If you haven’t heard about the Finnish education system already then it’s worth searching the term on Google or even YouTube and getting a quick look at some of the key features and figures denoting worldwise success (I’ve only not listed them here because the details change annually but I have listed some videos at the bottom of this for easy reference). What really needs to be discussed is whether the UK could realistically adopt some of the features that make the Finnish education system stand out, and what factors are getting in the way of embedding such a proven methodology.
This post does not explore all the background rationale for comparative education models but there’s a really good (and rather long) video looking at the bigger picture to all of this. Some links for you at the bottom. The aim of this post, much like the majority of this blog, is to break down some of the stuff happening out there and hopefully inspire change – giving school leaders ideas about what could change their school for the better, and giving activists information and concepts to address through central policy.
That being said, no system is perfect. All countries boast about their education system (they’d be fools not to) but that doesn’t mean it translates to the reality of the classroom. That’s up to the practitioners in each school. I’m not here to criticize any person or any model, and purposely choosing to focus on things that are going well and will leave it up to Finnish policy makers and teachers to address anything that needs improving.
Teaching standards
Teachers are always the favourite scapegoat so I thought I’d start here. Similar to France, Finland has high expectations and recruitment requirements for their teachers. All must be educated to Masters level (MA) and so will have completed 5-7 years of extra training, meaning they are more likely to be fully invested in their profession. Not to say that UK teachers lack commitment, just that when times get tough do you walk away and find something else, or do you insist on change so that you can continue in your chosen profession? Food for thought.
By contrast, the key skills required in the UK are “to have achieved a standard equivalent to grade C/4, or above, in the GCSE examinations in English and mathematics,” in order to be accepted on a Bachelor Degree in education or Post-Grad (max 4 years of additional education). But that doesn’t mean our teachers aren’t as good. To the contrary, vocational experience is just as paramount as academia and whilst it would be lovely to have state-funded further education available for all teachers to engage in a Masters, it is neither paramount nor realistic when you look at the real priorities (such as recruitment). In short, for the most part our teachers are great and training is sufficient – of course there is always room for improvement and that’s another post altogether – and where there are cases of staff who struggle, schools on the whole have the means of supporting them. Again, there’s room for improvement but let’s keep this a bit more macro and focus on the priorities being staff retention and teachers’ welfare before extending the entrance requirements even further. The cold hard truth is that we have a shortage of teachers in this country anyway so let’s not make it harder… yet. And briefly while we’re on the topic, France has extremely high standards for teachers and oversubscription because the profession is valued, yet in the PISA 2018 report 15 year olds scored lower than the UK on reading, Maths and Science (the 2022 data is on it’s way, following a covid delay).
Would you get a higher caliber of teachers if standards were raised to be on par with doctors and lawyers? First off, I can’t imagine our current government would fund that, and secondly those potential educators would see the pitfalls to their lifestyle and run a million miles in the other direction. So let’s focus on the other, higher priorities with realistic potential for change.
Testing and League Tables
There are no standardised tests until children reach GCSE age in Finland. Shall I say it again for those at the back? No. Standardised. Testing. The outcome? A focus on learning for the sake of learning and a very blatant message that teachers and school leaders are trusted to do their jobs.
I remember as a Head of Faculty being perplexed when at KS4 there were reports of our young people taking far less notice in their foundation PE and RE lessons. You could try to coerce them, entice them, explain the benefits to them but it wasn’t until we offered them a certificate that many started to take notice – either in coaching, a short course or for participation. It highlights all too clearly that when you continually measure yourself by extrinsic standards (sticker charts, assessment levels, grades) you run the risk of lacking the intrinsic motivations to succeed without an audience. That’s not to say that competition needs to be removed but a healthy redress of the balance is probably necessary. Which brings us along to another useful point – the tendency towards collaboration before competition in Finland. This one is a little more tricky because it’s a somewhat cultural choice which is difficult to unpick in one blog post, but as an adult, how often do you sit in isolation at work, forbidden from talking to anyone else for hours at a time, whilst solving a problem? All I’m saying is that there are other ways of measuring progress and success so it’s about time we took a long, hard look at what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
Whilst it would take years of unpicking a colonial culture to shift our beliefs around valuable and damaging competition, one action we can and should get behind is the abolition of standardised testing before the age of 16. Raise children to understand that education is about learning, together with the value and necessity of assessment at relevant times to measure progress, and you’ll find that they have a healthy response to exams when they do eventually come along at age 16, plus they’ll demonstrate the intrinsic motivation skills to work towards their best selves. “How!?” I hear you cry. I dive into this in depth on the webinar, when we discuss ‘Generation C-19’ .
