does finland assign homework

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.

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.

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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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10 things you need to know about Finland’s highly praised education model

Reading time: 4 minutes

1. Finland has a flexible national curriculum, and teachers have the freedom to design their own lessons.

Schools in Finland follow the national curriculum but are given plenty of opportunities for tailoring it to match their facilities and students. After each school has made their modifications to the curriculum, teachers are then given complete liberty to implement it as they see fit.

Teachers are encouraged to use creativity – they can choose their learning materials, lesson plan contents, teaching methods and environments as they see fit based on the needs of the students. Teaching and learning can happen anywhere – in the classroom, museums, libraries, outside, at home or in a digital environment. Many teachers share their own learning materials in teacher communities (social media) and use free learning materials provided by other teachers, publishers, international material providers.

2. Finland has a strong emphasis on early childhood education and children start school at the age of seven.

Recent studies on neuroplasticity show that the human brain is most susceptible for learning during ages 0 through 7. This is an age period when a child’s interests and curiosity should be provided with a wide range of different experiences, stimulus and learning possibilities. This is why Finnish children start their learning path with mostly non-academic methods such as play and exploration.

3. Nearly all Finnish teachers have master’s degree.

In addition, teacher students in primary and secondary schools get to apply their skills in actual learning environments during their studies as Universities in Finland have teacher training schools that ensure a close relationship between theory and practice. Teacher training schools provide a fertile ground for getting more confidence, testing new ideas and innovative teaching methods. Professional feedback and mentoring is also provided from senior teachers during the practical training. Fun fact, all teachers study handcrafts, woodwork, music and arts during their studies.

4. Every student is equal regardless of their background.

School in Finland have a strong emphasis on equity and social justice and all students, regardless of their background receive the same quality of education. Finland does not have private school system (just a few of them). Teachers are paid equally across the nation, and teachers do not gravitate towards the “best schools” as all schools have the same high standards. Education is free for every student from pre-school to the end of secondary school, and higher education is also free for the most part.

5. Learning through play and exploration are the bases for life-long learning.

Finland has a long history of having strong emphasis on play and giving children responsibility and self-governance age-appropriately. Students are allowed to explore and experiment – learning often happens through play and creating new projects, presentations and tasks of motivating topics. Teachers help students attain a growth mindset in which they learn from their own mistakes and how to overcome obstacles. Learning not to be discouraged by initial failure at an early age helps to develop important life skills and have resilience for e.g., work and relationship related challenges later in life.

6. Education has a strong focus on individualized learning and support.

Finland has a class teacher system in which one teacher teaches most if not all subjects in grades 1 through 6. The teachers often are assigned to the same class for several years. This means they get to know their students well, also their strengths, and weaknesses, and can help them learn more efficiently based on their interests and motivations – suggesting for external support for learning difficulties or providing advanced assignments for talented students.

7. Finnish schools have a relatively low amount of homework.

Finnish teachers have the liberty to determine the need for homework individually. Required subjects are most often covered during the school day which reduces the need for homework. Homework is seen more as a recap of what has been learned in the class but it is not supposed to take a hours of time at home. Usually students finish the rest of the assignments that was covered during the lesson and read through the next chapter. It is good to focus on the basic skills at home such as writing, reading and calculating. It is not expected to have after-school tutoring or even parents to be heavily involved in homework.

8. Finnish schools have a strong focus on physical activities.

Multiple studies show that physical activity is highly beneficial for learning. Some form of exercise during a school day has a pronounced effect on brain stimulation compared to sitting in place. Biological neural networks are formed and reorganized much more effectively, and it becomes easier to recollect learned subjects later.

Finnish schools have a 15 minutes of break time per hour. Usually students spend their breaks outside in the school yard e.g. playing yard games, football, or swing. School yards are well equipped for physical activities, but students are also very innovative to invent their own games. Teachers often integrate exercise into their lessons in a form of movement, dance, or moving around the classroom to different activity spots. Physical education is an important part of a school day – and nowadays different physical activities are more in the focus as students don’t move so much anymore during their free time. Most schools and municipalities also offer a wide range of extracurricular activities – often organized at school facilities.

9. Every Finnish student knows at least two foreign languages.

In fact, most Finnish children study up to four languages during primary school – compulsory ones are Finnish, Swedish and English. The most popular ones are German, French, Russia and Spanish, but a wide selection of other languages is available. Learning a foreign language starts early in Finland. Instead of grappling grammar or writing, children begin learning new languages through active teaching methods, for example by playing, through games, songs and poems. The human brain is most susceptible for learning new languages during ages 0 through 7 which makes it quite easy for small children to learn even three languages at the same time.

10. A secondary degree enables to apply for almost every higher education program in Finland.

Vocational education is very popular in Finland: almost 50 percent of students apply for vocational schools after their basic education at the age of 16 years. The other 50 percent choose the academic path of deepening general knowledge in secondary school. Either way is a great option, but vocational education ensures the variety of trained professionals in all Finnish industries and domains. Most popular industries have recently been e.g. Social and Health Care, Business and Economy, Beauty Care, Vehicles and Logistics and House Construction. Vocational education is attractive to many students because of it practical approach to learning – learning by doing in an authentic working environment, not just learning theory in the classroom. Finnish vocational schools are working closely with the industry and school learning environment have all the latest equipment and tools for learning the profession.

Bonus fact: The Finnish education model continues to evolve, with ongoing efforts to incorporate digital technology and ensure that the system remains relevant and responsive to the needs of students in the 21st century.

Finnish education embraces a research-oriented approach. If something doesn’t work, the matter is researched, reconsidered and improved. Digital skills are no longer considered a separate subject in Finland but are incorporated into every subject and everyday practices.

The Finnish education system

Early childhood education, pre-primary education, comprehensive education, upper secondary education, higher education, applying for education and training, other study opportunities, language training.

The education system includes early childhood education, preschool education, comprehensive education, upper secondary education and higher education. Adult education is intended for adults and it includes a multitude of alternatives from comprehensive to higher education.

In Finland, children are entitled to receive early childhood education before they reach school age. Early childhood education is organised in day care centres and family day care. Children may also participate in open early childhood education together with a parent, for example, at a playground. The goal is to support children’s development and well-being and to promote equality in learning. In early childhood education, children learn, for example, social, linguistic and manual skills and gain different types of information. Children also acquire skills that help them learn more.

A lot of playtime and outdoor activities are included. If the child’s native language is not Finnish or Swedish, he or she will receive support in learning Finnish or Swedish. The child may also receive special needs education, if necessary.

In Finland, municipalities organise early childhood education. It is tax funded and therefore more affordable to families. There is also private early childhood education available in Finland. Trained early childhood education teachers, social pedagogues and childcarers work with children.

Read more about early childhood education on the InfoFinland page Early childhood education .

In Finland, children must attend pre-primary education for one year before compulsory education begins. Pre-primary education usually starts during the year when the child turns six. Municipalities organise pre-primary education and it is free of charge for families. Pre-primary education is given by highly educated early childhood education teachers. Pre-primary education is usually organised from Monday to Friday, four hours a day during school hours. In addition to pre-primary education, the child can also attend early childhood education.

During the time that children are in pre-primary education, they learn skills that are useful in school, such as the alphabet. They are not, however, taught how to read. If the child’s native language is not Finnish or Swedish, he or she will receive support in learning Finnish or Swedish. A typical day in pre-primary education also includes playtime and outdoor activities.

