Education and the Finnish society
Finland has built up an education system whose characteristics consist of uniformity, free education, school meals and special education by using the principle of inclusion. Typical of Finland are very small differences between schools, which may be explained by the definition of admission areas and the lack of ranking lists and thus by the even distribution of good teachers between schools. Finnish society has a very positive attitude to education. 73 % of the 25-64-year olds have at least gained a certificate from upper secondary level and 33 % (the highest in the EU) have had a university or corresponding education. The completion of basic education is a prerequisite for further studies. Only slightly more than one percent of the age group does not receive a comprehensive school leaving certificate. According to research more than half of these drop-outs will later in one way or another receive it and possibly also a further certificate.
In Finland school administrators very much cooperate with teachers’, subject teachers’ and headmasters’ associations. In this way measures to develop education receive strong support.
History of the school system
Education reforms in the 70s
The Finnish school system has been intentionally developed towards the comprehensive model, which guarantees everybody equal opportunities in education irrespective of sex, social status, ethnic group, etc. according to the constitution. The old school system has been replaced by a completely new one over a long period of time (about 30 years). The first steps for setting up a new system were taken in education policy decisions between 1964 and 1968. It was then decided that the parallel school system would be replaced by national nine-year basic education. In practice, the renewal was realized in Finland step by step between 1972 and 1977, starting from the north and ending up in the south. At the same time responsibility for basic education was given almost exclusively to the providers of education, i.e. in practice to municipalities. Only a few special schools and university training schools remained as state maintained schools. Schools continued to follow the nationally accepted curriculum, and ability grouping was introduced in the teaching of mathematics and languages. Teaching at schools was inspected by the school inspection system.
In 1985 the ability group system was abolished so that eligibility to further studies would be open to everyone. At the same time, by giving extra resources to schools, the aim was to guarantee the fairly small number of teaching groups in the teaching of the whole age group. At the same time the providers of education were given more and more opportunities to decide on how to organize teaching. Ten years later many schools introduced flexible groupings of pupils where pupils with different ability grouping studied in their own groups. It was, however, possible to move from one group to another also in the middle of the school year. When evaluating pupils for school leaving certificates the same criteria were applied irrespective of the group in which they had studied.
1990s: the role of central administration diminished
In 1994, a large change was made in order to diminish the role of central administration in deciding on the contents and aims of teaching. The Finnish National Board of Education gave only very broad aims and contents for the teaching of different subjects. The providers of education and finally schools set up their own curricula on the basis of the national core curriculum. In these plans local needs could be taken into consideration and special features of the school could be made use of.
At the beginning of the 1990s the system of inspecting textbooks was discontinued. The central administration of education trusted the providers of education and teachers more and more, and their judgement to choose the best possible teaching materials on the market. This procedure made possible free competition of teaching materials and their development to correspond to the curricula. By the beginning of the 1990s the system of school inspection was discontinued. The realization of national goals was instead systematically evaluated by national and international surveys of learning results.
The Finnish Government adopted the new allocation of lessons for basic education in 2001 and the new National Core Curriculum for Basic Education was introduced as from 16th January 2004. In the new distribution of lesson hours the minimum number of lesson hours in mathematics and mother tongue were increased by one and two hours respectively. The new final assessment criteria for basic education specify the level of competence required for grade 8 (good).