Finland: the real education revolution

Sunday 2 September 2012 12:05PM

Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have both talked about an education revolution. In Finland they have already had one and created the best education system in the world.

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Transcript for Rear Vision 02 September 2012

Emma Alberici, Lateline (archival): Over the past decades, successive Australian governments have increased spending on education only to learn that academic achievement in the country’s schools has slipped well below our international counterparts. A push is now on to encourage states to allow school principals to become more autonomous. Much of the new thinking in Australia was adopted in Finland more than 30 years ago…

Peter Garrett (archival): I think it’s clear that the Finnish have placed a very high emphasis on the professional standing of teachers, and they’re well remunerated too.

Emma Alberici, Lateline (archival): …and has given the Finnish what the OECD consistently rates as the best education system in the world.

Annabelle Quince: For the past 10 years Finland has outperformed Australia in the OEDC test known as PISA. Run every three years, PISA aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by assessing 15-year-olds in three key subjects: reading, mathematics and science.

So how is it that Finland, with a population of only 5 million, no mineral resources and an exceptionally cold climate, can outperform us in Australia?

Hello I’m Annabelle Quince and this is Rear Vision on RN and via the web. Today we take a look at education in Finland: how they developed their education system, what makes it so different from ours, and what if anything we can learn from their experience.

Finland’s education revolution began in the 1970s, but before we get to that, what kind of system did the Finns have before their revolution? Pasi Sahlberg is the director general at the Centre for International Mobility in Helsinki.

Pasi Sahlberg: The most visible feature of the education system before the great reform of 1970 was that we had like a parallel education system of two different kinds: the other one was the one that selected certain people and prepared them for academic studies in further education and finally universities; and then the other one that was for those who never aimed or were thought not to be able to continue education and was preparing them for work.

One of the things that was typical of this system was that when Finland came out of the war—after the Second World War—we were a fairly poor country and there was a huge shortage of money to provide proper education for everybody, so that’s why it was a very inequitable and unequal system as well, because it was based on where people happened to live and who their parents were. So it was a kind of a parallel divided system of education all the way until 1970s.

Jussi Välimaa: The system of education in Finland was similar that they have in Germany today, which means that we had four years of schooling after which you had to decide whether you continue to an academic track or vocational track.

Annabelle Quince: Professor Jussi Välimaa from the Finnish Institute for Educational Research.

Jussi Välimaa: Academic track led to five years of schooling and another three years of schooling after which you would apply for university, whereas the vocational track led to two extra years of schooling, after which you continued to vocational track.

The problem was that only very few people—about one-sixth of the age cohort—continued to the vocational track. This was felt as a problem and there was a consensus in Finnish society that something needed to be done.

Pasi Sahlberg: I can give you one figure that is probably telling about the kind of amount of people that went to education. In 1960, for example, we had only 4 per cent of our adult population having a higher education degree and nearly 90 per cent just had a basic education, which often meant about seven or eight years of education. We had a very rapidly increasing need for grammar school or lower secondary education after the war and we had probably half of our students went… When I started to go to school in 1970, in grammar school there were only about half of the kids, or less than half of the kids, did that, so it meant that for the majority of Finns, the education path finished at the age of 15 or 16.

Jussi Välimaa: The first four years and the vocation track were public, whereas the majority of the academic track was private. But that was not that kind of big issue, because also the private sector or the private track schools, they were heavily subsidised by public authorities. So the question was not that much private against public, but it was more like vocational against academic. And the problem was that most people who continued to vocational schools, they had no chances in advancing to universities later in their life.

Annabelle Quince: So what were the main social and political drivers when Finland embarked on its education revolution in the late sixties and early seventies?

Pasi Sahlberg: Well, there was a very clear understanding that as a small nation, if we want to be like our western neighbours—we were very much looking at what Sweden was doing—we have to educate everybody. The other was that Finland was also part of this Northern European and Nordic welfare states idea, where one of the key points was that education has to be comprehensive and inclusive for everybody. And this is what Sweden did in the 1960s, and we were very much part of this welfare state project.

But I think the driver really was that we committed ourselves to a kind of an equity-based education and really took the equality of educational opportunity very seriously in this country to make sure that in the future everybody has an opportunity to progress and to be educated. So there were these two… one of the kind of a political commitment, and then the kind of an economic reason that we need to educate everybody for our labour markets.