Read more on the InfoFinland page Pre-primary education (Link leads to external service) .

In Finland, comprehensive education normally starts during the year when the child turns seven. All children residing in Finland permanently must attend comprehensive education. Comprehensive school comprises nine grades.

Finnish legislation guides comprehensive education. National curriculum bases and local curriculums are also in use.

Comprehensive education is organised by municipalities and is free of charge for families. There is at least 20 hours of tuition per week for first and second grades and more for higher grades.

All comprehensive school teachers in Finland have a Master’s degree. Comprehensive school class teachers, who teach grades 1–6, are specialised in pedagogy. Grade 7–9 teachers are specialised in the subjects they teach.

Teachers are at liberty to plan their tuition independently based on the national and local curricula. Recently, curricula have emphasised, for example, entities that cover several subjects, investigating daily phenomena and information and communications technology.

Children often have the same teacher for the first six years. The teacher gets to know the students well and is able to develop the tuition to suit their needs. One important goal is that the students learn how to think for themselves and assume responsibility over their own learning.

The teacher evaluates the students’ progress in school. In comprehensive education, all grades are given by the teacher. There are no national examinations as such. Instead, learning results are being monitored with sample-based evaluations. These are usually organised in the ninth grade.

If the child or young person has only recently moved to Finland, he or she may receive preparatory education for comprehensive education. Preparatory education usually takes one year. After it, the student may continue to study Finnish or Swedish as a second language, or an S2 language, if he or she needs support in learning the language.

Adult immigrants who have no comprehensive school leaving certificate from their native country may complete comprehensive school in general upper secondary schools for adults.

Read more about comprehensive education on the InfoFinland page Comprehensive education .

The most common options after comprehensive school are general upper secondary school and vocational education.

Compulsory education was extended in Finland in 2021. After comprehensive school, all young people have to study until they graduate from secondary education or reach the age of 18.

A young person must apply for upper secondary education if they are in the 9th grade of comprehensive school in spring 2021 or later.

General upper secondary school

General upper secondary schools provide all-round education which does not lead to any profession. Mostly the same subjects are studied in general upper secondary schools as in comprehensive education, but the studies are more demanding and independent. At the end, students usually take the matriculation examination. General upper secondary school takes 2–4 years, depending on the student. After finishing, students are eligible to apply to universities, universities of applied sciences or general upper secondary school based vocational education.

Most general upper secondary schools provide education in Finnish or Swedish language. Larger cities have some general upper secondary schools that provide tuition in other languages, such as English or French.

Adults may take general upper secondary school studies in general upper secondary schools for adults. There, it is possible to either take separate courses or complete the entire general upper secondary school syllabus and take the matriculation examination. Tuition may include contact teaching, distance education, online education and independent studies.

Read more about general upper secondary school studies on the InfoFinland page General upper secondary school .

Vocational education

Vocational education and training is more practice-oriented than general upper secondary school education. Completing a vocational upper secondary qualification takes about three years. In addition, you can complete a further vocational qualification or a specialist vocational qualification during your working career. On-the-job learning is essential in vocational education and training. If students so choose, they can progress from vocational education and training to higher education.

Further vocational qualification or a specialised vocational degree can also be completed as competence-based qualifications if the student has already acquired the skills required for the qualification.

Vocational qualification can also be obtained through apprenticeship training. In this case, students work in jobs within their own field, receive a salary that is at least in accordance with the collective agreement, or a reasonable salary if there are no collective agreements in the field. Students are allowed to complete their studies at the same time.

Read more on the InfoFinland page Vocational education and training .

Preparatory education for programmes leading to an upper secondary qualification (TUVA)

Good language skills are needed in secondary education. If the student’s native language is something other than Finnish or Swedish and his or her language skills are not yet at the level required for general upper secondary school studies or vocational education, he or she can apply to preparatory education for programmes leading to an upper secondary qualification (TUVA).

Read more on the InfoFinland page General upper secondary school and Vocational education and training .

After finishing your upper secondary studies, you can progress to higher education. In Finland, higher education is provided by universities and universities of applied sciences. Universities and educational institutes decide on student admission.

Studying in an institute of higher education may be free or subject to a charge. You will be charged tuition fees if you are not an EU or EEA citizen or a family member of an EU or EEA citizen and are studying towards a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in an English-language degree programme.

More information is available on the InfoFinland page Foreign students in Finland .

Universities of applied sciences

The education provided by universities of applied sciences is more practice-oriented than that offered by universities. Tuition also includes on-the-job learning. Completing a Bachelor’s degree in a university of applied sciences takes 3.5–4.5 years. If you also want to complete a Master’s degree, you must first acquire two years of work experience from the same field. Read more on the InfoFinland page Universities of applied sciences .

Universities

University tuition is based on scientific research. Completing a Bachelor’s degree in a university takes about three years and Master’s degree about two more years. Universities organise English language tuition in some of their degree programmes. However, the teaching language of most degree programmes is either Finnish or Swedish.

Once you have completed a Master’s degree, you can apply for a right to complete further studies and earn a Licentiate’s or Doctoral degree.

Read more on the InfoFinland page Universities .

InfoFinland page Applying for education and training includes information on applying to upper secondary and higher education in Finland. If you are planning to study in Finland, more information is also available on the InfoFinland pages Foreign students in Finland .

In Finland, there are also many educational institutions offering persons of all ages studies which do not lead to a degree. Most of these studies are intended for adults. These liberal adult education institutes include adult education centres, summer universities, study centres and sports institutes.

The studies provide all-round education. You can study languages, arts, crafts and communications, for instance. Normally the student has to cover some of the expenses of the education.

However, in certain situations studying at these institutions may be free of charge. Education is non-chargeable if, for example, education in reading and writing and other language training have been approved as parts of your integration plan.

If you would like to study Finnish or Swedish, read more on the InfoFinland page Finnish and Swedish language .

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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

Digital Editor

A post-graduate in Journalism and Mass Communication with relevant skills, specialising in content editing & writing. I believe in the precise dissemination of information based on facts to the public.

Creatives : Shiva Chaudhary

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

We are an independent and public-spirited digital media platform for Indian millennials. We report news and issues that matter as well as give you the opportunity to take action.

9 reasons Finland's schools are so much better than America's

by Libby Nelson

If there's any consensus on education in the US, it could be this: other countries are doing it better. And in the doing-education-better sweepstakes, Finland has long been the cold and snowy standout.

In 2001, the world was stunned when Finland ended up at the top of international rankings after a standardized test administered to students in developed countries . Finland's dominance continued unabated for a decade (although it slipped in 2012 ). Endless articles, and some books, all have the same basic gist: what can the United States learn from Finland?

Finland might be a popular example because, no matter your general beliefs on education policy, you can find something to back them up. The result turns into a policy wonk buffet — nearly everybody can a policy lesson to learn from Finland's success, or a factor that explains why it isn't replicable in the US. Even if some of those lessons directly contradict each other.

Here are 9 reasons that have been cited to explain Finland's success.

