Finnish lessons

Finland is regarded as one of the best performing education systems in the world. How has this small Scandinavian country achieved such a status – and does it have anything to teach the rest of the world?

They like competition in Finland.

In this sparsely populated land of northern lights, vast arctic forests and Nokia, bizarre and eclectic challenges are something of a national obsession. For example, it hosts world championships for Sauna endurance, mobile phone throwing (the world record is held by a Finn who hurled a handset 85 metres) and wife carrying, among others.

But the deadly serious world of education is one area where the Finns don't do competition, says Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg (right).

Sahlberg, who describes himself as a school improvement activist, heads up the Centre for International Mobility at Finland's Ministry of Education.

He spoke to school leaders at the National College’s Seizing Success annual conference in Birmingham in June about Finland’s recipe for success in the international league tables.

He said that although Finland now topped tables of educational achievement – attracting the interest of policy makers and educationalists the world over – the country's international rankings were of little concern to Finnish principals and educators, whose focus had always been teaching and learning and ensuring that every child was in a good school.

In order to understand Finland’s approach to education you had to understand the country, he said.

“We’ve learned to build our education system through a spirit of survival,” he said. “In Finland we have always understood that we are nothing but average. As a nation, in sport and particularly in education.

“We are doing things differently and are able to build an education system that provides good and happy schools for every child but we have never thought that we are the best in the world.

“We are competitive but we do not compete on education.”

For a country whose educators eschew competition, Finland has been something of a star performer in the international comparison tables.

It has risen from educational obscurity since 1970 to become the best performing European country – and one of the best in the world – in terms of learning, participation, equality and efficiency. The landmark date that signified that Finland had arrived as a world leading education performer came in December 2001 when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD’s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tables on education performance were first published and gave the first hard evidence of Finland’s success.

Sahlberg outlined key approaches that contributed to Finland's success, including less teaching time than in many countries, pupils spending less time studying (children start schooling three years later than in England, aged seven) and fewer tests.

Finnish teachers teach less – around 100 fewer hours a year than their English counterparts and almost half the time of US teachers.

And Finnish pupils also study less – 5,500 compulsory instruction hours between the ages of 7, when they start school, and 14, compared to 7,000 in England.

There is less emphasis on testing as well, Sahlberg said.

“We do believe that it is very difficult to have an external national standard assessment that enables us to put our children in order,” he said. “That’s why we have left assessment of children’s progress to the teachers.”

Finland favours holistic and personalised learning over core subjects and standardisation. And he emphasised that genuine collaboration and striving for equity for all pupils had a central role to play.

He said teaching was seen as a dream job by the country's best and brightest graduates and that schools could "cherry pick" applicants.

As a relatively young country (it didn’t gain independence from neighbouring Russia until 1917) teachers are regarded as key to the development of the nation and the teacher recruitment programme has the pick of the nation’s best graduates.

“No person will be accepted for teacher training if they cannot explain why they want to teach. If you aren’t able to answer that question we’ll move onto the next candidate.

"There is a very strong social role for teaching in Finland, Teachers have always been perceived as nation builders. They have a very strong moral purpose," he said.

Sahlberg used his presentation to draw a contrast between the Finnish way of doing things and some of the school improvement strategies being pursued in many countries around the globe.

“There are no such things as core subjects – we are all about holistic learning. We don’t like standardisation – we do personalisation. And it’s not about competition, it’s about collaboration,” he explained.

“It’s also not about choice but equity. I am sure that every school is a good school. We have a thing called positive discrimination. If a school is struggling they are given more resources until that school gets out of trouble.”

But it was simply not possible for other countries to take Finland's approaches and transplant them into their own education systems, he said. What could be taken from Finland's experience was a desire to question current ways of doing things and try different approaches - and to trust the professionals, he said.

"We have gradually built trust in our education practitioners throughout the last 20 years,” says Sahlberg.

"When I started teaching there was no trust in the system. Now we've built trust by giving authority to schools and principals.

“When visitors come to Finland to see how we are doing things I always ask them what they will take away from their visit and they say they understand trust and how it is embedded in our system."