I recently tuned into an online webinar by Pasi Sahlberg talking about his book called Finnish Lessons. Finland has one of the top performing school systems in the world, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, a report published by the OECD that compares the competencies of 15-year-olds in about 70 countries in reading, math and science. Despite the fact that Finnish students do less homework and spend fewer hours at school than the OECD average, the country consistently ranks among the Top 3, sharing honours with education superpowers, such as China, Korea and Singapore, which are associated with rigid discipline and rote learning. Finland also came in third overall in the World Economic Forum’s most recent Global Competitiveness Survey.
Sahlberg is careful to highlight that the success of the education programme in Finland is closely related to other social and economic conditions in Finland: education is highly valued in society, there is a strong environment of trust in public services, society values collaboration over competition, and, above all, they value equality highly (gender, wealth distribution).
Sahlberg compares the Finnish Way to the Global Educational Reform Movement, characterised by teacher accountability and school comparison and suggests Finland's success has been on the emphasis on developing interpersonal skills, such as collaboration, and the ability to acquire, utilize, diffuse and create (rather than just learn) knowledge.
In his book The Global Fourth Way: The inspiring future for educational change, Dr. Andy Hargreaves makes a similar point. Speaking in this article he said“Following the lead of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and before them, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, [the movement] set about centralizing more of the curriculum and introducing more testing to hold teachers accountable,” Dr. Hargreaves wrote in an e-mail. “It provided a new generation of consumer-oriented parents with information about the performance of schools, and published rankings of schools to stimulate market competition between them. Instead of measuring what we value, we have got stuck in valuing what we can easily measure.”
This last point is particularly poignant in my opinion. It seems to me that the challenge is how to expand school's sense of accountability to things beyond test results, things that may not be so easily measured but that are equally important.
Sahlberg summarises what the world can learn from Finland as:
Sahlberg is careful to highlight that the success of the education programme in Finland is closely related to other social and economic conditions in Finland: education is highly valued in society, there is a strong environment of trust in public services, society values collaboration over competition, and, above all, they value equality highly (gender, wealth distribution).
Sahlberg compares the Finnish Way to the Global Educational Reform Movement, characterised by teacher accountability and school comparison and suggests Finland's success has been on the emphasis on developing interpersonal skills, such as collaboration, and the ability to acquire, utilize, diffuse and create (rather than just learn) knowledge.
In his book The Global Fourth Way: The inspiring future for educational change, Dr. Andy Hargreaves makes a similar point. Speaking in this article he said“Following the lead of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and before them, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, [the movement] set about centralizing more of the curriculum and introducing more testing to hold teachers accountable,” Dr. Hargreaves wrote in an e-mail. “It provided a new generation of consumer-oriented parents with information about the performance of schools, and published rankings of schools to stimulate market competition between them. Instead of measuring what we value, we have got stuck in valuing what we can easily measure.”
This last point is particularly poignant in my opinion. It seems to me that the challenge is how to expand school's sense of accountability to things beyond test results, things that may not be so easily measured but that are equally important.
Sahlberg summarises what the world can learn from Finland as:
- More collaboration less competition.
- Prevention is cheaper than repair (so invest in early childhood development and child health and well-being).
- School must be ready for the child, rather than children ready for school (personalise schooling to meet the needs of those children attending, rather than expecting children to fit into homogenous school settings).
- More gender equality, more child-friendly policies (more women in decision-making positions leads to more child-friendly policies - see more on this here).
- Enhancing social equity also enhances quality (more equal societies have better quality schooling).