Annabelle Quince: Ari Antikainen, professor emeritus in education, argues the main reason for the reforms was the changing nature of the Finnish economy.

Ari Antikainen: The main principle was the comprehensive school system and it was equity, but also qualification of people, qualification of manpower, because we were moving from an agrarian society to industrial society. The Nordic welfare state model followed the following principles: citizen equal social rights—so-called universalism—and second, responsibility of the state for the welfare of all citizens; third, striving towards the narrowing of difference in income and centring equality; and fourth, striving towards full employment. So this was the background for the school reform.

Annabelle Quince: In 1963, the Finnish parliament voted to reform education and by 1971, the new comprehensive school system was being rolled out across Finland.

Ari Antikainen: The implementation started in the rural areas of northern and eastern Finland in 1971 and was completed in southern Finland, in Helsinki, in 1977. During the first five years of comprehensive school, teachers had in-service training. And soon there was established teacher training units in faculties of education in universities. And the Master of Arts became basic degree for class teachers.

Pasi Sahlberg: All the way up until the mid-1970s, Finnish teachers were trained—primary school teachers were trained—in colleges that were not university-related, and then subject teachers were educated in universities, normally having bachelor’s degree-level studies in their subject and then some educational studies as well.

So the change that followed the comprehensive school reform initiation in early 1970s was the new proposal to have the teacher education system that would be in the universities based on academic studies, and ultimately based on the master’s degree-based research, academic studies in the universities. The argument was that because teachers will be working in much more complex environments, because of the diversity of students, and more required kind of a content specification as well, that they had to have a better education.

So this legislation that was passed in our parliament in 1978 and started to implement it in 1979, changed the teacher education completely and kind of upgraded the profession also at the same time. This has been a critical decision, because only when we started to require an academic master’s degree also from primary teachers we began to see much more interest among Finnish young people into teaching. So that’s why we have now about ten times more applicants to our primary school teacher education programs in our universities than we can take in, because it’s master’s degree-based.

Jussi Välimaa: The main goal of the comprehensive school system was to create equally good schools no matter where they are located and no matter who are attending the schools. So they have been given equal resources and equally good trained teachers. And what is remarkable in the Finnish education system, or exceptional on the basis of PISA studies, is that even the worst Finnish schools are at the average international level. So the differences between Finnish schools is the smallest in the world.

However, there are some trends that these differences are becoming bigger, but our present government has decided that this trend should be resisted, and those schools who are not performing that well or who are under-resourced, they should be given more resources. In Finnish society when we see that inequality is increasing, there is normally a will—a political will—to resist that trend.

Annabelle Quince: A second wave of reforms came in the 1980s, when Finland expanded its upper secondary school system.

Pasi Sahlberg: When this comprehensive school reform began to show some results and success it meant that there were many more parents and many more young people who wanted to continue studies in upper secondary education, and that’s why we want to make sure that we have, first of all that we have two equally competitive and meaningful options for those young people who want to study in upper secondary level. And we started to build a vocational upper secondary choice that would be high quality and not only the kind of a second or third choice, but first choice for many students.

And then the academic high school, one of the challenges that we had… for example, when I went to school, when I went to high school, we had a huge dropout rate in upper secondary school, and that was something that we wanted to really reduce. One of the things that we did in upper secondary education, as I said, was to make vocational upper secondary school a kind of a real first choice for those young people who want to study but they don’t want to study the academic fields. And that’s why we also created the tertiary education or higher education system where these students who graduate from vocational schools could continue studying.

The second thing we did was to change the whole structure of the academic upper secondary school so that it’s more flexible and allows young people to follow their personal learning and study plans and study more the things that they are interested in and also pace their own studies, own schooling, so that they could spend anything from two-and-a-half years to five years in high school without having to repeat a grade or drop out because of their performance. So, in other words, we wanted to make a flexible system that is attractive to as many young people as possible.

In Finland, the compulsory education ends at the end of comprehensive school—that is normally when kids are about 16 years of age—so we have to have a system that is interesting, because it’s not… these young people will not continue schooling.

Annabelle Quince: So how many people now continue on to upper secondary?

Pasi Sahlberg: It’s about 95 per cent every year.

