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What Finland is really doing to improve its acclaimed schools

does finland assign homework

Finland has been paid outsized attention in the education world since its students scored the highest among dozens of countries around the globe on an international test some 20 years ago.

And while it is no longer No. 1 — as the education sector was hurt in the 2008 recession, and budget cuts led to larger class sizes and fewer staff in schools — it is still regarded as one of the more successful systems in the world.

In an effort to improve, the Finnish government began taking some steps in recent years, and some of that reform has made for worldwide headlines. But as it turns out, some of that coverage just isn’t true.

A few years ago, for example, a change in curriculum sparked stories that Finland was giving up teaching traditional subjects. Nope .

You can find stories on the Internet saying Finnish kids don’t get any homework. Nope.

Even amid its difficulties, American author William Doyle, who lived there and sent his then-7-year-old son to a Finnish school, wrote in 2016 that they do a lot of things right:

What is Finland’s secret? A whole-child-centered, research-and-evidence based school system, run by highly professionalized teachers. These are global education best practices, not cultural quirks applicable only to Finland.

‘I have seen the school of tomorrow. It is here today, in Finland.’

Here is a piece looking at changes underway in Finnish schools by two people who know what is really going on. They are Pasi Sahlberg and Peter Johnson. Johnson is director of education of the Finnish city of Kokkola. Sahlberg is professor of education policy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and is the author of the best-selling “ Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland ?”

No, Finland isn’t ditching traditional school subjects. Here’s what’s really happening.

By Pasi Sahlberg and Peter Johnson

Finland has been in the spotlight of the education world since it appeared, against all odds, on the top of the rankings of an international test known as PISA , the Program for International Student Assessment, in the early 2000s. Tens of thousands visitors have traveled to the country to see how to improve their own schools. Hundreds of articles have been written to explain why Finnish education is so marvelous — or sometimes that it isn’t. Millions of tweets have been shared and read, often leading to debates about the real nature of Finland’s schools and about teaching and learning there.

We have learned a lot about why some education systems — such as Alberta, Ontario, Japan and Finland — perform better year after year than others in terms of quality and equity of student outcomes. We also understand now better why some other education systems — for example, England, Australia, the United States and Sweden — have not been able to improve their school systems regardless of politicians’ promises, large-scale reforms and truckloads of money spent on haphazard efforts to change schools during the past two decades.

Among these important lessons are:

  • Education systems and schools shouldn’t be managed like business corporations where tough competition, measurement-based accountability and performance-determined pay are common principles. Instead, successful education systems rely on collaboration, trust, and collegial responsibility in and between schools.
  • The teaching profession shouldn’t be perceived as a technical, temporary craft that anyone with a little guidance can do. Successful education systems rely on continuous professionalization of teaching and school leadership that requires advanced academic education, solid scientific and practical knowledge, and continuous on-the-job training.
  • The quality of education shouldn’t be judged by the level of literacy and numeracy test scores alone. Successful education systems are designed to emphasize whole-child development, equity of education outcomes, well being, and arts, music, drama and physical education as important elements of curriculum.

Besides these useful lessons about how and why education systems work as they do, there are misunderstandings, incorrect interpretations, myths and even deliberate lies about how to best improve education systems. Because Finland has been such a popular target of searching for the key to the betterment of education, there are also many stories about Finnish schools that are not true.

Part of the reason reporting and research often fail to paint bigger and more accurate picture of the actual situation is that most of the documents and resources that describe and define the Finnish education system are only available in Finnish and Swedish. Most foreign education observers and commentators are therefore unable to follow the conversations and debates taking place in the country.

For example, only very few of those who actively comment on education in Finland have ever read Finnish education law , the national core curriculum or any of thousands of curricula designed by municipalities and schools that explain and describe what schools ought to do and why.

The other reason many efforts to report about Finnish education remain incomplete — and sometimes incorrect — is that education is seen as an isolated island disconnected from other sectors and public policies. It is wrong to believe that what children learn or don’t learn in school could be explained by looking at only schools and what they do alone.

Most efforts to explain why Finland’s schools are better than others or why they do worse today than before fail to see these interdependencies in Finnish society that are essential in understanding education as an ecosystem.

Here are some of those common myths about Finnish schools.

First, in recent years there have been claims that the Finnish secret to educational greatness is that children don’t have homework.

Another commonly held belief is that Finnish authorities have decided to scrap subjects from school curriculum and replace them by interdisciplinary projects or themes.

And a more recent notion is that all schools in Finland are required to follow a national curriculum and implement the same teaching method called “phenomenon-based learning” (that is elsewhere known as “project-based learning”).

All of these are false.

In 2014, Finnish state authorities revised the national core curriculum (NCC) for basic education. The core curriculum provides a common direction and basis for renewing school education and instruction. Only a very few international commentators of Finnish school reform have read this central document. Unfortunately, not many parents in Finland are familiar with it, either. Still, many people seem to have strong opinions about the direction Finnish schools are moving — the wrong way, they say, without really understanding the roles and responsibilities of schools and teachers in their communities.

Before making any judgments about what is great or wrong in Finland, it is important to understand the fundamentals of Finnish school system. Here are some basics.

First, education providers, most districts in 311 municipalities, draw up local curricula and annual work plans on the basis of the NCC. Schools though actually take the lead in curriculum planning under the supervision of municipal authorities.

Second, the NCC is a fairly loose regulatory document in terms of what schools should teach, how they arrange their work and the desired outcomes. Schools have, therefore, a lot of flexibility and autonomy in curriculum design, and there may be significant variation in school curricula from one place to another.

Finally, because of this decentralized nature of authority in Finnish education system, schools in Finland can have different profiles and practical arrangements making the curriculum model unique in the world. It is incorrect to make any general conclusions based on what one or two schools do.

Current school reform in Finland aims at those same overall goals that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — which gives the PISA exams every three years to 15-year-olds in multiple countries — as well as governments and many students say are essential for them: to develop safe and collaborative school culture and to promote holistic approaches in teaching and learning. The NCC states that the specific aim at the school level is that children would:

  • understand the relationship and interdependencies between different learning contents;
  • be able to combine the knowledge and skills learned in different disciplines to form meaningful wholes; and
  • be able to apply knowledge and use it in collaborative learning settings.

All schools in Finland are required to revise their curricula according to this new framework. Some schools have taken only small steps from where they were before, while some others went on with much bolder plans. One of those is the Pontus School in Lappeenranta, a city in the eastern part of Finland.

The Pontus School is a new primary school and kindergarten for some 550 children from ages 1 to 12. It was built three years ago to support the pedagogy and spirit of the 2014 NCC. The Pontus School was in international news recently when the Finnish Broadcasting Company reported that parents have filed complaints over the “failure” of the new school.

But according to Lappeenranta education authorities, there have been only two complaints by parents, both being handled by Regional Authorities. That’s all. It is not enough to call that a failure.

What we can learn from Finland, again, is that it is important to make sure parents, children and media better understand the nature of school reforms underway.

“Some parents are not familiar with what schools are doing,” said Anu Liljestrom, superintendent of the education department in Lappeenranta. “We still have a lot of work to do to explain what, how and why teaching methods are different nowadays,” she said to a local newspaper. The Pontus School is a new school, and it decided to use the opportunity provided by new design to change pedagogy and learning.

Ultimately, it is wrong to think that reading, writing and arithmetic will disappear in Finnish classrooms.

For most of the school year, teaching in Finnish schools will continue to be based on subject-based curricula, including at the Pontus School.

What is new is that now all schools are required to design at least one week-long project for all students that is interdisciplinary and based on students’ interests. Some schools do that better more often than others, and some succeed sooner than others.

Yes, there are challenges in implementing the new ideas. We have seen many schools succeed at creating new opportunities for students to learn knowledge and skills they need in their lives.

It is too early to tell whether Finland’s current direction in education meets all expectations. What we know is that schools in Finland should take even bolder steps to meet the needs of the future as described in national goals and international strategies. Collaboration among schools, trust in teachers and visionary leadership are those building blocks that will make all that possible.

does finland assign homework

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No Tests, No Homework! Here's How Finland Has Emerged As A Global Example Of Quality, Inclusive Education

Mrinalini Kaushik

Writer: Mrinalini Kaushik  (Remote Intern) 

Mrinalini kaushik.

She is a student of journalism, keen on learning new ways to unlearn, deconstructing news and life. Interested in exploring new media as medium is the message. Avid follower of sports and politics

Others/World,  15 May 2022 3:40 AM GMT

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Shiva Chaudhary

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Digital Editor

A post-graduate in Journalism and Mass Communication with relevant skills, specialising in content editing & writing. I believe in the precise dissemination of information based on facts to the public.

Creatives : Shiva Chaudhary

Student-oriented approach to education in finland has been recognised as the most well-developed educational system in the world and ranks third in education worldwide..

"A quality education grants us the ability to fight the war on ignorance and poverty," - Charles Rangel

The uniqueness of the Finnish education model is encapsulated in its values of neither giving homework to students every day nor conducting regular tests and exams. Instead, it is listening to what the kids want and treating them as independent thinkers of society.

In Finland, the aim is to let students be happy and respect themselves and others.

Goodbye Standardised Exams

There is absolutely no program of nationwide standard testing, such as in India or the U.S, where those exams are the decisive points of one's admission to higher education like Board Examinations or Common Entrance Tests.

In an event organised by Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat remarked, "It is because they teach their children to face life struggles and not score in an examination," reported The Print .

Students in Finland are graded based on individual performance and evaluation criteria decided by their teachers themselves. Overall progress is tracked by their government's Ministry of Education, where they sample groups of students across schools in Finland.

Value-Based Education

They are primarily focused on making school a safe and equal space as children learn from the environment.

All Finland schools have offered since the 1980s free school meals, access to healthcare, a focus on mental health through psychological counselling for everyone and guidance sessions for each student to understand their wants and needs.

Education in Finland is not about marks or ranks but about creating an atmosphere of social equality, harmony and happiness for the students to ease learning experiences.

Most of the students spend half an hour at home after school to work on their studies. They mostly get everything done in the duration of the school timings as they only have a few classes every day. They are given several 15 -20 minutes breaks to eat, do recreational activities, relax, and do other work. There is no regiment in school or a rigid timetable, thus, causing less stress as given in the World Economic Forum .

Everyone Is Equal - Cooperate, Not Compete

The schools do not put pressure on ranking students, schools, or competitions, and they believe that a real winner doesn't compete; they help others come up to their level to make everyone on par.

Even though individualism is promoted during evaluation based on every student's needs, collectivity and fostering cooperation among students and teachers are deemed crucial.

While most schools worldwide believe in Charles Darwin's survival of the fittest, Finland follows the opposite but still comes out at the top.

Student-Oriented Model

The school teachers believe in a simple thumb rule; students are children who need to be happy when they attend school to learn and give their best. Focus is put upon teaching students to be critical thinkers of what they know, engage in society, and decide for themselves what they want.

In various schools, playgrounds are created by children's input as the architect talks to the children about what they want or what they feel like playing before setting up the playground.

Compared To The Indian Education Model

Firstly, Finnish children enrol in schools at the age of six rather than in India, where the school age is usually three or four years old. Their childhood is free from constricting education or forced work, and they are given free rein over how they socialise and participate in society.

Secondly, all schools in Finland are free of tuition fees as there are no private schools. Thus, education is not treated as a business. Even tuition outside schools is not allowed or needed, leaving no scope for commodifying education, unlike in India, where multiple coaching centres and private schools require exorbitant fees.

Thirdly, the school hours in Finland do not start early morning at 6 am, or 7 am as done in India. Finland schools begin from 9.30 am as research in World Economic Forum has indicated that schools starting at an early age is detrimental to their health and maturation. The school ends by mostly 2 pm.

Lastly, there is no homework or surprise test given to students in Finland. Teachers believe that the time wasted on assignments can be used to perform hobbies, art, sports, or cooking. This can teach life lessons and have a therapeutic stress-relieving effect on children. Indian schools tend to give a lot of homework to prove their commitment to studying and constantly revise what they learn in school.

Delhi Govt's Focus On Education

The Delhi model of education transformed under the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) tenure in the capital. In line with the Finnish model, Delhi government schools have adopted 'Happiness Classes' to ensure students' mental wellness through courses on mindfulness, problem-solving, social and emotional relationships, etc., from 1st to 8th classes.

Delhi government also introduced 'Entrepreneurial Mindset Classes' in 2019 to instil business and critical thinking skills among students of 9th to 12th classes. The practical approach in this class is indicated in the 'Business Blasters', a competition started by the Delhi government to encourage students to come up with start-up ideas and students were provided with ₹1000. Approximately 51,000 students participated in the first edition of the competition, according to Citizen Matters .

Through these endeavours, India is steadily investing in creating human resources that can get employment and generate employment for themselves.