1) Finland's teachers have high status, professional support, and good pay

Becoming a teacher in Finland is hard, but they enjoy more autonomy and professional development. ( Shutterstock )

Teachers in Finland with 15 years' experience make about as much as the typical college graduate with a bachelor's degree; in the US, they make less than that . And the workload is also less demanding. Teachers in Finland teach about four hours a day, with another two hours of professional development , and they develop their own curriculum based on a set of national guidelines. The leadership ranks of education are also drawn from former teachers. The result, writes Pasi Sahlberg , a Finnish teacher and researcher who has become a one-man promotional machine for the country's schools, is "an inspiring and respectful environment in which teachers work… Parents and authorities regard teachers with the same confidence they do medical doctors. Indeed, Finns trust public schools more than any other public institution, except the police."

American teachers unions point to the high status and professional flexibility for Finnish teachers as something they'd like to have themselves. They also often note that nearly all Finnish teachers are unionized and the unions are relatively powerful . They argue that to improve schools, the US should focus on treating teachers the way Finland does — with more professional support and greater respect — rather than using students' standardized test scores to reward and grade teachers, a trend the Obama administration has encouraged.

2) Finland has more selective and rigorous schools of education

One reason teaching in Finland is prestigious is becoming a teacher isn't easy. Finland, like the US, used to have a large number of teachers' colleges. But in the 1970s, Finland dramatically changed how teachers were trained. Teacher education became the responsibility of the country's eight universities , and teachers are required to earn masters' degrees. It takes five years of teacher education to become a teacher, and only about one in 10 applicants to teacher education programs is accepted. Secondary teachers get a master's degree in the content area they're going to be teaching, and all master's degree recipients have to write a research-based dissertation.

This is the other side of the argument about teaching: education reformers in the US argue that Finnish teachers get more respect because they earn it through a rigorous, selective entry process. The policy lesson they draw isn't that teachers should be treated like they are in Finland — it's that the teacher corps in the US needs to be more like Finland's. Groups like the National Council on Teacher Quality argue that teachers' colleges aren't selective or rigorous enough . About half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates, as measured by SAT or ACT scores, according to a 2010 McKinsey report.

On the other hand, the fact that Finnish teachers are so intensely trained also appeals to opponents of programs like Teach for America . A popular saying among opponents of the two-year program is that there is no "Teach for Finland," because in Finland, teaching is a lifelong career with a long and rigorous training program.

3) Finland doesn't give standardized tests

( Shutterstock )

The most common praise for Finland (pushed by Sahlberg and others) goes something like this: Finland has no national standardized tests and no rewards or punishments for schools that pass or fail them — and yet they still outperform American students on international exams. Students in Finland take one standardized test at the end of high school. The rest of the time, teachers are responsible for setting expectations and evaluating whether students can meet them. The nation doesn't monitor the quality of schools in any way.

Some people argue that the success of Finnish schools without standardized testing means that testing shouldn't be necessary in the United States, either – and that it's possible for the US to improve its educational performance in other ways.

4) Finland emphasizes subjects other than reading and math

Finnish kids get plenty of recess , more than an hour a day; US kids get less than half an hour. Oh, and students do less than an hour of homework per night all the way through the equivalent of American middle school. Arts and crafts are required — both boys and girls learn needlework, embroidery, and metalwork .

It's not clear how much this has to do with the success of the Finnish school system, but Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University, argued in the New Republic that these subjects allow students to apply science and math skills in the real world. They're also an example of what some parents fear has been lost in the US as teachers spend more time preparing students for standardized tests.

5) Finland has a history of tight oversight for schools

Finland doesn't have a national curriculum now, and Finnish education experts brag about how much autonomy teachers get in the classroom. But that wasn't always the case. In the 1960s and 1970s, Finland totally overhauled its education system . The change to teacher training was part of this, but the country also worked with teachers to develop a mandatory national curriculum and there were national inspections to check on student learning. That tight national control remained in place for two decades, until it was eased up in the 1990s — the national curriculum is now described as being more like guidelines than a tight prescription for what teachers should teach in the classroom.

Unlike the lack of testing, this is a Finnish tradition that American supporters of education reform, particularly standards like the Common Core, embrace. They argue that Finland can only give teachers the autonomy they have now because of the generation of tight oversight that preceded it.

6) It's easier to learn to spell in Finland

(Shutterstock)

This is the most unusual explanation for Finland's success yet. At The Atlantic, Luba Vangelova argues that the difficulties of learning to read and write English are holding American students back because other languages — including Finnish — are more straightforward.

Masha Bell, the vice chair of the English Spelling Society, says that Finnish is phonetically much simpler than English because there aren't dozens of arcane spelling rules and exceptions ( i before e except after c, for example) to memorize. Once you know the alphabet and how letter sounds correspond with the written word, learning to read is fairly simple. A study found that in Finnish and other European languages, children can read a list of familiar words after about a year of reading instruction; in English, it took nearly three years.

In other words, Finnish children have an advantage: even though they don't start school until age 7, and even though the Finnish language is very complex for English-speakers to learn, it's relatively easy for native speakers to learn to read and write.

7) Finland has low child poverty and state support for parents

Finland doesn't spend as much on education as the United States. But that overlooks a vast social safety net for families, particularly low-income families, that doesn't exist here, either. Baby Finns start their life with a " baby box " of supplies from the Finnish government. Child care is heavily subsidized, and most children attend some kind of early childhood education before mandatory schooling starts at age 7.

Finland also has one of the lowest child poverty rates in the world, around 5 percent (it's over 20 percent in the US). Parents get a monthly allowance to help them care for their children — 100 euros for the first child and more for additional children. Matt Bruenig at Demos has an overview of Finland's extensive child welfare programs .

Perhaps as a result, Finland has very small gaps between rich and poor students' test scores; in the US, those divides are much bigger. Schools in Finland also offer other services, like dentistry and psychological counseling, according to the OECD. These "wraparound services" are something that teachers' unions argue the United States needs more of — although the attempt to create Finland-style community schools generally hasn't resulted in higher test scores.

8) Finland's schools aren't better — they're just homogenous

Some people argue that Finland's schools aren't actually better — they're just serving a much smaller, much more homogenous population. Finland is tiny — the entire country has just 5.4 million people, fewer than New York City. About 5 percent of its residents are immigrants, much lower than the United States.

Schools in the US where most children aren't poor are actually better than low-poverty school systems in Finland. But high-poverty schools in the US struggle in part because of a toxic legacy of segregation, unequal funding, and unequal opportunity. "For a lot of kids who don't score well on these tests, you go back six generations and you have people in bondage," Jack Schneider, a historian of education, told Vox in October.

Finland, which essentially reinvented its school system from scratch in the second half of the 20th century, has none of that baggage. In some ways, the United States has two school systems — well-funded, high-performing suburban schools serving the middle class, and struggling urban school systems where students are overwhelmingly poor and from disadvantaged backgrounds. While Finland has a few schools educating low-income immigrants with an excellent track record of success ( this Smithsonian article features a visit to one ), those schools are fewer and farther between than they are in the US.

9) Finland is culturally different

Another thing Finland has a lot of: saunas. (Shutterstock)

This is another version of the "Finland does better because it's Finland" argument — that Finnish society is just different than American society, and that as a result lessons are harder to translate. Finnish adults are among the most literate in the world, and the country's libraries are treasured institutions . That, as much as an easier language to spell, could explain stellar reading results. Finland also doesn't have a school sports culture like the US's. And children are more independent; helicopter parenting is just not really a thing .

