade to go down and so that defeats the whole point of education to become better and smarter. 

A study from teenink.com shows that students perform best in school when they receive 10–12 hours of sleep each night, while only 15% of teenagers in America reported themselves sleeping eight hours or more on school nights, according to the national sleep foundation of America. Sleep disruption is very bad for our health.

Teacher trust

If you’re completely booked up for the day doing sports or other activities you have no time to do your homework. Your teachers start to trust you less and less and this develops a bad view of you when it’s not entirely your fault. 

It’s also repetitive so you’re doing the same work at school and there’s no effectiveness, it’s not going in. So all that homework becomes a waste because you have already completed it at school. You can also easily get distracted.

Homework takes away revision time for tests and that can affect the test scores. That develops a bad reputation for the student and for the school. The parents then assume that the teaching at the school is bad and they might move school. So the kid might lose friends and over time the school becomes less liked and popular.

All because there is too much homework. 

Bad for the mood

If you don’t sleep enough it can cause mood swings which can affect students’ performance and relationships. To think we can stop all of this by just banning homework makes me wonder why schools still give out homework at all.

People who believe that homework should not be banned have reasonable points and arguments. They believe that doing homework at home can be better for the students and they would receive higher results. 

They also think the parents of the students will have an idea of what type of work they are doing in the classroom, at what scale the student is doing their work and how the student is doing that work. There is absolutely no reason why parents shouldn’t know what the student’s work is like. 

Some people believe that homework boosts interaction between a student and his or her teacher. Homework might develop their presentation skills. They believe that homework is “a remedy against weaknesses”. These can all be done at school. They believe it teaches the students responsibility because they have to make sure that they do their work and not lose it or destroy it. 

They think the students learn much more new information as well as in school. So people think it teaches the students important life skills. They also think it keeps the students busy and entertained. I would argue that these should all be the responsibility of parents, not school.

A shift in the debate

The Green Party in Ireland has promised to explore the banning of homework for primary school children. They also vow to review primary and secondary schools curriculum “to meet the needs of the 21st century”. Catherine Martin, deputy leader of the Green Party, said that “the phasing out of homework is something that definitely should be explored”. 

“This isn’t new, this has been on our policy for the past several years. And I think we really need to have a conversation on how best to develop the creative juices of our children, or really change how we do homework, homework could be, ‘go home and draw a picture of something that means a lot to you’,” she said.

“They’re so young, especially up to the age of seven or eight, it’s a conversation that we need to have”. 

She used the example of Loreto Primary School in Rathfarnham, Dublin, which is currently trialling a “no-homework” programme for all classes except sixth. Ms Martin said that they had found the pilot scheme “amazing” and children were spending a lot more time with their families as a result. 

Mental health considerations

Psychotherapist Mary McHugh believes that we are reducing children’s natural “curious, imaginative and creative” tendencies by “pressuring them to conform”. 

“Our children from the age of three, are being trained to sit still and from five upwards, it’s expected that this is the norm.” McHugh also says that “stress is showing up at an alarming scale and we’re still applying more pressure academically younger and younger”. 

Let’s look at Finland. In Finland, there is no homework in all schools. Finland agrees that there should be no homework because it increases stress, it wastes time etc. Finnish students regularly top the charts on global education metric systems.

Some 93% of Finnish students graduate from secondary school compared to 75% in the USA and 78% in Canada. About two in every three students in Finland go to college which is the highest rate in Europe. The students’ test scores dominate everyone else.  These are the scores for the PISA test (Program for International Student Assessment) 2006.  There are other reasons why Finland’s education system is so good but no homework is definitely an important one. 

Homework increases stress levels among students. It replaces time for hobbies and sports. It messes up your sleep. It can’t always be done and that causes trouble. It’s repetitive. You can develop health problems from lack of sleep.

It takes away time for studying and also when you don’t get enough sleep you can get mood swings and that can affect performance and relationships. There are reasonable arguments for why people who believe that homework shouldn’t be banned are wrong.

We have seen that the Green Party also thinks that homework should be banned and that some schools have already trialled it. We have looked at Finland banning homework and we have seen the impact it has made compared to other countries. This is why I think homework should be banned, not just in my school but in all schools. 

Misha McEnaney is a fifth class student at St Mary’s College, Rathmines, Dublin.

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