India is at its demographic dividend stage; more than half of its population is within the working-age group of 14 to 60 years. Education is an essential factor in utilising this considerable advantage to grow economically and socially. Finland's education model is how India can strive closer to its goal and progress as a nation.

Also Read: Connaissance! Delhi Board of School Education Pens MoU To Add French In Government Schools

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Homework in Finland School

Homework in Finland School

How many parents are bracing themselves for nightly battles to get their kids to finish their homework every year with the beginning of a school year? Thousands and thousands of them. Though not in Finland. The truth is that there is nearly no homework in the country with one of the top education systems in the world. Finnish people believe that besides homework, there are many more things that can improve child’s performance in school, such as having dinner with their families, exercising or getting a good night’s sleep.

Do We Need Homework?

There are different homework policies around the world. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) keeps track of such policies and compares the amount of homework of students from different countries. For example, an average high school student in the US has to spend about 6 hours a day doing homework, while in Finland, the amount of time spent on after school learning is about 3 hours a day. Nevertheless, these are exactly Finnish students who lead the world in global scores for math and science. It means that despite the belief that homework increases student performance, OECD graph shows the opposite. Though there are some exceptions such as education system in Japan, South Korea, and some other Asian countries. In fact, according to OECD, the more time students spend on homework, the worse they perform in school.

Finnish education approach shows the world that when it comes to homework, less is more. It is worth to mention that the world has caught onto this idea and, according to the latest OECD report, the average number of hours spent by students doing their homework decreased in nearly all countries around the world.

So what Finland knows about homework that the rest of the world does not? There is no simple answer, as the success of education system in Finland is provided by many factors, starting from poverty rates in the country to parental leave policies to the availability of preschools. Nevertheless, one of the greatest secrets of the success of education system in Finland is the way Finns teach their children.

How to Teach Like The Finns?

There are three main points that have to be mentioned when it comes to the success of education system in Finland.

First of all, Finns teach their children in a “playful” manner and allow them to enjoy their childhood. For example, did you know that in average, students in Finland only have three to four classes a day? Furthermore, there are several breaks and recesses (15-20 minutes) during a school day when children can play outside whatever the weather. According to statistics, children need physical activity in order to learn better. Also, less time in the classroom allows Finnish teachers to think, plan and create more effective lessons.

Secondly, Finns pay high respect to teachers. That is why one of the most sought after positions in Finland is the position of a primary school teacher. Only 10% of applicants to the teaching programs are accepted. In addition to a high competition, each primary school teacher in Finland must earn a Master’s degree that provides Finnish teachers with the same status as doctors or lawyers.

High standards applied to applicants for the university teaching programs assure parents of a high quality of teaching and allow teachers to innovate without bureaucracy or excessive regulation.

Thirdly, there is a lot of individual attention for each student. Classes in Finland are smaller than in the most of other countries and for the first six years of study, teachers get to know their students, their individual needs, and learning styles. If there are some weaker students, they are provided by extra assistance. Overall, Finnish education system promotes warmth, collaboration, encouragement, and assessment which means that teachers in this country are ready to do their best to help students but not to gain more control over them.

The combination of these three fundamentals is the key to success of any education system in the world and Finns are exactly those people who proved by way of example that less is more, especially when it comes to the amount of homework.

System of education in Finland

System of education in Finland

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School System in Finland

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Finland Education Reform

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Fins and Fun: Distinctive Features of Education in Finland

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Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?

The country’s achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework

LynNell Hancock

Photographs by Stuart Conway

Kirkkojarvi School

It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.

Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.

“I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn .

Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. “You helped me,” he told his former teacher. Besart had opened his own car repair firm and a cleaning company. “No big fuss,” Louhivuori told me. “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”

This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools.

“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”

The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. “I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good.”

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.

Still, there is a distinct absence of chest-thumping among the famously reticent Finns. They are eager to celebrate their recent world hockey championship, but PISA scores, not so much. “We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a former math and physics teacher who is now in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture. “We are not much interested in PISA. It’s not what we are about.”

Maija Rintola stood before her chattering class of twenty-three 7- and 8-year-olds one late April day in Kirkkojarven Koulu. A tangle of multicolored threads topped her copper hair like a painted wig. The 20-year teacher was trying out her look for Vappu, the day teachers and children come to school in riotous costumes to celebrate May Day. The morning sun poured through the slate and lemon linen shades onto containers of Easter grass growing on the wooden sills. Rintola smiled and held up her open hand at a slant—her time-tested “silent giraffe,” which signaled the kids to be quiet. Little hats, coats, shoes stowed in their cubbies, the children wiggled next to their desks in their stocking feet, waiting for a turn to tell their tale from the playground. They had just returned from their regular 15 minutes of playtime outdoors between lessons. “Play is important at this age,” Rintola would later say. “We value play.”

With their wiggles unwound, the students took from their desks little bags of buttons, beans and laminated cards numbered 1 through 20. A teacher’s aide passed around yellow strips representing units of ten. At a smart board at the front of the room, Rintola ushered the class through the principles of base ten. One girl wore cat ears on her head, for no apparent reason. Another kept a stuffed mouse on her desk to remind her of home. Rintola roamed the room helping each child grasp the concepts. Those who finished early played an advanced “nut puzzle” game. After 40 minutes it was time for a hot lunch in the cathedral-like cafeteria.

Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers. Teachers use the extra time to build curriculums and assess their students. Children spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of winter. Homework is minimal. Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.

Even so, Rintola said her children arrived last August miles apart in reading and language levels. By April, nearly every child in the class was reading, and most were writing. Boys had been coaxed into literature with books like Kapteeni Kalsarin (“Captain Underpants”). The school’s special education teacher teamed up with Rintola to teach five children with a variety of behavioral and learning problems. The national goal for the past five years has been to mainstream all children. The only time Rintola’s children are pulled out is for Finnish as a Second Language classes, taught by a teacher with 30 years’ experience and graduate school training.

There are exceptions, though, however rare. One first-grade girl was not in Rintola’s class. The wispy 7-year-old had recently arrived from Thailand speaking not a word of Finnish. She was studying math down the hall in a special “preparing class” taught by an expert in multicultural learning. It is designed to help children keep up with their subjects while they conquer the language. Kirkkojarvi’s teachers have learned to deal with their unusually large number of immigrant students. The city of Espoo helps them out with an extra 82,000 euros a year in “positive discrimination” funds to pay for things like special resource teachers, counselors and six special needs classes.

does finland assign homework

Rintola will teach the same children next year and possibly the next five years, depending on the needs of the school. “It’s a good system. I can make strong connections with the children,” said Rintola, who was handpicked by Louhivuori 20 years ago. “I understand who they are.” Besides Finnish, math and science, the first graders take music, art, sports, religion and textile handcrafts. English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth. By fifth grade the children have added biology, geography, history, physics and chemistry.

Not until sixth grade will kids have the option to sit for a district-wide exam, and then only if the classroom teacher agrees to participate. Most do, out of curiosity. Results are not publicized. Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,” Louhivuori teased, as he rummaged through his closet looking for past years’ results. “Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

I had come to Kirkkojarvi to see how the Finnish approach works with students who are not stereotypically blond, blue-eyed and Lutheran. But I wondered if Kirkkojarvi’s success against the odds might be a fluke. Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s PISA scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade.

To get a second sampling, I headed east from Espoo to Helsinki and a rough neighborhood called Siilitie, Finnish for “Hedgehog Road” and known for having the oldest low-income housing project in Finland. The 50-year-old boxy school building sat in a wooded area, around the corner from a subway stop flanked by gas stations and convenience stores. Half of its 200 first- through ninth-grade students have learning disabilities. All but the most severely impaired are mixed with the general education children, in keeping with Finnish policies.

A class of first graders scampered among nearby pine and birch trees, each holding a stack of the teacher’s homemade laminated “outdoor math” cards. “Find a stick as big as your foot,” one read. “Gather 50 rocks and acorns and lay them out in groups of ten,” read another. Working in teams, the 7- and 8-year-olds raced to see how quickly they could carry out their tasks. Aleksi Gustafsson, whose master’s degree is from Helsinki University, developed the exercise after attending one of the many workshops available free to teachers. “I did research on how useful this is for kids,” he said. “It’s fun for the children to work outside. They really learn with it.”

Gustafsson’s sister, Nana Germeroth, teaches a class of mostly learning-impaired children; Gustafsson’s students have no learning or behavioral issues. The two combined most of their classes this year to mix their ideas and abilities along with the children’s varying levels. “We know each other really well,” said Germeroth, who is ten years older. “I know what Aleksi is thinking.”

The school receives 47,000 euros a year in positive discrimination money to hire aides and special education teachers, who are paid slightly higher salaries than classroom teachers because of their required sixth year of university training and the demands of their jobs. There is one teacher (or assistant) in Siilitie for every seven students.

In another classroom, two special education teachers had come up with a different kind of team teaching. Last year, Kaisa Summa, a teacher with five years’ experience, was having trouble keeping a gaggle of first-grade boys under control. She had looked longingly into Paivi Kangasvieri’s quiet second-grade room next door, wondering what secrets the 25-year-veteran colleague could share. Each had students of wide-ranging abilities and special needs. Summa asked Kangasvieri if they might combine gymnastics classes in hopes good behavior might be contagious. It worked. This year, the two decided to merge for 16 hours a week. “We complement each other,” said Kangasvieri, who describes herself as a calm and firm “father” to Summa’s warm mothering. “It is cooperative teaching at its best,” she says.

Every so often, principal Arjariita Heikkinen told me, the Helsinki district tries to close the school because the surrounding area has fewer and fewer children, only to have people in the community rise up to save it. After all, nearly 100 percent of the school’s ninth graders go on to high schools. Even many of the most severely disabled will find a place in Finland’s expanded system of vocational high schools, which are attended by 43 percent of Finnish high-school students, who prepare to work in restaurants, hospitals, construction sites and offices. “We help situate them in the right high school,” said then deputy principal Anne Roselius. “We are interested in what will become of them in life.”

Finland’s schools were not always a wonder. Until the late 1960s, Finns were still emerging from the cocoon of Soviet influence. Most children left public school after six years. (The rest went to private schools, academic grammar schools or folk schools, which tended to be less rigorous.) Only the privileged or lucky got a quality education.

The landscape changed when Finland began trying to remold its bloody, fractured past into a unified future. For hundreds of years, these fiercely independent people had been wedged between two rival powers—the Swedish monarchy to the west and the Russian czar to the east. Neither Scandinavian nor Baltic, Finns were proud of their Nordic roots and a unique language only they could love (or pronounce). In 1809, Finland was ceded to Russia by the Swedes, who had ruled its people some 600 years. The czar created the Grand Duchy of Finland, a quasi-state with constitutional ties to the empire. He moved the capital from Turku, near Stockholm, to Helsinki, closer to St. Petersburg. After the czar fell to the Bolsheviks in 1917, Finland declared its independence, pitching the country into civil war. Three more wars between 1939 and 1945—two with the Soviets, one with Germany—left the country scarred by bitter divisions and a punishing debt owed to the Russians. “Still we managed to keep our freedom,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a director general in the Ministry of Education and Culture.

In 1963, the Finnish Parliament made the bold decision to choose public education as its best shot at economic recovery. “I call this the Big Dream of Finnish education,” said Sahlberg, whose upcoming book,  Finnish Lessons , is scheduled for release in October. “It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive."

Practically speaking—and Finns are nothing if not practical—the decision meant that goal would not be allowed to dissipate into rhetoric. Lawmakers landed on a deceptively simple plan that formed the foundation for everything to come. Public schools would be organized into one system of comprehensive schools, or  peruskoulu , for ages 7 through 16. Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions. Besides Finnish and Swedish (the country’s second official language), children would learn a third language (English is a favorite) usually beginning at age 9. Resources were distributed equally. As the comprehensive schools improved, so did the upper secondary schools (grades 10 through 12). The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers. Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive. In 2010, some 6,600 applicants vied for 660 primary school training slots, according to Sahlberg. By the mid-1980s, a final set of initiatives shook the classrooms free from the last vestiges of top-down regulation. Control over policies shifted to town councils. The national curriculum was distilled into broad guidelines. National math goals for grades one through nine, for example, were reduced to a neat ten pages. Sifting and sorting children into so-called ability groupings was eliminated. All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind. The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”

To be sure, it was only in the past decade that Finland’s international science scores rose. In fact, the country’s earliest efforts could be called somewhat Stalinistic. The first national curriculum, developed in the early ’70s, weighed in at 700 stultifying pages. Timo Heikkinen, who began teaching in Finland’s public schools in 1980 and is now principal of Kallahti Comprehensive School in eastern Helsinki, remembers when most of his high-school teachers sat at their desks dictating to the open notebooks of compliant children.