There are other differences that influence social policy, but aren't limited to them. Rick Hess, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, is skeptical that Finland can teach the US anything because its society is so different. His list of differences (most tongue-in-cheek) include long winter nights that leave plenty of time for studying and more children in two-parent families.

Finnish test scores dropped in 2012, but the fascination with its education system hasn't faded. The bottom line seems to be that something in Finland is working — but it might be impossible to ever figure out what.

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Education System
Fins and Fun

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.

$System of education in Finland$

System of education in Finland

School System in Finland

Finland Education Reform

Fins and Fun: Distinctive Features of Education in Finland

10 Facts About Education in Finland

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Flagship of Distance Education

A Day in the Life of a Finnish Student: Embracing Education and Well-being

July 19, 2023

Finland, often hailed for its exemplary education system, is known for its commitment to providing quality education to its students. With a focus on fostering holistic development and nurturing a love for learning, Finnish students experience a unique educational journey. In this blog, we will take a glimpse into a typical day in the life of a Finnish student, exploring the Finnish education system routine, emphasis on well-being, and the values that underpin their educational experience.

Morning Routine:

The day begins with a Finnish student waking up early, ensuring they get enough rest for the day ahead. With an emphasis on balance and well-being, they engage in activities like meditation, light exercise, or perhaps a nutritious breakfast before heading to school. This ritual sets the tone for the day, promoting mindfulness and preparing them for a day of learning.

Comprehensive Curriculum:

Finnish students benefit from a comprehensive and inclusive curriculum that encourages a love for learning. The national curriculum framework provides a strong foundation in core subjects such as mathematics, science, languages, and social studies. However, it also allows flexibility for students to pursue their interests through optional subjects, promoting a well-rounded education.

Active Learning Environment:

Finnish classrooms are characterized by a student-centered and collaborative approach to learning. Rather than traditional teacher-led lectures, students actively participate in discussions, problem-solving activities, and hands-on projects. This fosters critical thinking, creativity, and teamwork skills, preparing students for real-world challenges.

Shorter School Days:

One noteworthy aspect of the Finnish education system is the shorter school days. Students typically spend fewer hours in school compared to many other countries, allowing them to maintain a healthy work-life balance. The idea behind this is to prioritize quality over quantity, recognizing that effective learning does not solely depend on the number of hours spent in the classroom.

Recess and Outdoor Activities:

During the school day, Finnish students enjoy regular breaks and recess periods. These breaks provide opportunities for socializing, physical activity, and play. Outdoor activities are highly encouraged, even during colder months, as they believe in the restorative power of nature and the benefits it brings to overall well-being.

Nutritious School Lunches:

Finnish schools place great importance on providing students with nutritious meals. Students are offered healthy, balanced, and free or low-cost school lunches, ensuring they have the energy and nourishment required for optimal learning. This practice promotes healthy eating habits, reduces inequalities, and fosters a sense of community as students dine together.

Emphasis on Well-being:

In Finland, the well-being of students is paramount. Schools prioritize creating a positive and supportive environment where students feel safe, respected, and valued. Teachers play a vital role in monitoring students’ emotional well-being and providing guidance when needed. School counselors are also readily available to address any concerns students may have.

Outdoor Education and Nature Immersion:

Nature plays a significant role in Finnish education. Students often engage in outdoor education activities, exploring forests, lakes, and other natural landscapes. This not only enhances their knowledge of the environment but also promotes well-being, creativity, and a sense of connection with the natural world.

Independent Study:

After school, Finnish students have the opportunity for independent study. Rather than overwhelming them with excessive homework, the focus is on self-regulated learning. Students are encouraged to manage their time effectively, set goals, and take responsibility for their own learning. This approach cultivates a sense of autonomy and instills lifelong learning skills.

Extracurricular Activities:

Finnish students are encouraged to participate in extracurricular activities that cater to their diverse interests. Whether it’s sports, music, arts, or clubs, these activities provide avenues for students to explore their passions, develop talents, and foster social connections beyond the classroom. These pursuits contribute to a well-rounded education and help in the development of various skills.

Conclusion:

A day in the life of a Finnish student encompasses a harmonious blend of rigorous education, well-being, and holistic development. The Finnish education system emphasizes individual growth, critical thinking, creativity, and the overall well-being of students. By fostering a positive learning environment, promoting an active lifestyle, and valuing each student’s uniqueness, Finland has set an inspiring example for educational systems worldwide. The Finnish approach reminds us that education goes beyond academic achievement, striving to nurture well-rounded individuals who are prepared to face the challenges of the future with confidence and resilience.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Finnish education system or exploring educational opportunities in Finland, consider visiting the Finland Education Hub. The Finland Education Hub provides a comprehensive resource for understanding and engaging with Finland’s education system, offering insights, research, and information about studying in Finland. Whether you’re a student, parent, or educator, the Finland Education Hub can be a valuable platform to discover the innovative approaches and educational opportunities that Finland has to offer.

Why the U.S. can’t replicate Finland’s educational success

A teacher giving rulers to children of the second grade (8 years old) in a primary school in Vaasa, on their second day of school in Finland. ( OLIVIER MORIN / Getty Images)

Finland’s success on international student assessment tests have left many wondering if the United States should adopt its education policies.
However, Finland’s educational system developed from a culture that maintains education as a fundamental right; the United States lacks such an acknowledgement.
Unless the United States undergoes a drastic reassessment of its social contract, meaningful education reform will likely remain out of reach.

Can the United States replicate Finland’s educational success? No.

When people triumph Finland’s education system , they enumerate a laundry list of reforms aimed at radically altering the country’s scholastic approach: no homework, no standardized tests, teacher autonomy, and children beginning compulsory school later. Finland’s success should be praised. Its education system should be studied for what empirical data it may yield.

But underlining discusses of Finland’s education system is a subtext that if the U.S. transfers these practices, it too can see its international test scores rise from the middling ranks. This view misses an important point: Finland’s educational success was driven by a culture with a strong, unifying social contract. The United States simply lacks such a social contract.

Finnish educators are among the first to make this point. As education expert Pasi Sahlberg said during a lecture to the Sandford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education :

I’m not trying to convince people that if they follow what Finland is doing, things will be good. All the education issues and reforms are done specifically to the culture and should be done locally. I’m very much aware that America is very different culturally. I’m trying to tell what we’ve been doing and use Finland as real-world evidence.

If the United States is to make education reform, it must first look to reassessing its cultural assumptions and priorities.

(Photo: Andy Blackledge/Flickr)

Education: a right or a privilege?

In 1919, Finland enshrined educational provisions as a right. Section 16 of the country’s constitution states unequivocally: “Everyone has the right to basic education free of charge” and this right guarantees citizens “the opportunity to develop themselves without being prevented by economic hardship.”

The United States’ constitution does not make such a promise to its citizens. True, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has established some parity within the education system, but this interpretation of the text has been held up in the courts, most famously in Brown v. Board of Education and Plyler v. Doe . It does not specifically name education as a right, nor is such a right listed anywhere else in the Constitution.

Because of this wording, the Supreme Court ruled in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriquez that education is not a fundamental right. America’s public education system persists because of a patchwork of federal and state laws and institutions, not as a cohesive, universal goal for the society.