Annabelle Quince: During the first decade of this education revolution, reforms were driven from the top down, but in the late 1980s there was a pushed to decentralise the system.

Ari Antikainen: It was a very centralised system until 1980s and there was a lot of criticism against this centralisation and bureaucracy. At the same time, it meant kind of a sustainable administration and leadership, which was needed. In other ways it could be very difficult to implement this reform. But of course after 10 years of the beginning it was so strong criticism against this centralisation and bureaucracy that we moved to a more decentralised system.

Pasi Sahlberg: This decentralisation movement took place in Finland at the same time as it happened in many other countries here in Europe, which is the late 1980s, early 1990s, where we decided to pass over the authority to the local municipalities. Local government is very strong here in Finland. They have been before, but now after this decentralisation movement they are—in practice, they are kind of the key players here; the central government has very little authority over anything, including education now.

So I often say that Finland is probably the most decentralised country in this respect, because we have 330 local governments and municipalities and cities and they really decide how they want to run their education and they also finance most part of the education that they do. This means that every school and every municipality has their own curriculum—it’s not the national, state curriculum like many other countries have, so there’s a lot of variation in terms of the philosophy and ethos of schools and municipalities as well. It’s a kind of a system where teacher and the principal community is the key in deciding how the schools will be run.

Annabelle Quince: You’re with Rear Vision on RN and via the web. I’m Annabelle Quince and today we’re taking a look at Finland’s education system and trying to understand what makes it one of the best in the world.

The introduction of the new comprehensive system wasn’t without its critics—and that criticism lasted right up until the first PISA results, in 2001.

Pasi Sahlberg: There was a very strong resistance since the beginning of this school reform, actually starting from this famous historic vote in 1963 and really becoming visible in 1970s, when we started to implement this project. The main item in this criticism was the fact that we are… trying to educate everybody will be a waste of time and resources, because there will be people who will never learn anything.

The other one was that if we insist that everybody goes to the similar type of comprehensive school that has the same requirement for everybody in every school, we’ll eventually kill the talent; in other words, this system is not able to allow those who can learn more and have more talents and more abilities and could progress further than the others. And this was obviously a kind of a misconception of the whole school idea, because there was a very clear idea of in-school differentiation of instruction and very strong focus on special education from early on.

But there was, you know… this resistance continued throughout the seventies and it was even intensified in 1980s. And the industry—Finnish industry and many of the business sector people—joined this. And the prime minister and politicians came along and it became quite a little bit different form in 1990s. And then finally the first results of the OECD PISA in 2001 saved the Finnish school system, because much of this criticism basically was muted overnight.

Michael Turtle, AM (archival): The OECD study of 15-year-olds happens every three years and it’s the biggest of its kind. More than 400,000 students from 57 countries are tested in three key areas: reading, maths and science.

Journalist (archival): Schools in Finland are the envy of the world, consistently topping the OECD education comparison charts.

Pasi Sahlberg: Oh, it was a huge shock. There were many people who couldn’t believe that this can be true and that’s why there were many of those who said that we should wait for the next PISA study, three years later, to see what happens. And so this argument went on for the three years here—people were explaining this performance in different ways. And when the second results were published three years later and Finland was even further from the other OECD countries, only then people started to believe that maybe there’s something in the system that is able to create better results. But it has been… overall this has been a huge surprise and shock also for most Finns, given the situation that there was so much criticism and doubts for the comprehensive school before 2000.

Annabelle Quince: What is it about Finland’s education system that makes it so different from other education systems?

Pasi Sahlberg: If you look at the school network, particularly the one that was built in the early years of this comprehensive school reform, these Finnish schools were—in the international scale—were fairly small. So it means that if anyone’s said that, ‘I’m teaching in a large school,’ it meant that you had, like, five or six hundred students. So a typical size of the elementary or primary school at that time was about… probably about 200 or 300 students. In the rural areas we had many schools where the number of students was 50 or something like that. The school I went to had probably about 50 or 60 students, the primary school.

So now we have with the same global movement and everybody else in education, we are looking for more productivity and efficiency that the school sizes are becoming bigger, particularly in the high school or upper secondary level. But Finnish schools are still, we try to keep them fairly small. Many principals say that the ideal size of the school is such that the principal can learn all the pupils by name by the end of first term so that they can speak to kids by their name, and this means that you can probably reasonably learn about 300 or 400 names if you really try hard. So that’s the kind of ideal size of the school still.