And there are still challenges. Finland’s crippling financial collapse in the early ’90s brought fresh economic challenges to this “confident and assertive Eurostate,” as David Kirby calls it in  A Concise History of Finland . At the same time, immigrants poured into the country, clustering in low-income housing projects and placing added strain on schools. A recent report by the Academy of Finland warned that some schools in the country’s large cities were becoming more skewed by race and class as affluent, white Finns choose schools with fewer poor, immigrant populations.

A few years ago, Kallahti principal Timo Heikkinen began noticing that, increasingly, affluent Finnish parents, perhaps worried about the rising number of Somali children at Kallahti, began sending their children to one of two other schools nearby. In response, Heikkinen and his teachers designed new environmental science courses that take advantage of the school’s proximity to the forest. And a new biology lab with 3-D technology allows older students to observe blood flowing inside the human body.

It has yet to catch on, Heikkinen admits. Then he added: “But we are always looking for ways to improve.”

In other words, whatever it takes.

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LynNell Hancock | READ MORE

LynNell Hancock writes about education and teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Stuart Conway | READ MORE

Stuart Conway is a photographer based in southeast England.

10 reasons why Finland's education system is the best in the world

Finland's education system Students Blue-bots programmable robots lesson school Tampere

From tests to teachers, here are 10 reasons why Finland’s education system is dominating America and the world stage. Image:  REUTERS/Attila Cser

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does finland assign homework

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Time and time again, American students continually rank near the middle or bottom among industrialized nations when it comes to performance in math and science. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) which in conjunction with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) routinely releases data which shows that Americans are seriously lagging behind in a number of educational performance assessments.

Despite calls for education reform and a continual lackluster performance on the international scale, not a lot is being done or changing within the educational system. Many private and public schools run on the same antiquated systems and schedules that were once conducive to an agrarian society. The mechanization and rigid assembly-line methods we use today are spitting out ill-prepared worker clones, rudderless adults and an uninformed populace.

But no amount of pontificating will change what we already know. The American education system needs to be completely revamped – from the first grade to the Ph.D. It’s going to take a lot more than a well-meaning celebrity project to do that…

Many people are familiar with the stereotype of the hard-working, rote memorization, myopic tunnel vision of Eastern Asian study and work ethics. Many of these countries, like China, Singapore, and Japan amongst others routinely rank in the number one spots in both math and science.

Some pundits point towards this model of exhaustive brain draining as something Americans should aspire to become. Work more! Study harder! Live less. The facts and figures don’t lie – these countries are outperforming us, but there might be a better and healthier way to go about this.

Finland is the answer – a country rich in intellectual and educational reform has initiated over the years a number of novel and simple changes that have completely revolutionized their educational system. They outrank the United States and are gaining on Eastern Asian countries.

Are they cramming in dimly-lit rooms on robotic schedules? Nope. Stressing over standardized tests enacted by the government? No way. Finland is leading the way because of common-sense practices and a holistic teaching environment that strives for equity over excellence. Here are 10 reasons why Finland’s education system is dominating America and the world stage.

No standardized testing

Staying in line with our print-minded sensibilities, standardized testing is the blanket way we test for subject comprehension. Filling in little bubbles on a scantron and answering pre-canned questions is somehow supposed to be a way to determine mastery or at least competence of a subject. What often happens is that students will learn to cram just to pass a test and teachers will be teaching with the sole purpose of students passing a test. Learning has been thrown out of the equation.

Finland has no standardized tests. Their only exception is something called the National Matriculation Exam, which is a voluntary test for students at the end of an upper-secondary school (equivalent to an American high school.) All children throughout Finland are graded on an individualized basis and grading system set by their teacher. Tracking overall progress is done by the Ministry of Education, which samples groups across different ranges of schools.

Accountability for teachers (not required)

A lot of the blame goes to the teachers and rightfully so sometimes. But in Finland, the bar is set so high for teachers, that there is often no reason to have a rigorous “grading” system for teachers. Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education and writer of Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Said that following about teachers’ accountability:

"There's no word for accountability in Finnish… Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

All teachers are required to have a master’s degree before entering the profession. Teaching programs are the most rigorous and selective professional schools in the entire country. If a teacher isn’t performing well, it’s the individual principal's responsibility to do something about it.

The concept of the pupil-teacher dynamic that was once the master to apprentice cannot be distilled down to a few bureaucratic checks and standardized testing measures. It needs to be dealt with on an individual basis.

Cooperation not competition

While most Americans and other countries see the educational system as one big Darwinian competition, the Finns see it differently. Sahlberg quotes a line from a writer named Samuli Paronen which says that:

“Real winners do not compete.”

Ironically, this attitude has put them at the head of the international pack. Finland’s educational system doesn’t worry about artificial or arbitrary merit-based systems. There are no lists of top performing schools or teachers. It’s not an environment of competition – instead, cooperation is the norm.

Make the basics a priority

Many school systems are so concerned with increasing test scores and comprehension in math and science, they tend to forget what constitutes a happy, harmonious and healthy student and learning environment. Many years ago, the Finnish school system was in need of some serious reforms.

The program that Finland put together focused on returning back to the basics. It wasn’t about dominating with excellent marks or upping the ante. Instead, they looked to make the school environment a more equitable place.

Since the 1980s, Finnish educators have focused on making these basics a priority:

  • Education should be an instrument to balance out social inequality.
  • All students receive free school meals.
  • Ease of access to health care.
  • Psychological counseling
  • Individualised guidance

Beginning with the individual in a collective environment of equality is Finland’s way.

Starting school at an older age

Here the Finns again start by changing very minute details. Students start school when they are seven years old. They’re given free reign in the developing childhood years to not be chained to compulsory education. It’s simply just a way to let a kid be a kid.

There are only 9 years of compulsory school that Finnish children are required to attend. Everything past the ninth grade or at the age of 16 is optional.

Just from a psychological standpoint, this is a freeing ideal. Although it may anecdotal, many students really feel like they’re stuck in a prison. Finland alleviates this forced ideal and instead opts to prepare its children for the real world.

Providing professional options past a traditional college degree

The current pipeline for education in America is incredibly stagnant and immutable. Children are stuck in the K-12 circuit jumping from teacher to teacher. Each grade a preparation for the next, all ending in the grand culmination of college, which then prepares you for the next grand thing on the conveyor belt. Many students don’t need to go to college and get a worthless degree or flounder about trying to find purpose and incur massive debt.

Finland solves this dilemma by offering options that are equally advantageous for the student continuing their education. There is a lesser focused dichotomy of college-educated versus trade-school or working class. Both can be equally professional and fulfilling for a career.

In Finland, there is the Upper Secondary School which is a three-year program that prepares students for the Matriculation Test that determines their acceptance into a University. This is usually based off of specialties they’ve acquired during their time in “high-school”

Next, there is vocational education, which is a three-year program that trains students for various careers. They have the option to take the Matriculation test if they want to then apply to University.

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Finland has the most effective universities in the world, finland has one of the world's best education systems. here's how it compares to the us, how equal are the world’s education systems, finns wake up later for less strenuous schooldays.

Waking up early, catching a bus or ride, participating in morning and after school extracurriculars are huge time sinks for a student. Add to the fact that some classes start anywhere from 6am to 8am and you’ve got sleepy, uninspired adolescents on your hands.

Students in Finland usually start school anywhere from 9:00 – 9:45 AM. Research has shown that early start times are detrimental to students’ well-being, health, and maturation. Finnish schools start the day later and usually end by 2:00 – 2:45 AM. They have longer class periods and much longer breaks in between. The overall system isn’t there to ram and cram information to their students, but to create an environment of holistic learning.

Consistent instruction from the same teachers

There are fewer teachers and students in Finnish schools. You can’t expect to teach an auditorium of invisible faces and breakthrough to them on an individual level. Students in Finland often have the same teacher for up to six years of their education. During this time, the teacher can take on the role of a mentor or even a family member. During those years, mutual trust and bonding are built so that both parties know and respect each other.

Different needs and learning styles vary on an individual basis. Finnish teachers can account for this because they’ve figured out the student’s own idiosyncratic needs. They can accurately chart and care for their progress and help them reach their goals. There is no passing along to the next teacher because there isn’t one.

A more relaxed atmosphere

There is a general trend in what Finland is doing with its schools. Less stress, less unneeded regimentation and more caring. Students usually only have a couple of classes a day. They have several times to eat their food, enjoy recreational activities and generally just relax. Spread throughout the day are 15 to 20-minute intervals where the kids can get up and stretch, grab some fresh air and decompress. This type of environment is also needed by the teachers. Teacher rooms are set up all over Finnish schools, where they can lounge about and relax, prepare for the day or just simply socialize. Teachers are people too and need to be functional so they can operate at the best of their abilities.

Less homework and outside work required

According to the OECD, students in Finland have the least amount of outside work and homework than any other student in the world. They spend only half an hour a night working on stuff from school. Finnish students also don’t have tutors. Yet they’re outperforming cultures that have toxic school-to-life balances without the unneeded or unnecessary stress.

Finnish students are getting everything they need to get done in school without the added pressures that come with excelling at a subject. Without having to worry about grades and busy-work they are able to focus on the true task at hand – learning and growing as a human being.

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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.

finnish-kids.jpg

Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey , conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.

And yet it wasn't clear that Sahlberg's message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.

During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather's TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an "intriguing school-reform model."

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

The irony of Sahlberg's making this comment during a talk at the Dwight School seemed obvious. Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented on Sahlberg's statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.

Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to education, because he's become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and physics in a junior high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a variety of positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent years as an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations.

Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred visits a year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want to know the secret of Finland's success. Sahlberg's new book is partly an attempt to help answer the questions he always gets asked.

From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: "Real winners do not compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg's comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don't exist in Finland.

"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same."

Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public school district -- and the other "99 percent" is painfully plain to see.

Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems of other countries. All countries are different, and as many Americans point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the United States.

Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.

Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Teachers College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation's education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country: Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.

Indeed, Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute , a research organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than Finland.

What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.

With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.

Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn't meant to be a how-to manual, it is meant to be a "pamphlet of hope."

"When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's, many said it couldn't be done," Sahlberg said during his visit to New York. "But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn't be done."

Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.

The Hechinger Report

Covering Innovation & Inequality in Education

OPINION: How Finland broke every rule — and created a top school system

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Finland's education system

Spend five minutes in Jussi Hietava’s fourth-grade math class in remote, rural Finland, and you may learn all you need to know about education reform – if you want results, try doing the opposite of what American “education reformers” think we should do in classrooms.

Instead of control, competition, stress, standardized testing, screen-based schools and loosened teacher qualifications, try warmth, collaboration, and highly professionalized, teacher-led encouragement and assessment.

At the University of Eastern Finland’s Normaalikoulu teacher training school in Joensuu, Finland, you can see Hietava’s students enjoying the cutting-edge concept of “personalized learning.”

Related: Everyone aspires to be Finland, but this country beats them in two out of three subjects

But this is not a tale of classroom computers. While the school has the latest technology, there isn’t a tablet or smartphone in sight, just a smart board and a teacher’s desktop.

Screens can only deliver simulations of personalized learning, this is the real thing, pushed to the absolute limit.

This is the story of the quiet, daily, flesh-and-blood miracles that are achieved by Hietava and teachers the world over, in countless face-to-face and over-the-shoulder interactions with schoolchildren.

Related: Ranking countries by worst students

Often, Hietava does two things simultaneously: both mentoring young student teachers and teaching his fourth grade class.

“Finland’s historic achievements in delivering educational excellence and equity to its children are the result of a national love of childhood, a profound respect for teachers as trusted professionals, and a deep understanding of how children learn best.”

Hieteva sets the classroom atmosphere. Children are allowed to slouch, wiggle and giggle from time to time if they want to, since that’s what children are biologically engineered to do, in Finland, America, Asia and everywhere else.

This is a flagship in the “ultimate charter school network” – Finland’s public schools.

Related: Why Americans should not be coming up with their own solutions to teacher preparation issues

Here, as in any other Finnish school, teachers are not strait-jacketed by bureaucrats, scripts or excessive regulations, but have the freedom to innovate and experiment as teams of trusted professionals.

Here, in contrast to the atmosphere in American public schools, Hietava and his colleagues are encouraged to constantly experiment with new approaches to improve learning.

Hietava’s latest innovations are with pilot-testing “self-assessments,” where his students write daily narratives on their learning and progress; and with “peer assessments,” a striking concept where children are carefully guided to offer positive feedback and constructive suggestions to each other.

Related: In Singapore, training teachers for the classroom of the future

The 37 year-old Hietava, a school dad and Finnish champion golfer in his spare time, has trained scores of teachers, Unlike in America, where thousands of teacher positions in inner cities are filled by candidates with five or six weeks of summer training, no teacher in Finland is allowed to lead a primary school class without a master’s degree in education, with specialization in research and classroom practice, from one of this small nation’s eleven elite graduate schools of education.

As a boy, Hietava dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot, but he grew so tall that he couldn’t safely eject from an aircraft without injuring his legs. So he entered an even more respected profession, teaching, which is the most admired job in Finland next to medical doctors.