As Stephen Lurie , former research and policy advisor at the National Network for Safe Communities, writes, “Each of the countries ahead of the U.S. has a fundamental commitment in common, one that the [sic] America doesn’t: a constitutional, or statutory, guarantee of the right to education. By centralizing education as a key focus of the state, these countries establish baseline requirements that set the frame for policy and judicial challenges, as well as contribute to what [a] Pearson report calls a ‘culture’ of education […].”

Lurie further notes that the U.S. has turned a blind eye to such responsibilities internationally, as well. The country has yet to ratified 13 of the 18 International Human Rights Treaties , including the Convention on the Rights of the Child , which, among other statutes, mandates the right to education.

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Funding education

In Finland, educational funding is provided by the government and is distributed much more evenly. It is tied to neither a school’s rank nor its status, but its need.

Contrary to popular belief , there are private schools in Finland, and around 2 percent of students attend one. However, Finnish private schools are a different breed. They may not charge fees, receive state funding comparable to public schools, and are prohibited from selective admissions.

This is not the case in the U.S. Another effect of San Antonio v. Rodriquez was the legal precedent that unequal school funding does not violate the Constitution. Private schools may charge tuition fees and engage in selective admission. Public schools — which are financed by state and local government, mostly through property taxes — may see their funds diverted to private schools . And while the federal government doesn’t technically fund education, it does offer grants to states, but these grants are tied to test scores and attendance records.

The result is lopsided educational funding where schools of plenty can provide more and better opportunities. A 2018 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that such inequalities “harm students subject to them” and are “fundamentally inconsistent with the American ideal of public education operating as a means to equalize life opportunity, regardless of zip code, race, economic status, or life circumstance.”

The report points directly to the San Antonio v. Rodriquez ruling as granting some states and cities the loophole necessary to continue discriminating against students of color in their funding policies. It calls for Congress to “make clear that there is a federal right to a public education.”

Teachers in Finland’s education system

In Finland, teachers receive high levels of training from much coveted educational programs. By the time they enter the classroom, most hold a master’s degree. They also continue to participate in professional development throughout their careers. The result is an educational force steeped in the science of teaching, drawn from such thinkers as John Dewey .

The United States also has very gifted, well educated teachers. The difference is cultural esteem. In Finland, teachers are highly regarded and paid very well.

“When we compare teachers to other professions in society, we compare them to lawyers or doctors or architects,” Shalberg said during his lecture. “Not as [in the United States], where they are compared to nurses or therapists, or something like that, that require lower academic training.”

In the United States, teachers aren’t disrespected, and few would think to disparage the profession in a public way. Yet, American teachers do have to struggle against the country’s zeitgeist of aggressive anti-intellectualism.

Professor Aldemaro Romero Jr. cites anti-intellectualism as persisting these all-too-familiar aspects of American discourse: tribalism, xenophobia, intolerance to dissent, fear of progress, and the invention of falsehoods to counter unwelcome facts (to name a few). All of which are counterproductive to educational practices.

“It is time for those of us involved in higher education in this country to recognize that there is a long shadow being cast on our institutions,” writes Professor Romero Jr. for the Edwardsville Intelligencer . “Because the characteristics mentioned above to fight anti-intellectualism with reason are naive. We need to become smarter in the use of media to get our message across. But what is the message? That higher education makes us richer and happier.”

A statement that, of course, holds true for all levels of education.

Education and stewardship

Finally, Finland views education as a stewardship of students. The Finnish National Agency for Education’s stated goal is “to support pupils’ growth towards humanity and ethically responsible membership of society and to provide them with the knowledge and skills needed in life.” As such, Finnish students enjoy a much more free-form education, with broader autonomy in how they approach learning as they advance.

Finnish upper-secondary students , for example, can choose between general education or vocational training, but may engage in both as needed to fulfill their scholastic and career goals. The country’s education system also limits scholastic cul-de-sacs so citizens, even adults, can reengage with education as needed in their lives.

Larger populations in the United States, in contrast, see educators not as supporters of students but the “molders of young minds,” a phrase that has an authoritative quality to it. Student deemed troublesome early in life have difficulty reengaging in formal education thanks to the U.S.’s one-shot approach . Parents insist on their right to teach children creationism , not the child’s right to learn practical, useful science. American politicians write educational goals aimed at making students competitive exam takers and workers in tomorrow’s global marketplace, not goals like self-actualization.

“Education must move beyond the current focus on training to benefit others and only incidentally benefiting youth,” writes Roger J.R. Levesque , a professor at Indiana University. “Education must enrich their lives essentially, not incidentally, by empowering them to accomplish their own ends and fulfill their potential. If this is what should be meant when we speak of educational rights, reform must take a radical turn.”

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Redefining a social contract

It is true that Finland and the United States are very different countries. Finland is roughly the size of Minnesota and holds fewer people than New York City. It’s relatively homogenous when compared to the United States’ cultural heterogeneity.

But these differences aren’t the main reasons the United States can’t replicate Finland’s educational system, nor its success. That is because the American social contract simply doesn’t value education in the same way.

The next question then: Can Americans gather the massive political, cultural, and social unity it would take to reverse such a long-standing trend? Maybe, but it seems unlikely in contemporary America, and it has a history of punting such difficult discussion onto future generations.

The country began with a fissure between the Federalists versus the Anti-Federalists, a debate that enjoys a through-line down to today’s political polarization . Its productive social change continues to be shackled to religious fundamentalism. Its education system is divided among more than 50 constitutional rulebooks with different view on what constitutes necessary funding, higher education, religious restrictions, and how to assist the disabled. Heck, Alabama’s constitution still incorporates segregation as an educational mandate. (Yes, that law is trumped by federal law, but that doesn’t change the fact that ballot measures to remove the language were struck down in both 2004 and 2012.)

As for America’s virulent anti-intellectualism, David Niose sums it up succinctly: “What Americans rarely acknowledge is that many of their social problems are rooted in the rejection of critical thinking or, conversely, the glorification of the emotional and irrational.”

And this is why the current answer to the question, can the United States replicate Finland’s education system? is no. If the United States wants true, lasting, and beneficial educational reform, it will need to fully engage with its own social contract, not copy another’ country’s generous recess policy.

People examining a detailed architectural model of a building and its surrounding area at an exhibition, reflecting the impact of the Chinese economy on urban development.

27 Surprising Finnish Education System Facts and Statistics

There has been a lot of press recently about how the education system in Finland is one of the best in the world and how they are using radical (compared with the UK and the US) ideas to help achieve their status as one of the best.

Anywhere you look the proof doesn’t seem to lie, yet how exactly is the Finnish Education system achieving such greatness? Their students outperform students in the US and the UK in most, if not all areas and their teachers enjoy a much better work life balance. Let’s take a dive into some of the things the Finnish are doing.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) , a survey taken every three years by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) routinely releases data which shows that Americans and British students are seriously lagging behind in many educational performance assessments.

The Finnish Education System

#1 Finnish children enter education at a later age than in many countries. They start school at age 7 and believe that “starting children in school before they’re naturally developmentally ready has no scientifically proven long-term advantage”.

#2 Prior to age 7, Finnish school children can attend day care/nursery school but they do not have formal education whilst there, Instead, they focus on creative play . “They need time to play and be physically active. It’s a time for creativity”. says Tiina Marjoniemi, head of Franzenia daycare center in Helsinki. The Guardian

#3 For every 45 minutes of learning, students enjoy 15 minutes of play.