Jussi Välimaa: What makes the Finnish schools different is that the Finnish schools are trying to serve the needs of Finnish society. And I think that this is the crucial thing for every system of education: how it serves the needs of the society where it’s located.

In Finland the schools are normally well taken care of, politicians are interested in schools, parents are interested in schools, teacher training is at a good level. And in Finland we have quite good system of recognising students with learning difficulties and normally immediately when those kind of difficulties are recognised, there is made a plan how to help the student. So in Finland the idea is that we should help those students who are not performing well so they should not be left alone but taken care of.

Pasi Sahlberg: As I said, we use the term ‘early intervention’ in special education here, and mostly that when we speak about special education in Finland, we are mostly referring to the developmental or learning difficulties rather than physical or medical categories in special education. So it means that many of those who are in special education are there because they have learning difficulties in reading or mathematics or writing or something like this, and that’s why we have as an important part of the Finnish teacher communities are the special education teachers.

But special education also includes the idea in Finland that the students will get all sorts of other help and support during their school, when they’re in the school—meaning the health and psychological services and counselling—as a part of the work in every school. So it’s not something that we bring in when the problems are there, but these welfare and support services are available in every school all the time. For example, now in comprehensive school we have about one third of our students in special education, which means that special education is not really anything special.

And finally I would say that one other thing that Finland stands out of practically everybody else is that we are not assessing our students using a national standardised testing or assessment that is often harmful for the way that teachers are teaching and students are learning. We are assessing and evaluating a lot in the system, but not using the standardised assessments like Australia, for example, is doing. And I think that this leaves more resources for teacher development, and also more time for teachers and students to focus on learning rather than preparing kids for the test.

Jussi Välimaa: We are much more development-orientated than testing-orientated, which means that in Finland it’s normal not to test students but it’s more student assessment and paying attention to those things that need to be improved. And the numerical evaluation of your knowledge and your skills, it begins—depending on the school—but normally only at the third or fourth year. Before that it’s only written evaluation on how a pupil has advanced in reading, writing, counting or mathematics. So the whole idea of testing students—we don’t have it. Even it’s very rare also in universities.

Australian mother (archival): Jake got to the end of Grade 5 without being able to read a word. Up until that point, he’d been guessing and memorising.

Annabelle Quince: So could or do students fall through the cracks in Finland’s education system?

Jussi Välimaa: No, that’s not possible. And again you should remember that we are a nation state of five million people; the whole sort of dynamics is different here from Australia, because in Finland basically everybody knows everybody. But one of the problems with the Finnish system is that after comprehensive school we lose something like 5 per cent of the age cohort, so they don’t continue to upper level education or they don’t go to labour market. That is felt as a problem in Finland and leading to possible marginalisation of one group of people. So I don’t that think you can finish comprehensive school without being able to read or write.

Pasi Sahlberg: I don’t belong to those who think that Finland has the best education system in the world without any problems. One of them is that I mentioned earlier that we have 95 per cent of comprehensive school leavers who continue in upper secondary education, and one of the big problems we have is related to this 5 per cent, that we would like to see, of course, everybody continuing in upper secondary school.

In Finland the situation now is that if you only have comprehensive school education, you will never have permanent, sustainable employment in life and you’re likely to have many other problems together with unemployment and social issues. So that’s why we are working very hard to make sure that everybody would continue studying.

The second thing is that we have the same thing that many other countries—probably in Australia as well—that we are seeing more and more particularly adolescent boys who are not finding reading anything that they would do for fun. So our boys are reading much less than they used to and they are reading much less than girls. If you look at the last PISA, the performance difference in reading between boys and girls is one of the largest in all of the OECD countries in Finland, so we have seen a very rapid decline in the reading behaviour and abilities also among our boys. So we have to pay much more attention to this and make sure that the boys will be reading.