I am “embedded” at this university as a Fulbright Scholar and university lecturer, as a classroom observer, and as the father of a second grader who attends this school.

Related: Schools exacerbate the growing achievement gap between rich and poor, a 33-country study finds

How did I wind up here in Europe’s biggest national forest, on the edge of the Western world in Joensuu, Finland, the last, farthest-east sizable town in the EU before you hit the guard towers of the Russian border?

In 2012, while helping civil rights hero James Meredith write his memoir “ A Mission From God ,” we interviewed a panel of America’s greatest education experts and asked them for their ideas on improving America’s public schools.

One of the experts, the famed Professor Howard Gardner of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, told us, “Learn from Finland, which has the most effective schools and which does just about the opposite of what we are doing in the United States. You can read about what Finland has accomplished in ‘Finnish Lessons’ by Pasi Sahlberg.”

Related: While the U.S. struggles, Sweden pushes older students back to college

I read the book and met with Sahlberg, a former Finnish math teacher who is now also at Harvard’s education school as Visiting Professor.

After speaking with him I decided I had to give my own now-eight-year old child a public school experience in what seemed to be the most child-centered, most evidence-based, and most effective primary school system in the world.

Now, after watching Jussi Hietava and other Finnish educators in action for five months, I have come to realize that Finland’s historic achievements in delivering educational excellence and equity to its children are the result of a national love of childhood, a profound respect for teachers as trusted professionals, and a deep understanding of how children learn best.

Related: In Norway, where college is free, children of uneducated parents still don’t go

Children at this and other Finnish public schools are given not only basic subject instruction in math, language and science, but learning-through-play-based preschools and kindergartens, training in second languages, arts, crafts, music, physical education, ethics, and, amazingly, as many as four outdoor free-play breaks per day, each lasting 15 minutes between classes, no matter how cold or wet the weather is. Educators and parents here believe that these breaks are a powerful engine of learning that improves almost all the “metrics” that matter most for children in school – executive function, concentration and cognitive focus, behavior, well-being, attendance, physical health, and yes, test scores, too.

The homework load for children in Finland varies by teacher, but is lighter overall than most other developed countries. This insight is supported by research, which has found little academic benefit in childhood for any more than brief sessions of homework until around high school.

Related: Demark pushes to make students graduate on time

There are some who argue that since Finland has less socio-economic diversity than, for example, the United States, there’s little to learn here. But Finland’s success is not a “Nordic thing,” since Finland significantly out-achieves its “cultural control group” countries like Norway and Sweden on international benchmarks. And Finland’s size, immigration and income levels are roughly similar to those of a number of American states, where the bulk of education policy is implemented.

There are also those who would argue that this kind of approach wouldn’t work in America’s inner city schools, which instead need “no excuses,” boot-camp drilling-and-discipline, relentless standardized test prep, Stakhanovian workloads and stress-and-fear-based “rigor.”

But what if the opposite is true?

What if many of Finland’s educational practices are not cultural quirks or non-replicable national idiosyncrasies — but are instead bare-minimum global best practices that all our children urgently need, especially those children in high-poverty schools?

Related: China downturn, increased competition could affect supply of foreign students

Finland has, like any other nation, a unique culture. But it has identified, often by studying historical educational research and practices that originated in the United States, many fundamental childhood education insights that can inspire, and be tested and adapted by, any other nation.

As Pasi Sahlberg has pointed out, “If you come to Finland, you’ll see how great American schools could be.”

Finland’s education system is hardly perfect, and its schools and society are entering a period of huge budget and social pressures. Reading levels among children have dropped off. Some advanced learners feel bored in school. Finland has launched an expensive, high-risk national push toward universal digitalization and tabletization of childhood education that has little basis in evidence and flies in the face of a recent major OECD study that found very little academic benefit for school children from most classroom technology.

Related: In Brazil, fast-growing universities mirror the U.S. wealth divide

But as a parent or prospective parent, I have spent time in many of the most prestigious private schools in New York City and toured many of the city’s public school classrooms, in the largest public school system in the world. And I am convinced that the primary school education my child is getting in the Normaalikoulu in Joensuu is on a par with, or far surpasses, that available at any other school I’ve seen.

I have a suggestion for every philanthropist, parent, educator and policymaker in the world who wants to improve children’s education.

Start by coming to Finland. Spend some time sitting in the back of Jussi Hietava’s classroom, or any other Finnish classroom.

If you look closely and open your mind, you may see the School of Tomorrow.

William Doyle is a 2015-2016 Fulbright Scholar and New York Times bestselling author from New York City on the faculty of the University of Eastern Finland, and father of an eight year old who attends a Finnish public school.

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Enjoyed reading William Doyle’s piece on school education in Finland. Am independently developing a flexible, interdisciplinary, interactive, and affordable learning model for K-12 education in India that integrates concept learning, hands- on activities, and life skills. Look forward to read more on new thinking in learning and education!

> But it has identified, often by studying historical educational research and practices that originated in the United States, many fundamental childhood education insights that can inspire, and be tested and adapted by, any other nation.

Can you elaborate on this? Did Finland learn from specific research that originated from the USA or studies from the USA? If so, which ones?

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does finland assign homework

Filling My Map

The life of a constant explorer, 11 ways finland’s education system shows us that “less is more”..

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When I left my 7th grade math classroom for my Fulbright research assignment in Finland I thought I would come back from this experience with more inspiring, engaging, innovative lessons.  I expected to have great new ideas on how to teach my mathematics curriculum and I would revamp my lessons so that I could include more curriculum, more math and get students to think more, talk more and do more math.

This drive to do more and More and MORE is a state of existence for most teachers in the US….it is engrained in us from day one.  There is a constant pressure to push our students to the next level to have them do bigger and better things.  The lessons have to be more exciting, more engaging and cover more content.  This phenomena  is driven by data, or parents, or administrators or simply by our work-centric society where we gauge our success as a human being by how busy we are and how burnt out we feel at the end of the day.  We measure our worth with completed lists and we criminalize down time.  We teach this “work till you drop” mentality to our students who either simply give up somewhere along the way or become as burnt out as we find ourselves.

When I arrived in Finland I did not find big flashy innovative thought provoking math lessons.  I did not find students who were better at mathematics or knew more math content.  In fact the Jr. High and High school math classrooms have been rather typical of what I have experienced in Indiana.  And most of the struggles (like students not remembering their basic math facts) were the same.  The instruction and classroom structure of a math classroom in Finland follows the basic formula that has been performed by math teachers for centuries: The teachers go over homework, they present a lesson (some of the kids listen and some don’t), and then they assign homework.  While some lectures have been wonderful and I have gotten to observe some fantastic teachers, I would say that on the whole I have seen more engaging and interactive secondary math instruction from teachers in the United States.  It is rare to see a math lesson that is measurably better than those found in my district and I have seen several that were actually far worse.

So, what is the difference?  If the instruction in secondary mathematics is the same or sometimes worse than those found in the US,  why are Finnish students succeeding and ours are failing?  The difference is not the instruction. Good teaching is good teaching and it can be found in both Finland and in the US.   (The same can be said for bad teaching.)  The difference is less tangible and more fundamental.  Finland truly believes “Less is More.”  This national mantra is deeply engrained into the Finnish mindset and is the guiding principal to Finland’s educational philosophy.

Less IS more. 

They believe it.  They live by it. Their houses are not larger than what they need in which to comfortably live.  They do not buy or over consume.  They live simply and humbly.  They don’t feel the need to have 300 types of cereal to choose from when 10 will do.  The women wear less make-up.  The men don’t have giant trucks (or any vehicles at all, really).  Instead of buying hundreds of cheap articles of clothing the Finns buy a few expensive items of high quality that will last for decades rather than months.  They truly believe and live by the mentality of less is more.

Conversely in the US we truly believe “more is more” and we constantly desire and pursue more in all areas of our lives.  We are obsessed with all things new, shiny and exciting and are constantly wanting to upgrade our lives.  Out with the old in with the new!  This mentality of “more is more”  creeps into all areas of our lives and it confuses and stifles our education system.

We can’t even stick to ONE philosophy of education long enough to see if it actually works.  We are constantly trying new methods, ideas and initiatives.  We keep adding more and more to our plates without removing any of the past ideas.  Currently we believe “more” is the answer to all of our education problems— everything can be solved with MORE classes, longer days, MORE homework, MORE assignments, MORE pressure, MORE content, MORE meetings,  MORE after school tutoring, and of course MORE testing!   All this is doing is creating MORE burnt out teachers, MORE stressed out students and MORE frustration.

Finland on the other hand believes less is more.  This is exemplified in several ways for both teachers and students.

Less = More

1.  Less Formal Schooling = More Options

Students in Finland start formal schooling at the age of seven.  Yes, seven!  Finland allows their children to be children, to learn through playing and exploring rather than sitting still locked up in a classroom.   But don’t they get behind?  No!  The kids start school when they are actually developmentally ready to learn and focus.  This first year is followed by only nine years of compulsory school.  Everything after ninth grade is optional and at the age of 16 the students can choose from the following three tracks:

• Upper Secondary School:   This three year program prepares students for the Matriculation Test that determines their acceptance into University.  Students usually pick which upper secondary school they would like to attend based on the school’s specialties and apply to get into that institution.  I think of this as a mixture of High School and College.  (In recent years a little less than 40% choose this option.)

• Vocational Education:   This is a three year program that trains students for various careers as well as gives them the option to take the Matriculation test to then apply for University should they so choose.  However, the students in this track are usually content with their skill  and  either enter the workforce or they go on to a Poly-technical College to get further training. (A little less than 60% choose this track.)

(But wait!  Shouldn’t everyone take calculus, economics, and advanced chemistry?!  Shouldn’t everyone get a University degree?!  No, not everyone has to go to University! Hmmm….. interesting….. What if we provided options for those who want to become successful (and very profitable) welders or electricians?  What if we didn’t force students who know that their talents reside outside of the world of formal academics to take three years of high school classes that they found boring and useless?  What if we allowed them to train in and explore vocations they found fascinating and in which they were gifted? What if we made these students feel valued and like they had a place in the education realm?)

• Enter the workforce. (Less than 5% choose this path)

2.  Less Time in School = More Rest

Students typically start school between 9:00 and 9:45.   Actually,  Helsinki is thinking of creating a law stating that schools cannot begin before 9:00 am because research has consistently proved that adolescents need quality sleep in the morning.  The school day usually ends by 2:00 or 2:45.  Some days they start earlier and some days they start later.  Finnish students’ schedules are always different and changing; however they typically have three to four 75 minute classes a day with several breaks in between.  This overall system allows both students and teachers to be well rested and ready to teach/learn.

3.  Fewer Instruction Hours = More Planning Time

Teachers have shorter days as well.  According to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)  an average Finnish teacher teaches 600 hours annually or about 4 or less lessons daily.   An average U.S. teacher almost doubles that teaching time with an average of over 1,080 hours of in-class instruction annually.  This equals an average of six or more lessons daily.  Also, teachers and students in Finland are not expected to be at school when they do not have a class.  For example, if they don’t have any afternoon classes on Thursdays, they (both teachers and students) can simply leave.  Or if their first class on a Wednesday starts at 11:00, they don’t have to be at school until that time.  This system allows the Finnish teacher more time to plan and think about each lesson.  It allows them to create great, thought provoking lessons.

4.  Fewer Teachers  = More Consistency and Care 

Elementary students in Finland often have the SAME teacher for up to SIX YEARS of their education.  That is right!  The same teacher cares for, nurtures and tends to the education of the same group of students for six years in a row.  And you had better believe that during those six years with the same 15-20 students, those teachers have figured out the individual instructional needs and learning styles of each and every student. These teachers know where each of their students have been and where they are going.  They track the kids’ progress and have a personal invested interest in seeing the kids succeed and reach their goals.  There is no “passing the buck” onto the next teacher because they ARE the next teacher.  If there is a discipline or behavior problem, the teacher had better nip it in the bud right away or else deal with it the next six years.  ( Some schools in Finland only loop their elementary children for three years at a time instead of six, however the benefits are still the same. )

This system is not only helpful to a child because it gives them the consistency, care and individualized attention they need, it also helps the teachers understand the curriculum in a holistic and linear way. The teacher knows what they need to teach to get them to the next step, while also giving the teachers freedom to work at the pace of their students.  Teachers don’t feel the pressure to speed up or slow down  so that they are “ready” for the teacher next year.  Again, they are the teacher next year and they control the curriculum!  They know where the kids are and what they have learned and will plan according to the students’ needs!   I really believe this is a HUGE part of Finland’s success story and it does not receive enough attention.