#4 School is only compulsory for 11 years, meaning students can leave education at age 18. Everything after that is optional. This idea is thought to prepare Finnish students for the real world.

#5 Finish students are not measured at all for the first six years of their education.

#6 Students in Finland only have to sit for a centralized exam (National Matriculation Exam) at the age of 18-19 years old (after 12 years of school).

Finland School Hours

#7 Finnish students do the least number of class hours per week in the developed world, yet get the best results in the long term. The school day starts between 8-9am and is finished by 2pm.

Finland Education Ranking

#8 The schools in Finland are not ranked in any way, there are no comparisons made between schools, regions, teachers or even students. They believe that cooperation is the key to success, not competition.

#9 Finnish Teachers are some of the most qualified in the world. The requirements for becoming a teacher in Finland are set very high, only around the top 10% of applicants are successful and all of those have a masters degree (which incidentally is fully subsidised!).

#10 Finnish teachers have the same status as doctors and lawyers. ( I wish that was the case in the UK! )

#11 Finnish Teachers are not graded. This is probably a direct result of their rigorous selection process and because of this, in Finland, they don’t feel the need to constantly assess and grade their teachers. If a teacher isn’t performing satisfactorily, it is up to the schools principal/head to deal with it. Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education and writer of Finnish Lessons, said this about teachers’ accountability:

“There’s no word for accountability in Finnish… Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

#12 Schools are not inspected. School inspections were actually abolished in Finland in the early 1990s. They have the ideology that they can help direct and assist through support and funding. Again, they trust the professionalism of teachers and school leaders. Schools are encouraged to self-evaluate along.

#13 There are no selective schools or private schools. One of the reasons why there is no competition between Finnish schools is that all schools are funded through public funds. No competition = level playing field.

#14 All Finnish school children receive free school meals, all of them, all the way through school!. There has been a healthy hot lunch served to all students been since 1943 for the whole 9 years at school. ( Huffingtonpost.com )

#15 Finnish students all have access to support that is individually based on their specific needs from the start of their school career. They believe that every child has some special needs and therefore special education is for everyone.

#16 The Basics are the priority. Rather than focus on increasing test scores and dominating in math, science and English, the Finnish education system focus on creating a healthy and harmonious environment for students and learning. The ideology of the Finnish education system is that education should be an “ instrument to balance out social inequality “.

#17 Finnish students have the same teacher for up to 6 years of their school career. This is one of the pillars of their harmonious education environment ideology. It allows student/teacher relationships to grow year on year, allowing a much deeper level of trust and respect than only having one year.

Finland Education Curriculum

#18 Finnish Students have less homework than any other student on the planet. Even with fewer school hours, they are still getting everything they need to be done whilst at school. This, in turn, builds on a Finnish child’s ability to grow and learn into a happy and responsible adult.

#19 All classes are mixed ability. This is unpopular in a lot of education systems in the UK and the US (I know, my own school recently adopted this policy (Personally, I love it) and there can be a lot of teachers that don’t like it. However, some of the most successful education systems have mixed ability classes, so it does work!

#20 Finnish Students learn more languages. They learn Finnish from their first day at school. At age 9 they start learning their second language (which is usually English). By age 11 they start learning Swedish, which is Finland’s second language. Many students even start learning a fourth language when they are 13. They are only tested on their first two languages in the final exam at the end of high school.

#21 Teachers only generally spend 4 hours a day in the classroom and have 2 hours every week for professional development , thus reducing teacher stress.

#22 The Finnish national curriculum is a broadly based guideline, allowing teachers to use their own style and ideas in the classroom. This builds on the trust that the Finnish education system has in its teachers.

Finland Education Statistics

#23 93% of students graduate from high school. More than in the US.

#24 66% of high school students go on to further education (college or vocational courses).

#25 Finland spends about 30% less per student than the US, the UK, Japan and Germany. ( OECD Indicators )

#26 Just under 100% of 9th-grade students in Finland go on to high school. This figure includes most of the severely disabled children ( smithsonian.com )

#27 43% of those students in further education (16+) attend vocational school.

So there we have it, Finnish students and teachers are part of a great system. Having worked with several Finnish teachers, I can tell you that their ideology and these strategies work, very well!

2 thoughts on “27 Surprising Finnish Education System Facts and Statistics”

As a student in Finland I realized some of this information is outdated. #1 – It states that children start their education at the age of 7. This is no longer correct because they can start is at the ages of 5, 6 or 7. Typically they do at ages 6 or 7. #3 – It is very school based. some schools do not follow this and it depends a lot. A school can have 45 minute lessons and a 5 min break. #4 – Over resent years it has changed into 9 years of compulsory education (basic education) 2-4 years of upper secondary studies/vocational application. #6 – the matriculation examination is at the age of 18 (typically the last two years of upper secondary studies). Not all students do this because they choose to go to vocational school. #7 – It is again very school based because some schools follow periods (certain subjects for 6 weeks and then the timetable changes). Most schools and students most likely have days from 8am-3pm. It depends a lot what day it is. #16 – To apply to upper secondary school and vocational schools they calculate the average of math, English, Finnish, Swedish, history, civics, religion/ethics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, health education. #17 – Pert of this is true. Best case scenario they do have the same teacher for six years, but most of the time teachers are only qualified to teach certain grade levels. #18 – The amount of homework totally depends on the teacher. It depends how much the teacher wants them to do. Most times homework is tasks that they did not get done on lessons or ones that deepen the meaning of the subject. #20 – there are a lot of confusing things about this. In most schools the child starts learning Finnish from first grade onwards. From grade 3 onwards they start learning English. From grade 5 onwards they can decide if the want another language (typically French, German or Spanish). From grade 6 onwards they start learning Swedish. In the matriculation examinations the test Finnish and a second home language so either Swedish or English. #21 – Subject teachers can have as many hours a day as the pupils. This all depends how many subjects they are qualified to teach.

According to the Bildung Review the Finnish educational system is failing. Not testing and focusing only on cooperation seems to have failed. I hope Finland will shift in the proper educational focus.

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Misconceptions About Homework in Finland

I’ve been seeing all over the internet that there is no homework in Finland. Even if you google it the answer is that there is no homework in Finland. But I live in Finland and I defidently have homework. Where is this misconception coming from? Like we don’t have that much homework but its still homework.

Homework, should or should not?

In Finland we do give homework, but it is only given when the teacher feels that it is necessary for the students. There is no policy that homework has to be given after every lesson, or even every week.

The aim of homework is to give the student a possibility to do revision on a new topic / most important topics covered in class. Homework should not be about learning anything new at home, but more about challenging the student´s memory on what concept was covered in class.

For example, if the students have been covering photosynthesis in their biology class, the teacher could give a problem solving task related to photosynthesis. In this task the student would have to think about what they learned in school and how to adapt that information into their homework. The teacher should not give the student tasks where they need to deepen their knowledge or learn anything new.

Because the aim of homework is only to do revision on the most important concepts covered in class, homework shouldn´t take over 15 minutes per subject. Teachers need to keep in mind that students have on average 4-5 different subjects per day. If every teacher gives them 30 minutes of homework, that would be over 2 hours of extra studying each night.

The Finnish education system wants to make sure that students have the ability to recharge from their school day by doing non-school related things that make them happy. For example, participating in football training, playing the piano, and enjoying time with their friends. This is why we limit the amount of homework. When a student has time to relax after school, they feel rested and have full focus and motivation for their next work day at school.