League Tables are non-existent in Finland because every school is expected to be as good as the next one, rather than the postcode lottery in some areas of the UK . Why are we accepting banners with “95% Level 5-9 at GCSE” as suitable marketing material for our children’s education? It says nothing about the ethos of the school, the culture or the well-being , and worse it allows emotionally illiterate teachers to hide behind cattle farming their kids through a syllabus, churning out regurgitative robots and ignoring some of those who might need their intervention the most.
Business owners have long besmirched some of the young people in their employ who can follow instructions but fail to think for themselves, yet there’s every chance they came from a school with a 95% pass rate.
Lessons
“That all sounds lovely, but how do you monitor where children are at in their learning?” I hear you cry. And that one is quite simple… You trust their teachers. Or better yet, you trust School Leaders to support and empower the professional judgement of their faculty .
Teachers aren’t stupid – they know when a child is struggling and they often know how to help them. Likewise they know how to use testing as a suitable assessment method. But the issues around intervention are complicated – funding and availability for statementing (again, the use of labelling is a separate issue altogether), parental or home support, specialist teaching and resource availability. What teachers need is a more structured and supportive system for intervention which looks holistically at the specific situations, but we’ll come on to that in a second . Let’s stick to the average lesson and how the school day can impact progress.
By the time you’ve explained a topic, gathered some class interaction to cast your net about basic understanding having been grasped, and then set the group off on a task, it’s invariably time to move on to the next activity. In Finland, teachers are able to ‘deep dive’ into lessons and take their time. This embeds learning and allows the lesson to breathe. It also teaches focus and attention training to developing minds. Teachers can work their way around a room and ascertain who is achieving and who is struggling, but most importantly, take the time to intervene and allow those children to practice and succeed. Lessons last much longer than an hour, with 15 minute breaks in between and children are only at school for about 4 hours a day. They start later and finish earlier because it’s best for the childrens’ well-being rather than what’s best for the parents’ work day. Granted, parents need to work and often both parents are forced to provide for a certain standard of living, but first and foremost we’re looking for changes which benefit our kids. So whether that’s workplaces rolling out more work-from-home options, flexi-hours, extended state childcare focussed on play rather than learning, or simply less people choosing to have wee ones because they want to focus on their career, then so be it.
Another option which could be brought in by forward-thinking Head Teachers is for classroom teachers to take responsibility for a class and then carry that same cohort through for their entire education. The class becomes more like a family and the teacher an extension of their family. It might be difficult for a child who perhaps clashes with the teacher but sometimes kids clash with their parents as well and they have to work around that. Firstly, when you take on a class that young you are able to mould them accordingly, second, there’s no reason a child cannot move to a different class if it truly becomes untenable, but most importantly, teachers commit to investing in those relationships for 5-6 years. They don’t have the option to pass the buck to the next teacher in line, which does happen in places at the moment, let’s be honest. They also have a more detailed understanding of the child’s development as a result. Sure, there might be an age range where a teachers’ specialism will flourish, but that happens with parenting as well. The point is that teachers grow with their class and the class grows with their teacher, in a collectively nurturing environment where faculty feel empowered to ask for help and support without being judged.
There is a valid argument for the same to happen at secondary level as well, considering young people are already beholden to a timetable weighted heavily towards their Maths and English lessons. Why aren’t staff allowed to keep the same cohorts from year 7 to 9 and really get to know them properly? What is the genuine benefit of switching teachers every year and only keeping the same form tutor? Make staff accountable for the children they’re educating rather than an external quality assurance (Ofsted), by giving teachers the chance to really get to know their kids, rather than just about figuring it out by Easter, then saying goodbye to them in the Summer.
Intervention
The other way children are monitored in Finland is through weekly meetings with welfare stakeholders about any academic or health interventions that are required.
Finnish children are considered ‘special’ if they haven’t had some level of learning intervention throughout their early school life. This reduces the gap in progress and eliminates the stigma around additional help, contributing to wellbeing and self esteem. It’s like Universal Basic Income versus a welfare state – stop highlighting people’s shortcomings and keeping them in a perpetual cycle of limited self-worth – invest properly in improving everyone’s existence and expectations. Schools have a nurse and an Educational Psychologist or full-time counsellor with an active and relevant role in developing the whole child.
This is only possible with considerable funding so it’s worth outlining that Finland has a population of 5.5 million compared to the UK’s 68 million, but when it comes to funding we start to venture into wealth distribution and that wasn’t the aim of this post.
Some classes are vertically mixed with children aged 7 learning alongside children aged 10. This means that they judge one another on their ability rather than their age and younger children have older peers to both model and support their progress, developing self-esteem and community but also recognising that we all learn in different ways and at different times so even if a 7 year old grasps maths faster than you, as a 10 year old you might be able to help them to throw and catch a ball. Effort, respect and collaboration are high on the priority list and learners quickly understand their strengths rather than constantly being compared to children their own age.