5.  Fewer Accepted Applicants= More Confidence in Teachers

So……children have the same teacher for three to six years.  What if your kid gets a “bad teacher”?  Finland works very hard to make sure there are no “bad teachers.”  Primary education is THE most competitive degree to get in Finland.  The elementary education departments in Finland only accept 10% of all applicants and turns down thousands of students annually.  A person not only has to be the best and the brightest to become a primary teacher, they also have to have passed a series of interviews and personality screenings to get in.  So, it isn’t enough to be the smartest in your class, you also have to have the natural ability and drive to teach.

Finland understands that the ability to teach isn’t something that can be gained from studying. It is usually a gift and passion.  Some have it, some don’t.  The few universities with teaching programs in Finland make sure they only accept applicants that have that gift.  On top of excellent grades, and a natural disposition to be a teacher, all teachers must get a Master’s degree and write a Master’s Thesis.  This generates a lot of confidence and trust in Finland’s teachers.  Parents trust the teachers to be highly qualified, trained, and gifted individuals.  They do not try to interfere or usurp their authority and decisions.  I asked a math teacher how many emails they typically get from parents.  They shrugged and answered “About five or six”.  I said, “Oh, I get about that much a day too.”  They then answered…”No!  I meant five or six a semester!”  Again, what would it be like to live in a society based on trust and respect ?

6.  Fewer Classes= More Breaks

As I stated before, students only have three to four (or rarely, five) classes a day.  They also have several breaks/recesses/ snack times during the day and these usually happen outside come rain or shine.  These 15 to 20 minute gives them time to digest what they are learning, use their muscles, stretch their legs, get some fresh air and let out the “wiggles.”   There are several neurological advantages for these breaks.  Study after study supports the need for children to be physically active in order to learn.  Stagnation of the body leads to stagnation of the brain and unfocused, “hyper” children.

The teachers also have these breaks.  The first day I was in a school in Finland a teacher apologized for the state of the “Teacher Room.”  She then commented on the fact that all teacher rooms must look like this.  I laughed and politely agreed, but in my head I was thinking; “What is a teacher room?”  A teacher’s room is what used to be called the teacher’s lounge in the U.S…back before they went extinct.  In Finland these rooms are always full of teachers who are either working, preparing, grabbing a cup of coffee, or simply resting, socializing, and mentally preparing for their next class.

Secondary level teachers usually have 10 to 20 minute breaks in between classes and often have a few skip (prep) periods as well.  These rooms are different depending on the school, but from what I can tell the basic formula is a few tables, a few couches, a coffee pot, a kitchen, a selection of free fruit and snacks, and teachers to talk and collaborate with.  A few of them even have massage chairs! Ha!

So, why don’t these rooms of collaboration, support and solace exist in the U.S.?   We do not have TIME!  Every day we teach six to seven classes in a row with no breaks.  The three to five minute passing periods we do get are often used to answer emails from parents, erase the board, get ready for the next class, make copies, answer student questions, pick up the mess left behind by the students, and (heaven forbid) go to the bathroom!  If we have a spare moment we are then expected to monitor the hallway because we can’t trust students to get to class without supervision.  The luxury of actually sitting down for 10 minutes and enjoying a cup of coffee with some colleagues is an absolute dream, and having a day with only three classes—that is a fantasy!

7. Less Testing = More Learning

Imagine all of the exciting things you could do with your students if there wasn’t a giant state test looming over your head every year.  Imagine the freedom you could have if your pay wasn’t connected to your student’s test scores.  Imagine how much more fun and engaging your lessons would be!

Although it still exists, there is overall less pressure on the teacher in Finland to get through the curriculum.  The teacher is simply trusted to do a good job and therefore they have more control over their classroom and its content. The teacher is able to take more risks and try new things and create exciting, engaging curriculum that allows students to become skilled individuals ready for the real world.  They have time to teach skills that allow students to develop into individuals who know how to start a project and work systematically to accomplish a goal.  They have time to teach craft education where students get to learn how to do real life skills like sewing, cooking, cleaning, woodworking and more!   And while they are learning these amazing skills they are also learning math and problem solving and how to follow directions!

8. Fewer Topics = More Depth

I have observed several fifth through ninth grade math classes in Finland.  I have looked at the curriculum covered over these five years of education and I realized that I attempt to teach the content of five years of  Finnish math education in one year.  Each math topic presented in every grade level I have observed here is include in my seventh grade curriculum.

Again, the American mentality of “more is more” simply does not work.  If I am to get through everything I am expected to do in one year I have to introduce a new topic/lesson every other day and I always feel “behind”.  Behind what, I am not sure, but the pressure is there pushing me and my students along.  In Finland, teachers take their time.  They look deeper into the topic and don’t panic if they are a little behind or don’t cover every topic in the existence of mathematics in a single year.

Also, students only have math a few times a week.  In fact, after Easter Break, all of my seventh graders only have math ONCE a week!  My heart still panics a little when I hear this!  I can’t believe that is enough math time!  How will they be ready for the tests?!  Oh— wait.  There are no tests.  There is no need to rush through.  The students get to actually understand the material before they are forced on to a new topic.  One teacher showed me a course book and said that it had too many topics for one five week grading period.  I looked at the entire book and had to stifle a chuckle because it essentially covered what would be found in ONE chapter from my textbook.  Why do we push our kids in the U.S. to learn so much so quickly?  No wonder they are stressed out!  No wonder they give up!

9.  Less Homework = More Participation  

According to the OECD, Finnish students have the least amount of homework in the world.  They average under half an hour of homework a night.  Finnish students typically do not have outside tutors or lessons either.  This is especially shocking when you realize Finnish students are outscoring the high performing Asian nations whose students receive hours of additional/outside instruction.  From what I can observe, students in Finland get the work done in class, and teachers feel that what the students are able to do in school is enough.  Again, there is not pressure to have them do more than what is necessary for them to learn a skill.  Often the assignments are open-ended and not really graded.  Yet, the students work on it in class diligently.  It is very interesting to see what happens to the students when they are given something to do.  The students who were not listening to the lesson at all put away their phones and start working on the task set before them.  Even if it is just a suggested assignment, they give it their full attention up to the end of class.  It is almost like there is an unspoken agreement: “I won’t give you homework if you work on this while you are in my classroom.”  This system has really made me think about the amount of homework I assign on a daily basis.

10.  Fewer Students = More Individual Attention

This is obvious.   If you have fewer students you will be able to give them the care and attention they need to learn. A Finnish teacher will have about 3 to 4 classes of 20 students a day- so they will see between 60 to 80 students a day.   I see 180 students every single day.  I have 30 to 35 students in a class, six classes in a row, 5 days a week.

11.  Less Structure =  More Trust

Trust is key to this whole system not structure. Instead of being suspicious of one another and creating tons of structure, rules, hoops and tests to see if the system is working, they simply trust the system.  Society trusts the schools to hire good Teachers.  The schools trust the teachers to be highly trained individuals and therefore give them freedom to create the type of classroom environment that is best for their individual students.  The Parent’s trust the teachers to make decisions that will help their children learn and thrive.  The Teachers trust the students to do the work and learn for the sake of learning.   The Students trust the teachers to give them the tools they need to be successful.  Society trusts the system and gives education the respect it deserves.    It works and it isn’t complicated.   Finland has it figured out.

Less IS More. 

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398 thoughts on “ 11 Ways Finland’s Education System Shows Us that “Less is More”. ”

Thanks Kelly for that Wonderful information. Here in Tanzania, and probably whole East Africa the group of people suffer a lot of pressure are students. For most of public schools they don’t have sufficient teachers, and for those with sufficient teachers, students SUFFER A LOT, reporting time is strictly at 7:00 a.m, more than that you will be in a terrible situation. If you are a student, especially primary student, DON’T live your class unless its a break time!!! and in fact we have only one break per day, its kind of CLASS = JAIL and STUDENTS=LIFE TIME PRISONERS. Those student who fail to pass are separated on different classes to have much more assignments, homework and punishments. For five years student performance have keep dropping accompanied with lack of competence for majority of students who graduate. In general everything written in this article is contrary to our current education system but I have enjoyed it a lot because I have learned something really new.

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It’s a good read. Although in India this isn’t possible. I am also a blogger, an ametur one I must say, I work in the field of education. I have written about the loopholes of the Indian education system and am going to write about what can be done to improve it with the help of your blog. Do check my blog.

Hi Kelly I’m a Brit living in Finland. I have two adult kids who went through the Finnish school system. I have to say, it was absolutely brilliant. All the teachers were wonderful as were the facilities at the schools. University is free, too.

Hi, I absolutely LOVE this post. I am an exchange student in Finland right now working on a research of the education system as well. It was wonderful to see all of your points which some I had not realized on my own yet. Thank you. It was also wonderful to read from a teachers perspective!! Thank you

this article and comments so great. give me good information. i wish i can go to finland to learn.

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As I read more of your posts, I see you are from Indiana. Indiana has one of the best K-12 systems and that shows in your public higher education as well. I think Indiana funds education better than other US states such as Arizona. While school quality in the USA does not always follow funding, there is some loose correlation.

I would not characterize US students as failing overall, although we seem to have some students slipping through the cracks in very low funded areas such as parts of Missouri. We have a rich variety of private, public and pubic charter as well as a very strong home schooling movement across the USA. All these education models can work well.

I think we see segregation in some inner city schools in some US cities. It was written about very well by a New York City Parent here:

I would be interested in your feedback on the article, if you care to read it.

Interested Reader

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hi kelly. my name is arik and i’m an educator from israel. thank you for this wonderfull post. cant wait to visit in schools there, i guess it will happen soon. arik

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Thank you for writing this! Three of my five children have graduated from high school (2 in idaho, 1 in California), with average GPAs and frankly, lots of frustration. My 22 yr d daughter is pursuing a degree in early elementary education, and on a side note, we have strong Finnish roots (My grandmother was 100% Finnish , her parents American immigranst)… So your article is relevant on many levels 🙂 After a late night discussion where my 16 yr old was trying to convince me that high school was pointless … I wanted to know how high school in America compared to other countries, like Finland. I honestly think the education system in America is a huge failure and wonder why we haven’t at least attempted an American adaptation of Finland’s education practices (as you’ve described) in those states and cities where it could at least be an experimental alternative. Who knows where we’d be as a country right now if we’d invested in this approach instead of common core??!! Key points that stood out to me… 1. school begins at age 7 2. only top notch teachers allowed 3. student choices after 9th grade include university focus, skill focus, or go to work.

Not only would this solve the crisis in education, it would create highly skilled workers in crafts and trades (be it interior designers, writers, woodworkers, or electricians) — students who are better at math and science would excel faster; boredom and bullying would cease to exist; higher education debt would drop significantly; teaching and learning would be rewarding again; and so much more! (My opinion-based conclusions after reading).

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Nature rich free and without obligation every child.

Reblogged this on Searching For The Truth .

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I’m so jealous of the Fins 4 days a week 25 periods a week Look at me ,in Thailand, 5 days a week starting at 8 am and ending at 4-5 pm, 8 periods a day ,40 periods! a week Finland is so fortunate. ; (

This is a sweet article, I’m writing a research paper on why the American School system sucks and this helped a lot. Thank you. Finland knows what’s up.

Reblogged this on Atticus Gallivant .

I enjoyed this article a lot. Thanks

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Thank You! This is a wonderful article. It needs to be read by the many in the US who are pushing for year long school. I think looking at Finland and how they are doing so well with their schools would be a great help for students world wide.

I love the approach of the Finnish. I’m opposed to many of the things which are required in US schools. I’ve taught overseas in schools attempting to mimick the US system and have asked why. We are no longer the educational superpower we one were. I think about my own schooling and that of those before me and feel that we are much more grounded and well developed than what we see today. We didn’t have the pressures of testing that seems to be THE single measure of success these days. Teachers being the ones primarily held responsible, not taking into account individual learning styles and needs not external factors beyond their control.

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I think you’re wrong that we don’t have teacher rooms in the US. I’ve subbed in various schools in Texas between 1999 and 2017, in 3 different areas (5 different districts…as I subbed for adjacent districts) and I’ve never been to one that didn’t have a teacher’s lounge. Some had better ones than others but they all had them.

But I agree that teachers most often don’t have time to use these rooms. These rooms are places for a quick snack and rushing back to class, not often for true collaboration here, simply because of lack of time.

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GREAT and awesome post! I am not a education specialist, but I like how that system school works. What changes could you do in a US school system and how could you overcome the culture and political system? Please share your findings about the foreign language teaching in Finland. I am a firm believer that a foreign languages should be teach starting at elementary school (Language immersion).

Incredible Article , so now i realized the plight of kerala(indian) educational system , politician , clever people are destroying the education. Majority student are becoming Clerks…

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Education Corner

27 Surprising Finnish Education System Facts and Statistics

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There has been a lot of press recently about how the education system in Finland is one of the best in the world and how they are using radical (compared with the UK and the US) ideas to help achieve their status as one of the best.