In Finland we have the mindset of "quality over quantity". With qualified and educated teachers, we can offer students excellent learning opportunities in school. This means that they do not have to do extra studying at home, but rather do a quick revision on the most important topics when needed.

I don’t worry that students forget knowledge Without homework. If the teacher offers the students a possibility to challenge their memory in diverse ways in class, there shouldn´t be any problem with students forgetting their knowledge.

For example: I use around 15 minutes of my lesson to teach a new concept in theory. After that the students are challenged to use the information they just learned in various ways. They might be doing group tasks, presentations, experiments, play games etc where they do revision on the topics they just learnt.

In Finland, teachers never have exercises or homework for students to review in the holidays . Students should spend their holidays resting and doing activities that they enjoy. No adult uses their holidays to do work, and if they would, they wouldn´t have the opportunity to recharge. This would make them tired, less motivated and less efficient when coming back to work. Holidays are the time for the students to let their brain rest.

Using diverse teaching methods is the best way for students to learn and gain knowledge. Teachers should offer students experiences where they can use their knowledge. Memories like this help students to understand what they have learned and come back to these situations when they need to remember something.

For example: in biology I teach the students about the digestive system by letting them build a model of how bread moves along the digestive tract. When doing a practical assignment like this, they constantly do revision on which parts of the body belong to the digestive tract and also get to see what happens to the food in each phase of digestion.

Finnish teachers also make sure that when they plan their lessons for the semester, there is enough time for students to revise during their classes. No Finnish teacher teaches new topics every single lesson. Instead, they make sure that students are offered possibilities to do revision in class.

For example: I teach my high school students 5 x 45 minutes lessons a week. 3 of those lessons are used to learn new topics. The rest are used for challenging the students memory through different assignments and tasks. In this way students do revision in class and no homework is needed.

Ms. Laura Katriina Lammi

Biology and geography teacher ; Coordinator of the Science Department

Masters of Biology and geography as a teaching subject, University of Jyväskylä

Of course, giving homework is entirely up to an individual teacher but usually holidays are breaks from the school work when students spend time with their families and friends, it is time when they charge their batteries and focus on free time and hobbies in order to be full of energy when they return to school. In a happy and balanced life, it is also important to just relax and be without doing anything serious with goals or objectives because this is a precondition for one's creativity and vitality.

Personally, I don't worry about students forgetting knowledge during the holidays because the school is not the only place where students learn, for instance, when they are travelling, they are using and practising knowledge of many different subjects: language, geography, history, etc.

At school we never can teach all the needed facts for the students, it is much more important to teach them to be curious about life and learn constantly based on experiences and new requirements faced in life, nobody will know what each of us will need to know in our individual and unique lives, we have to be prepared to face basically all kinds of events, but this is more related to attitude than mastering all the possible facts.

Nowadays we can check up facts from the internet whenever it is needed but it is much more important to learn to think and conduct your life and be a balanced person with good relationships to your friends and relatives. Besides, growing teenagers need more rest and sleep than grown-ups because they are growing, therefore there is a real need for a break from school for them even in physical terms.

Ms. Katja Grekula

History, Social Studies and Economics Teacher, Guidance Counsellor

Master of Social Studies, University of Tampere, Finland

European Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation

Inside a Finnish school: What Finland can teach the world about education

by John Kennedy

15 Dec 2017

What is the secret to the success of the Finnish education system? John Kennedy discovers that the answer lies in diversity, inclusion and equality.

During my recent foray to Slush in Helsinki , I got a chance to visit Kalasatama, a city-centre elementary school nestled in the Finnish capital’s harbour area.

Having read so much about how Finland revolutionised its education system to reach the pinnacle of global PISA and OECD league tables, I was determined not to gawp as Michael Moore had done in his brilliant movie Where to Invade Next when he heard about no standardised testing, no homework, the respectable standing of teachers in their local communities and the unwavering belief that all children should have a childhood.

‘Our attitude is that every place is a place to learn’ – MARJANNA MANNINEN

But yes, I was transfixed by the warm environment, hot lunches, beanbags, no desks and the existence of reading dogs (I’ll get to that later). I didn’t want to be a party pooper by recalling my own school days of prefabs, uniforms, packed lunches and by-rote learning. The only familiar comparison with my early school days was the kids’ art everywhere and the big squeezable paint tubes. May there always be paint!

Kalasatama is a brand new school that opened a year ago and is currently attended by 120 pupils. By 2020, the school will grow to 750 pupils. Ultimately, at capacity, it will be the one place kids will go to from pre-school right up to 15.

Inside, no one wears shoes on their feet, just their socks.

“The idea is, the building we are in will grow with the children and the area,” said school principal Marjanna Manninen (@MarjaanaM2). It shows how digitally attuned the teachers are that they insisted on giving their Twitter handles.

Vice-principal Jukka Ihalainen (@jukka_ihalainen) explained that there are currently 10 classes in the school looked after by 13 teachers and nine teaching assistants.

“It’s brand new architecture and it is designed to support a flexible learning environment,” Ihalainen explained. “The curriculum in Finland is designed so that the pupils themselves have an active role in learning. There is lots of collaboration, students working with teachers, flexible learning groups, and kids with special needs and mainstream students work together when reasonable.”

The modular school of the future

Inside a Finnish school: What Finland can teach the world about education

From left: Kalasatama school principal Marjanna Manninen and vice-principal Jukka Ihalainen. Image: John Kennedy

Technology is instantly visible. The modular school is described by Manninen as a smart building. There are 37 solar panels on the roof and every room is visible from the next with big windows everywhere. “The idea is the children will learn how to use technology as they themselves grow,” she said.

‘For kids who are learning how to read, they can read to the school reading dog. The dog won’t judge you and will always listen’ – JUKKA IHALAINEN

“Pupils do not have their own classrooms, or desks or tables. There are spaces for individual work, beanbags to sit on, and everything is flexible and light and easy to move around.

“We don’t believe kids will learn better at a desk or a table. They will learn 20 times better on beanbags, depending on what they are doing. Sometimes you need a desk and a chair, but sometimes a beanbag is easier. Kids with special needs can choose their own spaces and all our teachers plan their lessons together.”

Manninen said the core principle is that kids encounter learning everywhere. “The whole of Helsinki is the classroom. We have the park, the city centre, the zoo – it’s ideal for this kind of approach,” she said.

Ihalainen added that peer-to-peer learning is a vital factor in the education journey. “Learning groups are designed to be flexible. Teachers collaborate together to create great lessons.”

Diversity is a key factor in any city school and, in the case of Kalasatama, 50pc of current students have multicultural backgrounds.

“The open spaces and windows allow children and adults to see each other. Culturally, it helps learning when you see pupils and adults working and communicating together,” Manninen said.

So, what about computers? Having seen so many failed school IT strategies in Ireland and the UK, where iPads to PCs on every desk were promised but never delivered, the Finns have a different idea.

As I watch kids learn science through video game technology projected onto walls, Ihalainen explains: “Everyone has mobile phones and, where reasonable and useful, we will use PCs and tablets. We have very good technology in this building so pupils don’t have to bring their own technology. They can bring them in but we don’t necessarily use them. We are open to trying all kinds of games and devices.”