And thirdly I think an interesting challenge that we have, that has been created by this PISA hype that we have had now for the last 10 years, is that we don’t have a very clear shared idea here in Finland how the Finnish school should look like in 2025 or 2030. In other words, the direction for the future is not very clear, because there are many people who think that if you have a perfect system why should you change anything, because the thing that you change may be the one that is creating this good result. So we kind of are stuck in a situation where nobody’s really able to, you know, open the box and say that we need to think about and create the kind of next generation Finnish school, and we don’t have that at the moment. That’s one of the things that can become very costly for us in the future.

Jussi Välimaa: I was trained as a historian and a sociologist, and for me the context is quite important. And I, when I have been asked about the success of Finnish schools shown by PISA, normally people ask one to explain why their country’s doing not that well by paying attention to one or two things that we have and they don’t have. I would not like to pay attention to only one or two factors. The whole Finnish cultural and societal context is different and I think that the Finnish system of education serves well the needs of Finnish society, and luckily those have been evaluated by OECD as important learning objectives for students. The Finnish system of education was created decades before the whole PISA system was developed, so I’m emphasising the importance of context and tradition.

Annabelle Quince: Professor Jussi Välimaa from the Finnish Institute for Educational Research ending the program. My other guests were Pasi Sahlberg, director general at the Centre for International Mobility in Helsinki, and Ari Antikainen, professor emeritus in education.

If you’d like a transcript of this program or any Rear Vision program head to the web site—simply type ABC and Rear Vision into your search engine. And while you’re there, check out the archives: it’s a wealth of information on just about anything that’s been in the news over the past six months.

Today’s sound engineer is Timothy Nicastri. I’m Annabelle Quince and this is Rear Vision on RN. Thanks as always for joining us.


Pasi Sahlberg
Director General at the Centre for International Mobility in Helsinki
Professor Jussi Välimaa
Finnish Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyväskylä.
Professor Emeritus Ari Antikainen
Professor Emeritus of Education, University of Joensuu in Finland.


Annabelle Quince

Comments (9)

Add your comment

  • Jarvis Ryan :

    02 Sep 2012 3:40:36pm

    Interesting program. But I think you mean PASI Sahlberg, not Pisa.

      • Mirkka J-M :

        20 Sep 2012 10:09:57pm

        Hi, PISA is the standardised test and Pasi was one of the people interviewed in this programme. Best wishes, Mirkka J-M.

  • akensa :

    02 Sep 2012 8:38:07pm

    Wonderful program. But why do we not hear more about the Finnish School system. Clearly it is the best most efficient in the world. Clearly we should be adopting it here in Australia if we want to survive as a prosperous and harmonious country into the future. Yet in the Gonski school funding debate we hear nothing from most media about it. And apart from a few wonderful ABC programs such as Rear Vision there is very little other media focus on it. Even in the USA with all their education problems and lack of solutions it gets more airing than in Australian media, judging from my internet searching anyway.

  • John Morris :

    02 Sep 2012 11:04:07pm

    Respect teachers, pay them highly, fully fund public schools, universal pre-schooling, early intervention equity programs - bliss! On top - surprise, surprise - not just equity but "efficiency"!

      • Brad Raymond :

        08 Sep 2012 8:41:30am

        I'm a school teacher and I don't feel there is a lack of respect for teachers. If you are a good teacher you get the respect from the parents of your students. Put simply, there are not enough quality teachers teaching in our classrooms.

  • theodora :

    03 Sep 2012 4:26:23pm

    All teachers must have a Masters in Arts. Utopia.

  • Ari Antikainen :

    03 Sep 2012 5:48:13pm

    Despite the Pisa success and success in many social comparisons the Finnish welfare state and its education system has moved towards a competition state and a neoliberal trend in education from the 90s onward. Even two school shootings have occured.
    Ari Antikainen, Professor of Sociology of Education (Emeritus), University of Eastern Finland

  • Tony Weston :

    03 Oct 2012 5:18:21pm

    There is a comment in the program that Finland has no mineral resources. The September 2012 edition of International Mining describes Outukumpu's development of the namesake copper orebody in Finland from 1910 followed by large scale development of other mining, processing and smelting facilties. From the 1960s Outukumpu provided sophisticated mineral processing and smelting equipment to world markets and another company, Tampella, became a leading world supplier of underground mining equipment under the Tamrock and later Toro brands. Finland continues to develop world class mines. Mining has been an active participant in Finland's rapid emergence from a basically agrarian system in the 1900s.