Anywhere you look the proof doesn’t seem to lie, yet how exactly is the Finnish Education system achieving such greatness? Their students outperform students in the US and the UK in most, if not all areas and their teachers enjoy a much better work life balance. Let’s take a dive into some of the things the Finnish are doing.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) , a survey taken every three years by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) routinely releases data which shows that Americans and British students are seriously lagging behind in many educational performance assessments.

The Finnish Education System

#1 Finnish children enter education at a later age than in many countries. They start school at age 7 and believe that “starting children in school before they’re naturally developmentally ready has no scientifically proven long-term advantage”.

#2 Prior to age 7, Finnish school children can attend day care/nursery school but they do not have formal education whilst there, Instead, they focus on creative play . “They need time to play and be physically active. It’s a time for creativity”. says Tiina Marjoniemi, head of Franzenia daycare center in Helsinki. The Guardian

#3 For every 45 minutes of learning, students enjoy 15 minutes of play.

#4 School is only compulsory for 11 years, meaning students can leave education at age 18. Everything after that is optional. This idea is thought to prepare Finnish students for the real world.

#5 Finish students are not measured at all for the first six years of their education.

#6 Students in Finland only have to sit for a centralized exam (National Matriculation Exam) at the age of 18-19 years old (after 12 years of school).

Finland School Hours

#7 Finnish students do the least number of class hours per week in the developed world, yet get the best results in the long term. The school day starts between 8-9am and is finished by 2pm.

Finland Education Ranking

#8 The schools in Finland are not ranked in any way, there are no comparisons made between schools, regions, teachers or even students. They believe that cooperation is the key to success, not competition.

#9 Finnish Teachers are some of the most qualified in the world. The requirements for becoming a teacher in Finland are set very high, only around the top 10% of applicants are successful and all of those have a masters degree (which incidentally is fully subsidised!).

#10 Finnish teachers have the same status as doctors and lawyers. ( I wish that was the case in the UK! )

#11 Finnish Teachers are not graded. This is probably a direct result of their rigorous selection process and because of this, in Finland, they don’t feel the need to constantly assess and grade their teachers. If a teacher isn’t performing satisfactorily, it is up to the schools principal/head to deal with it. Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education and writer of Finnish Lessons, said this about teachers’ accountability:

“There’s no word for accountability in Finnish… Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

#12 Schools are not inspected. School inspections were actually abolished in Finland in the early 1990s. They have the ideology that they can help direct and assist through support and funding. Again, they trust the professionalism of teachers and school leaders. Schools are encouraged to self-evaluate along.

#13 There are no selective schools or private schools. One of the reasons why there is no competition between Finnish schools is that all schools are funded through public funds. No competition = level playing field.

#14 All Finnish school children receive free school meals, all of them, all the way through school!. There has been a healthy hot lunch served to all students been since 1943 for the whole 9 years at school. ( Huffingtonpost.com )

#15 Finnish students all have access to support that is individually based on their specific needs from the start of their school career. They believe that every child has some special needs and therefore special education is for everyone.

#16 The Basics are the priority. Rather than focus on increasing test scores and dominating in math, science and English, the Finnish education system focus on creating a healthy and harmonious environment for students and learning. The ideology of the Finnish education system is that education should be an “ instrument to balance out social inequality “.

#17 Finnish students have the same teacher for up to 6 years of their school career. This is one of the pillars of their harmonious education environment ideology. It allows student/teacher relationships to grow year on year, allowing a much deeper level of trust and respect than only having one year.

Finland Education Curriculum

#18 Finnish Students have less homework than any other student on the planet. Even with fewer school hours, they are still getting everything they need to be done whilst at school. This, in turn, builds on a Finnish child’s ability to grow and learn into a happy and responsible adult.

#19 All classes are mixed ability. This is unpopular in a lot of education systems in the UK and the US (I know, my own school recently adopted this policy (Personally, I love it) and there can be a lot of teachers that don’t like it. However, some of the most successful education systems have mixed ability classes, so it does work!

#20 Finnish Students learn more languages. They learn Finnish from their first day at school. At age 9 they start learning their second language (which is usually English). By age 11 they start learning Swedish, which is Finland’s second language. Many students even start learning a fourth language when they are 13. They are only tested on their first two languages in the final exam at the end of high school.

#21 Teachers only generally spend 4 hours a day in the classroom and have 2 hours every week for professional development , thus reducing teacher stress.

#22 The Finnish national curriculum is a broadly based guideline, allowing teachers to use their own style and ideas in the classroom. This builds on the trust that the Finnish education system has in its teachers.

Finland Education Statistics

#23 93% of students graduate from high school. More than in the US.

#24 66% of high school students go on to further education (college or vocational courses).

#25 Finland spends about 30% less per student than the US, the UK, Japan and Germany. ( OECD Indicators )

#26 Just under 100% of 9th-grade students in Finland go on to high school. This figure includes most of the severely disabled children ( smithsonian.com )

#27 43% of those students in further education (16+) attend vocational school.

So there we have it, Finnish students and teachers are part of a great system. Having worked with several Finnish teachers, I can tell you that their ideology and these strategies work, very well!

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2 thoughts on “27 Surprising Finnish Education System Facts and Statistics”

As a student in Finland I realized some of this information is outdated. #1 – It states that children start their education at the age of 7. This is no longer correct because they can start is at the ages of 5, 6 or 7. Typically they do at ages 6 or 7. #3 – It is very school based. some schools do not follow this and it depends a lot. A school can have 45 minute lessons and a 5 min break. #4 – Over resent years it has changed into 9 years of compulsory education (basic education) 2-4 years of upper secondary studies/vocational application. #6 – the matriculation examination is at the age of 18 (typically the last two years of upper secondary studies). Not all students do this because they choose to go to vocational school. #7 – It is again very school based because some schools follow periods (certain subjects for 6 weeks and then the timetable changes). Most schools and students most likely have days from 8am-3pm. It depends a lot what day it is. #16 – To apply to upper secondary school and vocational schools they calculate the average of math, English, Finnish, Swedish, history, civics, religion/ethics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, health education. #17 – Pert of this is true. Best case scenario they do have the same teacher for six years, but most of the time teachers are only qualified to teach certain grade levels. #18 – The amount of homework totally depends on the teacher. It depends how much the teacher wants them to do. Most times homework is tasks that they did not get done on lessons or ones that deepen the meaning of the subject. #20 – there are a lot of confusing things about this. In most schools the child starts learning Finnish from first grade onwards. From grade 3 onwards they start learning English. From grade 5 onwards they can decide if the want another language (typically French, German or Spanish). From grade 6 onwards they start learning Swedish. In the matriculation examinations the test Finnish and a second home language so either Swedish or English. #21 – Subject teachers can have as many hours a day as the pupils. This all depends how many subjects they are qualified to teach.

According to the Bildung Review the Finnish educational system is failing. Not testing and focusing only on cooperation seems to have failed. I hope Finland will shift in the proper educational focus.

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  • Study in Finland /

Finland Education System

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Finland Education System

Revered as the best education system in the world , Finland has meticulously curated an apparatus for academia and learning that is at par with almost all countries around the globe. Bordering Sweden , Norway , and Russia by land and Estonia by sea, the country is home to a unique mix of modern and natural with its clean and sophisticated towns blossoming with coniferous forests in the countryside. Emerging as an intellectual in the domain of education, the Finnish education system is meant to have cracked the code of imparting quality education and following the motto of eternal learning. Have you ever thought about why Finland has the best education system in the world? Through this blog, let’s explore what makes Finland’s education system unique as well as how it is designed. 

This Blog Includes:

Finland education system ranking, top 10 reasons why finland has the best education system, finland education system facts, finland education policy, schooling in finland, early childhood education and care (ecec), pre-primary education, basic education , upper secondary education, higher education (universities/universities of applied sciences), adult education, finland education statistics, free education in finland, restructuring of higher education in finland , finland education system ppt, list of popular universities in finland, top public universities in finland, cost of studying in finland, best cities in finland, student visas for finland .

Click here to download Finland Education System PDF!

Finland is, no doubt, one of the best countries to study. So, let’s check out some of the rankings that the country has received:

  • Finland is the 8th most educated country in the world.
  • In Education ranking by Countries, Finland has a total score of 1.631K ranking in 3rd position in 2021.
  • Finland has the highest ranking in High School Completion Rate.
  • World Economic Forum’s Global Competitive study ranks Finland as having the most well-developed education in the world.

Now being admired as the best of them all, the Finnish education system wasn’t always like this. If we go back in time, it happened almost 50 years ago when the Finnish government examined the education system and added better, progressive though untested reforms that would prove to be imperative in the future years. That’s when the whole structure was redeveloped going from the basic early education stage to the higher education level, it got recreated with the motto to equip students with incremental life skills.

Here are the top 10 reasons why Finland has the best education system in the world:

  • Free Education Access (from Pre-Primary to Higher) to Finnish Citizens as well as to those coming from EU /EEA countries because education is considered an equal right for everyone.
  • Implementation of a holistic teaching and learning environment that aims to emphasise equity over excellence.
  • No standardized testing system as students is graded individually with a grading system created by their teacher. Also, overall progress is mapped by the Ministry of Education by sampling groups of varied ranges of schools.
  • Finnish children begin their academic journey at an older age, i.e. only when they turn seven years old do they commence their schooling and before that learning is made free-flowing.
  • The “bar is higher for teachers”, i.e. only master’s degree holders (from specialised teaching schools) can opt for teaching positions and even then an individual principal is allotted to every teacher to keep a tab on their progress.
  • Exemption from the Artificial Parameters of Academic Progress by removing any kind of competition between academic institutions but rather cooperation is made the norm.
  • Better Alternatives to the Same-Old Degree those planning for a college education can choose from professional options, be it vocational schools, university education or training classes.
  • Focuses on fostering cooperation over competition in schools by inculcating the skills of teamwork, collaboration and team spirit in students.
  • Emphasis on foundational basics is an important reason why Finland has the best education system in the world because students are provided with the time and scope to build the best foundation and basics at their own pace.
  • Only 9 years of compulsory education are there in Finland’s education system and after that students are encouraged to find out what’s best for them academically and career-wise.

Explore New Zealand Education System !

Want to know why Finland has the best education system in the world? Well, here are the top characteristics of Finland’s Education System:

  • The minimum age for starting elementary education in Finland is 7 years thus Finnish kids get to enjoy their childhood and kickstart their learning with their families rather than spending excessive time in schools.
  • Finnish teachers formulate their grading systems for the students rather than relying on class exams and standardised tests.
  • The only mandatory test that Finnish students give is at the age of 16.
  • Finnish teachers only spend around 4 hours every day teaching in the classroom while they devote 2 hours every week to professional development.
  • The school system in Finland is wholly 100% state-funded.
  • Graduates from the top 10 percentile can only apply to become a Teacher in Finland.
  • Every teacher in Finland is a master’s degree holder which is completely subsidized by the country’s government.
  • On average, the starting salary of a teacher in Finland is somewhere around $29,000.
  • Teachers are considered equivalent in status to doctors and lawyers in Finland.
  • In 2018, the literacy rate in Finland was 99.0% .
  • Finnish students spend only 20 hours a week at school.
  • Every student in Finland can speak 2-3 languages .
  • No competition between Finnish schools since every academic institution has the same facilities as any other.
  • Students get to learn new things in schools from baking and industrial works to music and poetry .
  • For every 45 minutes of learning in schools , Finnish students get to spend every 15 minutes playing or doing leisure activities .
  • Finnish students receive free healthy meals from their schools.
  • Every Finnish student is provided special services that fit their special needs and requirements.
  • The Finland education system also fosters the teacher-student relationship as every student gets the same teacher for up to 6 years in their school.
  • The students get very less homework and almost finish up everything they get during school hours only.
  • The Finnish schools have mixed ability classes to nurture diverse interests and hobbies.

Click here to know all about Studying in Finland!

Finland Education Policy

The uniquely created Finland Education Policy is one of the key reasons why Finland has the best education system in the world. Here are the important features of Finland’s Education Policy:

  • The main aim of Finland’s Education policy is to ensure that every citizen has equal educational opportunities to avail.
  • The most important focus of the education policy is emphasised quality, efficiency, equity and internationalization.
  • It is founded on the principles of ‘Lifelong Learning and ‘Free Education.
  • Finnish teachers are provided with the autonomy they need but they are fully trained and shortlisted only with higher qualifications which are usually a master’s degree.
  • Teachers are also intensively involved in creating the best curricula as well as learning plans for students.
  • Finland’s education system fosters an environment of trust between educators as well as the community.
  • Students are motivated to work on collaborative projects especially through interdisciplinary projects and specialisations.

Finland Education System

The Finnish Education System contains nine years of compulsory basic education, early education and care, pre-primary education, upper secondary education, higher education, and finally adult education. The description of all these levels has been given below.