What’s really important here is that academia is NOT prioritised. A lot of our issues are deeply rooted in the assessment model of the education system which tells children outright that some skills are considered more important than others, but let’s not get bogged down with that – the takeaway is that in order for vertical teaching to work, everyone has to understand that all skills are valued because they come from the individual. PSHE leads the way to invested learners so even with the assessment constraints we currently face, teachers have the power to teach youngsters about what matters and what’s less important.
If you’re a teacher, just picture the scene… a lesson with a gradual, calm pace where those who work quickly have extension activities and those who struggle have the time and peer or teacher support to make good, esteem-building progress. Then you all have at least a 15 minute break to shake it all out before you go again. Rinse and repeat that once more with an outdoor activity in the afternoon and send the children on their way. Off you go to collaborative planning meetings. No more formal assessment to take up your time and instead you can make parent phone calls, create exciting lesson content or – here’s a crazy thought – carry out research on developments in education. You’ve had the time to informally assess throughout the lesson because you’ve had the time to steadily work around the room and have a good idea about the progress which has been made, and because your judgement is trusted, you trust yourself.
Curriculum
Literacy is just as important in Finland as it is in the rest of the world and it too takes up the focus of the curriculum. Books and texts are used as a daily exercise and children are expected to express themselves and tell stories every day. Finnish children also grow up learning 3 or 4 languages – Finnish, Swedish & English for economic reasons and then sometimes a 4th. This has a huge impact on literacy so it’s worth looking at how and why we teach languages in school. Simply being relatively bi-lingual from a young age can have a huge impact on language acquisition and retention.
Again, because British children are being trained to take exams, their learning outcomes tend to be geared towards a worksheet or graded exercise. How relevant is that to real life? How many exams have you taken since leaving school?
A more realistic outcome is project work, started at the beginning of the term or the year, depending on the age of the child and their ability to focus or invest in a project. The child is able to develop at their own pace, with staggered exercises which a teacher can monitor and assess at each stage whilst also giving children a clear journey and focus – a little like working through the levels on a computer game. Completing the project to the standard you are capable of is the learning focus, not getting everyone to the same level. Within that, lessons on effort and growth mindset are embedded, meaning children are more likely to want to review and re-attempt their learning the next time around. Most children have little intrinsic interest in a worksheet or an exercise book, but a tangible outcome or creation they can take home, share and celebrate is the stuff youthful memories are made of. Think about how much more invested you were in making a box in technology lessons, versus writing about, researching and answering questions about the different joints, types of woods or tools involved.
Limiting Beliefs
Population is obviously a contributing factor – it’s cheaper to educate everyone and you need fewer high quality teachers in Finland in order to get the job done. However, France has a similar population to the UK and they still manage to fund their schools really well because it’s a priority for spending. It really is that simple.
Culturally, Finns value equality and education which does differ from some aspects of British society. However, there’s a school of thought that if you get these things right, those opinions might change. Children will feel less like a candidate number and more like a human being so in turn will act like one. They grow up in an education environment that they enjoy and value, so when the time comes they too invest in their child having the same experience – that way the cycle shifts from the current paradigm where some parents have lost faith in state education and so have somewhat low expectations for their child.
I appreciate we’re talking about a cultural shift here, and one which is by no means easy to implement or even fully relevant to an English school system, but my intention is to suggest ideas and highlight how school leaders’ hands are tied without some flexibility from policymakers on how we run our schools.
Whilst there’s apparently only a magic money tree at very specific times in a governments’ life, there are choices schools can make which don’t involve budget decisions – changes to timetable, lesson length and break times, teacher/class progression and the focus on collaboration over competition (which a lot of institutions do already), are all things that Head Teachers can validly engage their faculty in implementing. Yes, class sizes are smaller and teachers have the time to create personalised learning schedules but that time has been accounted for by the school schedule. It’s scary to make some of these huge changes and unfortunately budgets are always going to be a sticking point for some schools.
As a grassroots education movement it then becomes all of our responsibility to encourage policy makers to deal with the other elephant in the room – the abolition of formalised testing before the age of 16 and a shift in focus towards actively celebrating vocational learners.
At what age do you think testing should begin?
Do you have other ideas about aspects which can be implemented to improve everyone’s learning?
Have you tried any of these methods and have feedback to share – successes and pitfalls?
Developing education practice is at the heart of what drives Morphise and I fundamentally believe that when we empower a workforce of teachers to understand who they are, why they teach, what’s important to them and what contribution they most want to make to education, we’ll start to see the grassroots development and transformation we know is possible. Our teachers are some of the most talented in the world – I know, I’ve worked with plenty of them! – so it’s about time we give them the tools, confidence, resources and framework to do the job even better than they are already and to really draw out their potential. If you believe this is possible and want to find out how, get in touch today to learn about how UCU can transform your school’s professional development.