And, in what might appear to be anathema to lovers of structure, there are no set timetables. “We don’t have specific hours. It depends on the grade,” said Manninen. “We realise that kids spend the whole day inside the school. So, every time, when reasonable, we try to bring the kids outside the school to learn in the real world.

“In Finnish schools, there are lots of breaks and recess. For Finnish people, that is normal and rational.”

A journalist accompanying us pipped up that in New York, some schools only get five minutes’ break in the entire day.

Ihalainen looks slightly horrified and reasons: “We take many things for granted here and we realise that this is not normal elsewhere – it’s good to have perspective. For us, we believe it is important that kids can run out and play in the rain. We believe that makes it easier for them to concentrate and to learn. We also believe it is important that parents at all times can see what is happening in the schools; we make it easier to cooperate with the parents by making everything visible to them.

So, what are the Finns doing differently? There is a kind of fearlessness when it comes to trying new things that is not reflected in other countries where a conservative loyalty to longstanding curricular tradition gets in the way of progress. Fear will always hold you back.

“The school is much more than technology,” Ihalainen points out, bringing up a picture of the school reading dog. Yes, there is a school reading dog.

“Kids struggling with reading have reservations about reading to the class, and we found that for kids who are learning how to read, they can read to the school reading dog.

“The dog won’t judge you and will always listen.”

In most countries, a community school has walls and gates. The difference with Kalasatama is that it engages with its community, embracing young and old alike.

“Groups of kids visit the senior citizens in the nearby senior home and sing songs to them, and we have events here where the seniors are invited in. In Finland, different ages are mixed.”

It isn’t just Finland’s education system that is flying high. The country’s prowess at video game technology – think Rovio and Angry Birds as well as Supercell and Clash of Clans – is fuelling an entire edtech industry.

Lightneer’s Peter Vesterbacka, the former brand ambassador and ‘Mighty Eagle’ of Angry Birds developer Rovio, explained that there are about 300 start-ups in Finland focused on education technology.

Founded by former Rovio alumni including Vesterbacka, Lightneer is on a mission to create the best science-learning game on the planet. The Big Bang Legends game has been created in cahoots with some fine minds at Oxford and CERN. Lightneer recently raised $5m in a funding round led by GSV Acceleration along with IPR.VC, Brighteye Ventures and Reach Capital.

“After the Angry Birds movie went to No 1, I decided it was a good time to work on bigger things. What can be bigger than Angry Birds , a student project that began in 2003 and that is today recognised by nine out of 10 people on the planet? Education.”

Vesterbacka points out that education is a $6.3trn market and the second-biggest market in the world after food. “Finland is the only non-Asian country in the league tables that is competing with Singapore, Japan and Korea.

“Part of the reason for Finland’s success at education is our short school days, not a lot of homework, and kids have life outside of school. But, in Singapore, the school day starts at 6am and goes on until evening, and parents spend a fortune on tutoring because it is so competitive. In some cases, parents do the homework for the kids. They have to, otherwise the kids won’t get to the next level.

“What’s wrong with you people?” Vesterbacka questioned. “Kids are people too, and they have human rights. Here, we take a relaxed and casual approach and still achieve top results.”

Former Rovio ‘Mighty Eagle’ and co-founder of Lightneer, Peter Vesterbacka (in red hoodie), and Lightneer chief creative officer and former lead game designer of ‘Angry Birds’, Lauri Konttori (green). Image: John Kennedy

‘Kids are people too, and they have human rights. Here, we take a relaxed and casual approach and still achieve top results’ – PETER VESTERBACKA

He said that if Finnish edutech start-ups are on a mission to capture up to $300bn – a sliver of the global education market – that would still be an enormous success for the country.

At Kalasatana, kids play Lightneer’s Big Bang Legends on tablets and PCs. “The idea is that they can have a lot of fun playing but they are learning particle physics without realising it. All of the characters in the game are from the periodic table of elements. We already have kids in Finnish schools who are fans of Copper, Helium and Neon. All the kids who play the game know that Neon consists of 10 protons. All the elements and atoms are turned into characters and the kids know all the elements because they play the game.”

21st-century learning skills

I also talked to Kirsi Haapamäki from Mightifier , a popular app that focuses on using game techniques to help kids in schools develop mentally and emotionally.

‘We try to teach kids the ability to have trusting human relationships and improve their wellbeing and social skills’ – KIRSI HAAPAMÄKI

“The world is changing at a huge pace, faster than ever before, and students in schools will end up doing jobs we don’t even know about yet. Education is about preparing them to answer questions we don’t have yet for a world we don’t even know yet. That means we have to prepare them for a world they will need to survive in and find their own answers.

“PISA and OECD are concerned about 21st-century skills. Wellbeing data from around the world highlights that the two main threats to student wellbeing and the ability to learn are anxiety and bullying. If you feel anxious, how could you be expected to learn? The same is true for adults at work.”

Teachers and children alike use the Mastifier app, and the kids are encouraged to say something positive about their colleagues.

Haapamäki points out that regular ‘mightifying’ leads to an improved class environment, less bullying and a better focus on learning, adding that it could have applications in the adult working world down the line.

“We try to teach kids the ability to have trusting human relationships and improve their wellbeing and social skills. Mightifier teaches children how to give each other positive feedback based on their character strengths. Positive psychology is the science that makes everything worth living for by focusing on positive things, feeling positive things and, in doing so, boosting self-esteem [and] reducing anxiety and bullying.”

As Haapamäki talks, kids assess each other using Mightifier, focusing on 27 character strengths, including creativity, leadership, kindness and persistence. “Everybody has these character strengths, we just learn to use them differently. But, if you are aware of your strengths, you can impact the world around you and it also boosts your problem-solving abilities.”

So, what is Finland’s secret sauce for learning?

The secret to Finland’s surge in the education ranks is a certain fearlessness and willingness to try something new. It is also about remembering that kids are humans too, and deserve to enjoy their childhoods.

But what was also evident during my visit to Helsinki was the pride each community has in its school. Education is respected and appreciated, and so are the educators.

“As a parent, you don’t worry about where you live. Every school in Finland is equal. It’s not like you have to wonder where in the city you should live in order for your child to receive a good education. All schools are the same and equal. That’s the reason for the success of Finland’s education system,” said Manninen.

This principle carries through from newly arrived immigrants to kids with special needs, and it is all designed to help them fit in and thrive. “There are no social divisions when it comes to education. That’s the key to Finnish success. Where you live doesn’t matter.”

And, even despite its success in turning its education system around from one of failure to one that towers globally, Finland is hoping to do more with an even newer curriculum.

The bravery and openness to new ways of doing things would astonish the most slavish followers of rules and by-rote learning in education systems around the world. For example, the new curriculum contains recommendations – not orders – to phase out numerical grades for assessing student performance in favour of more qualitative approaches such as written and spoken feedback.

Manninen sums it up: “It is all about changing learning environments to be more learning-centric. You don’t need so many desks and chairs; you can be innovative. The curriculum encourages schools to get outside their buildings. For example, there is a huge library here in Helsinki’s city centre and lots of places to visit during the school day.

“Our attitude is that every place is a place to learn.”

Related: psychology , health , Finland , apps , Opinion , education , gaming

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years. His interests include all things technological, music, movies, reading, history, gaming and losing the occasional game of poker.

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