  • Early Childhood Education and Care (Provided to the students before the beginning of compulsory education)
  • Pre-Primary Education (1-year duration for 6-year-olds)
  • Basic Education (Compulsory 9-year education for children aged 7-16))
  • Upper Secondary Education (Vocational Education and Training / General Upper Secondary Education)
  • Higher Education (Education offered by Universities / Universities of Applied Sciences )

Now, let’s explore these levels of education in further detail:

This level of education aims to support the development, learning and well-being of a child while giving them plentiful learning opportunities. Local Authorities and Municipalities are tasked with the responsibility of regulating the mechanism of Early Children’s Education and Care. At this level of the Finland Education System, only municipal daycare cover is charged which mainly relies on family income as well as the number of children. Taking approval of the Finnish National Agency for Education, the National Curriculum Guidelines (NCG) is designed for the ECEC level and also constitute of open early childhood education activities which are conducted by municipalities for kids and their families.

Playing a vital role in the continuum expanding from ECEC, this stage aims to enhance the children’s opportunities for learning and development. For the children in the country, participation in pre-primary education has been made compulsory, since 2015. Also, another significant feature of the Finland education system under the stage of Pre-primary education is that the guardian of the kid must ensure their participation in different types of activities at this level. With the approval of the Finnish National Agency for Education, the National Core Curriculum for Pre-Primary Education guides the planning and implementation of the contents of Pre-Education.

In the Finland Education System, Comprehensive Schooling or Basic Education is where the compulsory education of 9 years begins for all children aged between 7 and 16. It strives to support the student’s growth towards becoming an ethically responsible member of society as well as imparting them the essential knowledge and skills needed in life. Further, all the schools providing basic education follow a national core curriculum which constitutes the objectives and core fundamentals of varied subjects, and the local authorities, such as municipalities and other education providers, maintain the Comprehensive Schools and often create their curricula as part of the national framework.

After the basic education stage of the Finland education system, students are given the choice between pursuing general and vocational education. General Education usually takes three years to complete and does not qualify students for pursuing any particular profession or occupation. After completing the General Upper Secondary Education, the students have to take the Finnish matriculation examination to be eligible for various educational universities or universities of applied sciences for bachelor’s degrees. 

The other route which students of Finland can choose is Vocational Upper Secondary Education and Training in which students are provided with basic skills required in their chosen field by allotting them to workplaces through an apprenticeship agreement or a training agreement. The institution facilitating the program curates a personal capability development plan for its students, drafting the content, schedule, and schemes of study. After concluding this level, the students are eligible to opt for further studies at universities or universities of applied sciences to enter the higher education stage in Finland’s education system.

Under the higher level of the Finland Education system, the academic institutions are bifurcated into regular universities and Universities of Applied Sciences. There are various postgraduate degrees as well in higher scientific and artistic education, i.e. licentiate and doctoral degrees. The time duration to complete a bachelor’s degree in regular universities is 3 years and the master’s program is of 2 years. Whereas, the students who pursue their higher education at Universities of Applied Sciences in Finland, are awarded UAS Bachelor’s and UAS Master’s degrees. 

In Finland’s education system, the degrees offered by the Universities of Applied Sciences usually take between 3.5 and 4.5 years to get completed. Those students who want to pursue UAS Master’s program in these universities must have completed their bachelor’s degree or any other suitable degree along with having 3 years of relevant work experience in their field.

Must Read: Finland Student Visa

Adult education and training in Finland’s Education System are added to provide education leading to a qualification, degree studies, apprenticeship training, further and continuing education updating and extending the professional skills, studies in different crafts and subjects on a recreational basis, and much more. For this stage of education, the training is either paid by the student or the employer facilitating apprenticeship training, staff development, or labour policy education. Adult education is provided by educational institutions mainly for working professionals, private companies, and workplaces.

Also Read: Japan Education System

Around 93% of graduates in Finland from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5% points higher than the US, and 66% of them choose to opt for higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends around 30% less per student than the US.

Finland does not just boast quality education but also offers free education for many students. The public universities in Finland are divided into regular universities and universities for applied sciences. These universities have no tuition fees for students coming from EU/EEA countries and Switzerland. Although Non-EU/EEA country students have to pay the tuition fees, programs taught in Finnish or Swedish are free for international students as well. 

The Ministry of Education has called for system-wide reorganisation as a result of globalisation and increased competition for dwindling younger age groups. Since 2006, all higher education institutions have started exchanging collaboration methods. Within 10–15 years, the total number of institutions is likely to shrink dramatically. The University of Eastern Finland was formed in 2010 when the University of Kuopio and the University of Joensuu merged to become the University of Eastern Finland. On August 1, 2009, three local institutions in Helsinki, notably the Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics, and Helsinki University of Art and Design, united to form Aalto University. Several applied science universities have also announced mergers. Within universities, new forms of collaboration such as consortia and federations have been introduced (e.g., the University of Turku and Turku School of Economics Consortium). Traditional institutions and universities of applied sciences are forming partnerships (e.g., the University of Kuopio and Savonia University of Applied Sciences formed the Northern Savonia Higher Education Consortium). In general, system-wide change in Central Europe , the United States , Spain , and Hungary follows a similar pattern.

Several universities in the country have earned international accreditation and are on the wish lists of many students. Examine the following list of universities in Finland, along with their respective QS Rankings for the year 2023:

Listed below are the top public universities offering academic degrees to international students –

  • University of Helsinki
  • Abo Akademi University
  • Aalto University
  • Tampere University
  • University of Jyväskylä

Finland’s public institutions did not charge tuition fees until 2017. However, there have been attempts at the government level since the 1990s to impose tuition fees on students from outside the European Union/EEA . Those ideas have been met with opposition from student organisations. Students from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) have had to pay at least 1,500 euros a year to study in Finland since the autumn semester of 2017, while students from the EEA continue to study for free. Non-European students’ tuition fees typically range from roughly EUR 6,000 to EUR 18,000 (INR 5.19 – INR 15.58 Lakhs) per year, depending on the university and programme.

While planning to pursue higher studies in Finland, students might be confused about the cities. Well, to help you with that, we have listed the best cities in Finland in this section, to help make your university selection process easier –

As an Indian student wanting to study in Finland, you need to have a valid passport and a visa to enter a new country. The Single-entry visa enabled entry to the Schengen zone once and for up to 90 days in any 180 days while the Double-entry visa increases your entry to twice. Other than this, there is a Multiple-entry visa granted for various consecutive visits to the Schengen area and the total duration of the stay cannot exceed 90 days in 180 days and this is valid for a maximum of 5 years. In case you wish to extend the validity of your visa while in Finland, you need to contact the local police authorities there.

Finland ranks third in the Education Ranking by Countries in 2021, with a total score of 1.631K. Finland has the highest rate of high school completion in the world. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, Finland has the best-developed education system in the world.

Finland has been named one of the world’s happiest and most prosperous countries, and The Economist just named it the best country in the world for higher education.

In Finland, for example, students spend just around 5 hours per day in school and have little homework outside of school. Students in many Asian countries, however, attend school for longer days, and many attend private “cram schools” for hours each day outside of official school hours.

Regular universities and universities of applied sciences are the two types of public institutions in Finland. They are all tuition-free for students from the EU/EEA and Switzerland. Non-EU/EEA students enrolled in English-taught degrees must pay tuition.

The fact is that in a country with one of the best education systems in the world, there is hardly any homework. Finnish people think that, aside from homework, several other factors might improve a child’s academic achievement, such as eating supper with their family, exercising, or getting a good night’s sleep.

Thus, the Finland education system strives to emphasize equal educational opportunities imparting every pupil with the essential life skills and core knowledge of basic disciplines while giving them the necessary liberty at the latter stages to experiment, explore and follow their callings.

If you are intending to study in Finland but are confused about how to go about it, let our Leverage Edu experts guide you in finding a suitable program and university as well as kickstarting the application process promptly so that you get to embrace an incredible experience in the intellectual land of opportunities.

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10 comments

I wish to apply for a scholarship in country ,I am very interested to study in country

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I wish to get my children admitted in Finland schools…matriculation and lower. Can you guide me for next steps please

Hi please get in touch with our study abroad experts at 1800 57 2000 they will surely help you out

i wish to do my PhD and wish to apply for scholarship, I am very interested to study in country

Hi please get in touch with our study abroad experts at 1800 57 2000 they will surely assist you

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Homework, should or should not?

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In Finland we do give homework, but it is only given when the teacher feels that it is necessary for the students. There is no policy that homework has to be given after every lesson, or even every week. 

The aim of homework is to give the student a possibility to do revision on a new topic / most important topics covered in class. Homework should not be   about learning anything new at home, but more about challenging the student´s memory on what concept was covered in class. 

For example, if the students have been covering photosynthesis in their biology class, the teacher could give a problem solving task related to photosynthesis. In this task the student would have to think about what they learned in school and how to adapt that information into their homework. The teacher should not give the student tasks where they need to deepen their knowledge or learn anything new. 

Because the aim of homework is only to do revision on the most important concepts covered in class, homework shouldn´t take over 15 minutes per subject. Teachers need to keep in mind that students have on average 4-5 different subjects per day. If every teacher gives them 30 minutes of homework, that would be over 2 hours of extra studying each night. 

The Finnish education system wants to make sure that students have the ability to recharge from their school day by doing non-school related things that make them happy. For example, participating in football training, playing the piano, and enjoying time with their friends. This is why we limit the amount of homework. When a student has time to relax after school, they feel rested and have full focus and motivation for their next work day at school. 

In Finland we have the mindset of "quality over quantity". With qualified and educated teachers, we can offer students excellent learning opportunities in school. This means that they do not have to do extra studying at home, but rather do a quick revision on the most important topics when needed. 

I don’t worry that students forget knowledge Without homework. If the teacher offers the students a possibility to challenge their memory in diverse ways in class, there shouldn´t be any problem with students forgetting their knowledge. 

For example: I use around 15 minutes of my lesson to teach a new concept in theory. After that the students are challenged to use the information they just learned in various ways. They might be doing group tasks, presentations, experiments, play games etc where they do revision on the topics they just learnt. 

In Finland, teachers never have exercises or homework for students to review in the holidays . Students should spend their holidays resting and doing activities that they enjoy. No adult uses their holidays to do work, and if they would, they wouldn´t have the opportunity to recharge. This would make them tired, less motivated and less efficient when coming back to work. Holidays are the time for the students to let their brain rest.

Using diverse teaching methods is the best way for students to learn and gain knowledge. Teachers should offer students experiences where they can use their knowledge. Memories like this help students to understand what they have learned and come back to these situations when they need to remember something. 

For example: in biology I teach the students about the digestive system by letting them build a model of how bread moves along the digestive tract. When doing a practical assignment like this, they constantly do revision on which parts of the body belong to the digestive tract and also get to see what happens to the food in each phase of digestion. 

Finnish teachers also make sure that when they plan their lessons for the semester, there is enough time for students to revise during their classes. No Finnish teacher teaches new topics every single lesson. Instead, they make sure that students are offered possibilities to do revision in class. 

For example: I teach my high school students 5 x 45 minutes lessons a week. 3 of those lessons are used to learn new topics. The rest are used for challenging the students memory through different assignments and tasks. In this way students do revision in class and no homework is needed. 

Ms. Laura Katriina Lammi

Biology and geography teacher ; Coordinator of the Science Department

Masters of Biology and geography as a teaching subject, University of Jyväskylä

tdtu

Of course, giving homework is entirely up to an individual teacher but usually holidays are breaks from the school work when students spend time with their families and friends, it is time when they charge their batteries and focus on free time and hobbies in order to be full of energy when they return to school. In a happy and balanced life, it is also important to just relax and be without doing anything serious with goals or objectives because this is a precondition for one's creativity and vitality. 

Personally, I don't worry about students forgetting knowledge during the holidays because the school is not the only place where students learn, for instance, when they are travelling, they are using and practising knowledge of many different subjects: language, geography, history, etc. 

At school we never can teach all the needed facts for the students, it is much more important to teach them to be curious about life and learn constantly based on experiences and new requirements faced in life, nobody will know what each of us will need to know in our individual and unique lives, we have to be prepared to face basically all kinds of events, but this is more related to attitude than mastering all the possible facts.

Nowadays we can check up facts from the internet whenever it is needed but it is much more important to learn to think and conduct your life and be a balanced person with good relationships to your friends and relatives. Besides, growing teenagers need more rest and sleep than grown-ups because they are growing, therefore there is a real need for a break from school for them even in physical terms.

