It was a great honour for me, as part of my commitments to the GELP (Global Education Leadership Program), to come face-to-face with the most talked and written about education jurisdiction in the world — Finland. As our host, Auli Toom, at the University of Helsinki acknowledged, thousands of visitors come from all parts of the world to try to understand just what it is that Finland is doing so right, and what can be taken from it and applied to their own jurisdiction. Pasi Sahlberg’s book, Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? is a wonderful introduction to understanding what Finland is doing and why it is working so well. However, nothing quite beats seeing the “educational change” face-to-face.
In Sweden, just a 55-minute flight away, they are talking the same educational language (high-performing) and have the same goals (personalized learning), but in other ways, the Finnish experience couldn’t be more different. Whereas Sweden has a universal voucher system and a system that embraces choice and competition, Finland has focused on equity and equal opportunities.
This will be the first of two posts exploring the Finnish system. The visit to the university focussed on the pre-service of teachers, as will this particular post. The following presentation gives a solid overview of both the Finnish education system and their teacher training programs:
The teacher education program at the University of Helsinki receives about 1000 applicants annually, and admits about 100 to their program. They, along with the other universities with teacher training, only create space in their education programs balanced on the needs of the system; in British Columbia, the number of teachers being trained is dramatically greater than the number of teaching vacancies.
It has also been widely discussed that Finland obtains the “best of the best” teachers. Many will apply for teaching and then, if unsuccessful, look to other areas like medicine and engineering — this is somewhat the reverse of what happens in North America. It is clearly not the pay that is different. Toom describes teacher compensation as similar, if not less, to what it is in BC. She argued that the workload, shorter hours and longer vacations are part of the attraction, but these are similar to most jurisdictions around the world. Much of the discussion comes back to the place of teaching in society — as a profession held in extremely high regard.
The funding model is very different for university – it is free in Finland. While it is very competitive, with less than half of the applicants gaining admission, successful applicants do receive a fully funded education. The continuum of the system is also important to understand; students do not start school until seven years of age, and prior to that a highly subscribed user-pay (though nobody is denied access) pre-school or Kindergarten system exists. At 16 years of age, students move into an upper secondary program, or a vocational program, or (and this worries the Finns) some leave school all together. At age 19 (about one year later than in Canada), students enter university.
It is also true that all teachers have a Master’s degree. They complete a three-year Bachelor’s program and a two-year Master’s program. This is different in structure to BC, but not in total number of years — with the typical BC education graduate completing a four-year Bachelor’s degree and a 12-month Education degree. In Finland, admittance to an education program includes a 100-question, multiple-choice test to gauge appropriateness, and for those who advance beyond this round, an interview system that assesses appropriateness for the profession.
Finland has also harmonized the main parts of their teacher education programs, with a common approach to teacher education, across the country. British Columbia sees huge variances based on particular university programs and with greater autonomy at the hands of its universities.
In looking at their teacher-education model, there are a number of pieces related to cohesiveness and alignment that are ones we could learn from in British Columbia — from the focus on deep research as part of preparation, the strict focus on pedagogy, the link between spaces in programs and system requirements, and the common approach from all teacher education programs –these are all areas that could use additional work in BC.
As a fellow high-performing system (it is always worth reminding ourselves BC is in the top grouping of jurisdictions along with Finland) the challenges that they have identified for their system, sound very familiar to us:
- Special Education
- Multiculturalism
- Student Engagement
Having spent more time understanding the Finnish education system, it is interesting to see where they have been, but more interesting to see where they are trying to go — many of the same places we want to go in British Columbia.
I have previously written about Finland, and what I have learned about their system through GELP (here), in looking at their efforts for change in a highly successful system.
More to come . . . .
I am interested to hear that you are affiliated with GELP, a public-private partnership “of thought leaders and consultants from world-class organizations, collaborating in a global community with teams of key education leaders who are seriously committed both to transforming education in practice and to developing the personal skills they need to lead the changes required. At the heart of GELP’s vision is the fostering of Education 3.0: new pedagogies, curricula and assessment methods that enable every student to develop higher order capabilities (http://gelponline.org/node/14/what-gelp).”
Public-private partnerships are becoming more commonplace in educational reform and I see that Cisco and Promethean, two private, for-profit international technology corporations are partners in GELP. I am interested in hearing your opinions on the role of public-private partnerships in education. Do you perceive a potential for conflict of interest in these partnerships. For example, in this instance, CISCO profits from the installation and development of technology in educational institutions; therefore, should CISCO be involved in a program like GELP that is designed to promote the use of technology in educational institutions?
Hi Rhonda – it is a really important point you raise, and something I think about whenever I attend events or participate with different organizations. Just as we teach students to be critical thinkers and consider bias, we need to do the same. I have attended events hosted by corporations that have been thinly veiled sales pitches. I have also attended events hosted by not-for-profits that have been extremely biassed in their presentation of information. I have now been part of two GELP events and have been extremely impressed. It is an interesting mix – jurisdictions from around the world from very different political realities (e.g. China, India, Korea, Finland, BC), corporate sponsors, philanthropists and others. The two events I have attended had a feeling of learning together – it is in the interest of all – school jurisdictions, governments, business and the community to better understand what is working in education and where we go next.
I think we always need to be critical consumers and ask why when it comes to corporate involvement – but this shouldn’t mean necessarily excluding their participation.
You are right – it is an important, and growing, topic.
I’m catching up on your blog – and surprised that there aren’t more comments on this!
As a TOC who finished a DipEd program 5 years ago, it has been painful watching other colleagues enter education programs in BC and be denied even the possibility of an interview for local (Metro Van) districts. I currently mesh TOCing for 2 districts with my responsibilities at another part-time job (at Science World) partly because there are nearly zero opportunities for full-time teaching, and ‘trying to make it work financially’ as a TOC in Metro Van is impossible.
I really liked that you were able to tease out the reputation that grade-level teaching in Finland is a highly-sought after profession that is competitive with medicine.
I listened to a fantastic interview on CBC a few months ago of a young woman debating for free post-secondary education. I wish that this conversation came up more often.
Hi Kate – one thing that really struck me in Finland was the great pride in the “Welfare State.” It is a term which often can a negative connotation (particularly south of the border) but they speak openly and proudly of this feature of their society. It is why, in part, I concluded that for the BC education to really look more like the system in Finland it would not only to make changes inside the system but also larger shifts in society.
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There is plenty of evidence that the easy spelling system that Finnish has makes it really easy to learn to decode and spell. With 4200 common words out of 7000 spelled with errors, it would be better to restore the English spelling system to what it should have been had it not be disrupted by many unfortunate events. ONce we regularize the spelling system, removing as many of those errors as possible, then we could introduce this regular spelling system and phase it in in 2020 for “reading” 2020. Current literate people will not have to learn a new code since the first cohort would be leaving “school” at the earliest by 2032! By then, we will all have brain implants enabling on the fly transcoding, but there will be a generation of co-existence, made easier by the presence of e-books written in the old and the modern code. WHo is going to select the exact new code? I suggest a contest-like whereby groups of students in all kinds of disciplines would be studying other ways to clean up the system or regularizing it. They would be in charge of lobbying political leaders. While it is true Finland has a great educational system, even Swedish-speaking students do not perform as well as Finnish students, proof that an easy spelling system matters. The Canadian system is not that different, but the difficulty of the spelling system makes it really tough to make progress.