Ms. Katja Grekula

History, Social Studies and Economics Teacher, Guidance Counsellor

Master of Social Studies, University of Tampere, Finland

European Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation

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There's no Homework in Finland

THERE'S No Homework In Finland Finland's school system accomplishes some impressive feats: 93% THEIR HIGH SCHOOL 78% GRADUATION RATE IS AT 93%. 75% COMPARED TO 78% IN CANADA. AND 75% IN THE US. %! ABOUT 2 IN 3 STUDENTS IN FINLAND WILL GO ON TO COLLEGE. That's the highest rate in all of Europe. AND THEIR TEST SCORES DOMINATE EVERYONE ELSE. Mean scores for PISA test (Program for International Student Assessment) 2006. 520 530 540 550 560 570 Finland Hong Kong Canada Taiwan Estonia Japan New Zealand Australia Netherlands Liechtenstein So what makes Finnish students so successful? STUDENTS GET PLENTY OF TEACHER INTERACTION. Finland and New York City have the same number of teachers. But Finland has nearly half the number of students. FINLAND NYC Students: Students: 600,000 ALMOST 1.1 MILLION Student to teacher ratio: Student to teacher ratio: 1 TO 12 1 TO 24 THOUGH 1 IN 3 FINNISH STUDENTS RECEIVES SOME SORT OF SPECIAL HELP IN SCHOOL... There are no separate classrooms for accelerated learning or special education. STANDARDIZED TESTING IS KEPT TO A MINIMUM. BEFORE A NEW YORK STUDENT REACHES HIGH SCHOOL, HE OR SHE WILL HAVE TAKEN 10 STANDARDIZED TESTS. Collectively, US students take 100 million standardized tests a year. FINLAND'S ONLY STANDARDIZED TEST IS TAKEN WHEN STUDENTS ARE 16 YEARS OLD. KIDS HAVE MORE TIME TO BE KIDS. AN AVERAGE US 5TH Finnish students GRADER HAS 50 MIN. rarely do homework OF HOME WORK until their teens. PER DAY. 10-11 YRS. ÖLD 13-14 YRS. ÖLD And while US elementary students average 27 minutes of recess... ... STUDENTS IN FINLAND GET 27 MIN 75 MIN ABOUT 75 MINUTES DAY. Most importantly? Finland knows good teachers are essential. TEACHERS IN FINLAND ARE ALL REQUIRED TO HAVE A MASTER'S DEGREE. (Which is fully subsidized by the state.) ONLY THE TOP 10% OF GRADUATES ARE ACCEPTED INTO TEACHING PROGRAMS. AND FINLAND'S TEACHERS ARE AS ESTEEMED AS THEIR DOCTORS OR LAWYERS. The rest of the world could learn a lot from you, Finland. Sources: [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/82204617/Global-Graduation-Rates-By-Country-Source-OECD [2] http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/48343652/ns/today-back_to_school/t/home work-overload-gets-f-experts/ [3] http://www.businessinsider.com/finland-education-school-2011-12?op=1 [4] http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019676789_finland14m.html [5] http://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/secret-finland%E2%80%99s-success- [6] http://www.time4learning.com/testprep/index.php/new-york-state-standardized-test-prep/educating-teachers.pdf This work is under a Creative Commons license. Brought to you by: Online Classes.org BY NO ND OnlineClasses.org

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Do Finland students have no homework?

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Do schools in Finland give homework?

According to the information available, Finnish schools have a relatively low amount of homework. Required subjects are most often covered during the school day, which reduces the need for homework. Homework is seen more as a recap of what has been learned in class, rather than a time-consuming task at home.

What are the disadvantages of Finland education system?

The Finnish education system does have some disadvantages. These include the downsides of mixed ability teaching, decreasing importance of education, lack of enjoyment in school, budget cuts, and structural weaknesses.

How is Finland’s education compared to the United States?

Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and less time in classrooms compared to American teachers. Finnish education emphasizes building curriculums and assessing students during the extra time. Children in Finland also spend more time playing outside, even in the winter season. Homework is kept to a minimum.

How long is a school day in Finland?

Typically, the Finnish school day starts between 9:00 and 9:45 a.m. and students spend approximately five hours in the classroom each day. Finnish students also have little to no homework.

Education in Finland (No Homework, No Standardized Testing)

Unfortunately, there is no information available about the specifics of the education system in Finland related to homework and standardized testing.

Is school in Finland stressful?

It is considered that the education system in Finland promotes stress-free learning. Finnish students do not have to face excessive amounts of homework. The system values free time and play for children’s development.

Which country has the shortest school year?

The country with the shortest school year is typically Luxembourg, with an average of 163 days of school per year. However, it’s important to note that school year lengths can vary based on specific regions within a country and other factors.

What country is #1 in education?

Based on the information available, Iceland is ranked as the country with the best education system, followed by Germany and New Zealand.

Why is Finland #1 in education?

The Finnish education system is often praised for its high-quality and inclusive approach. Finland emphasizes equal opportunities, well-trained teachers, and a focus on learning through play and exploration.

Does Finland have shorter school days?

In Finland, children have a 15-minute break every 45 minutes, resulting in an average of three hours and 45 minutes of educational instruction each day. In comparison, children in the United States spend approximately 6.5 hours a day in the classroom.

What are the downsides of living in Finland?

Living in Finland has some disadvantages, including high taxes, difficulties in finding a job due to high competition, remote areas with expensive air travel, and other factors.

Is Finland school hard?

According to the OECD, Finnish students have less homework and outside work compared to students in other countries. They spend only about half an hour a night working on school-related tasks. Additionally, Finnish students do not have tutors.

Is Finnish education hard?

Finnish schools have a less intense atmosphere with shorter school days and less homework compared to many other countries. The education system emphasizes creativity, critical thinking, and practical skills rather than standardized testing.

How long is lunch in Finland schools?

Each class in Finland meets three times a week for 75 minutes, and each marking period is about a month and a half long. School typically starts at 8:15 a.m. and ends at 2:45 p.m., with an hour allocated for lunch and 15 minutes between each class to allow students plenty of time to relax.

Is school lunch free in Finland?

Finland’s national school meal program provides a free daily meal to all children and young people from pre-primary to upper secondary school. This program has been in place since 1990.

How long is school recess in Finland?

In Finnish schools, students have 15-minute breaks after every 45-minute class. Regardless of the weather, they are usually required to go outside during recess.

What is the toughest education system in the world?

The Korean educational system is often considered the toughest in the world. South Korea is renowned for its challenging and rigorous nature, and Korean students consistently outperform their global counterparts in academic achievement.

Why do kids start school at 7 in Finland?

In Finland, kids often start school at the age of 7 because it is believed that before this age, they learn best through play. Finland also provides free universal daycare for children aged eight months to five years, along with a year of “preschool/kindergarten” at age six to prepare children for their formal education.

Why is Finland so happy?

Finland’s happiness is attributed to factors such as lower income inequality, high social support, freedom to make decisions, and low levels of corruption.

Which country has the toughest education?

Some countries known for having tough education systems include South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Finland.

Which US state is #1 in education?

According to U.S. News & World Report, Florida ranks as the number one state for education.

Where does USA rank in education?

The United States ranks among the top countries in education and is home to eight of the 10 best global universities. U.S. students perform above average in reading and science, but below average in math according to the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment.

What time does school start in Finland?

In Finland, students usually begin school between 9:00 and 9:45 a.m. Finland recognizes the negative impact of early start times on students’ well-being and health.

Does Finland have a good education system?

Finland has one of the best education systems in the world, attracting international students who seek a high-quality and inclusive approach to higher education.

What country has 4 days of school?

Several countries, from Poland to Australia to the U.S., are implementing four-day school weeks, either as a short-lived fad or as a long-term approach to reduce student stress, recruit teachers, and rethink the concept of learning.

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Should Kids Get Homework?

Homework gives elementary students a way to practice concepts, but too much can be harmful, experts say.

Mother helping son with homework at home

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Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful.

How much homework students should get has long been a source of debate among parents and educators. In recent years, some districts have even implemented no-homework policies, as students juggle sports, music and other activities after school.

Parents of elementary school students, in particular, have argued that after-school hours should be spent with family or playing outside rather than completing assignments. And there is little research to show that homework improves academic achievement for elementary students.

But some experts say there's value in homework, even for younger students. When done well, it can help students practice core concepts and develop study habits and time management skills. The key to effective homework, they say, is keeping assignments related to classroom learning, and tailoring the amount by age: Many experts suggest no homework for kindergartners, and little to none in first and second grade.

Value of Homework

Homework provides a chance to solidify what is being taught in the classroom that day, week or unit. Practice matters, says Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University 's Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

"There really is no other domain of human ability where anybody would say you don't need to practice," she adds. "We have children practicing piano and we have children going to sports practice several days a week after school. You name the domain of ability and practice is in there."

Homework is also the place where schools and families most frequently intersect.

"The children are bringing things from the school into the home," says Paula S. Fass, professor emerita of history at the University of California—Berkeley and the author of "The End of American Childhood." "Before the pandemic, (homework) was the only real sense that parents had to what was going on in schools."

Harris Cooper, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and author of "The Battle Over Homework," examined more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and found that — when designed properly — homework can lead to greater student success. Too much, however, is harmful. And homework has a greater positive effect on students in secondary school (grades 7-12) than those in elementary.

"Every child should be doing homework, but the amount and type that they're doing should be appropriate for their developmental level," he says. "For teachers, it's a balancing act. Doing away with homework completely is not in the best interest of children and families. But overburdening families with homework is also not in the child's or a family's best interest."

Negative Homework Assignments

Not all homework for elementary students involves completing a worksheet. Assignments can be fun, says Cooper, like having students visit educational locations, keep statistics on their favorite sports teams, read for pleasure or even help their parents grocery shop. The point is to show students that activities done outside of school can relate to subjects learned in the classroom.

But assignments that are just busy work, that force students to learn new concepts at home, or that are overly time-consuming can be counterproductive, experts say.

Homework that's just busy work.

Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful, experts say. Assignments that look more like busy work – projects or worksheets that don't require teacher feedback and aren't related to topics learned in the classroom – can be frustrating for students and create burdens for families.

"The mental health piece has definitely played a role here over the last couple of years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the last thing we want to do is frustrate students with busy work or homework that makes no sense," says Dave Steckler, principal of Red Trail Elementary School in Mandan, North Dakota.

Homework on material that kids haven't learned yet.

With the pressure to cover all topics on standardized tests and limited time during the school day, some teachers assign homework that has not yet been taught in the classroom.

Not only does this create stress, but it also causes equity challenges. Some parents speak languages other than English or work several jobs, and they aren't able to help teach their children new concepts.

" It just becomes agony for both parents and the kids to get through this worksheet, and the goal becomes getting to the bottom of (the) worksheet with answers filled in without any understanding of what any of it matters for," says professor Susan R. Goldman, co-director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois—Chicago .

Homework that's overly time-consuming.

The standard homework guideline recommended by the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association is the "10-minute rule" – 10 minutes of nightly homework per grade level. A fourth grader, for instance, would receive a total of 40 minutes of homework per night.

But this does not always happen, especially since not every student learns the same. A 2015 study published in the American Journal of Family Therapy found that primary school children actually received three times the recommended amount of homework — and that family stress increased along with the homework load.

Young children can only remain attentive for short periods, so large amounts of homework, especially lengthy projects, can negatively affect students' views on school. Some individual long-term projects – like having to build a replica city, for example – typically become an assignment for parents rather than students, Fass says.

"It's one thing to assign a project like that in which several kids are working on it together," she adds. "In (that) case, the kids do normally work on it. It's another to send it home to the families, where it becomes a burden and doesn't really accomplish very much."

Private vs. Public Schools

Do private schools assign more homework than public schools? There's little research on the issue, but experts say private school parents may be more accepting of homework, seeing it as a sign of academic rigor.

Of course, not all private schools are the same – some focus on college preparation and traditional academics, while others stress alternative approaches to education.

"I think in the academically oriented private schools, there's more support for homework from parents," says Gerald K. LeTendre, chair of educational administration at Pennsylvania State University—University Park . "I don't know if there's any research to show there's more homework, but it's less of a contentious issue."

How to Address Homework Overload

First, assess if the workload takes as long as it appears. Sometimes children may start working on a homework assignment, wander away and come back later, Cooper says.

"Parents don't see it, but they know that their child has started doing their homework four hours ago and still not done it," he adds. "They don't see that there are those four hours where their child was doing lots of other things. So the homework assignment itself actually is not four hours long. It's the way the child is approaching it."

But if homework is becoming stressful or workload is excessive, experts suggest parents first approach the teacher, followed by a school administrator.

"Many times, we can solve a lot of issues by having conversations," Steckler says, including by "sitting down, talking about the amount of homework, and what's appropriate and not appropriate."

Study Tips for High School Students

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  6. Study: Homework Matters More in Certain Countries

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  7. Finland has one of the world's best education systems. Here's how it

    Students in Finland spend relatively little time on homework, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A 2014 study of 15-year-olds around the world by the OECD said that on average, Finnish students spend 2.8 hours a week on homework. This contrasts noticeably from the 6.1 hours American students spend ...

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  20. Homework, should or should not?

    The teacher should not give the student tasks where they need to deepen their knowledge or learn anything new. Because the aim of homework is only to do revision on the most important concepts covered in class, homework shouldn´t take over 15 minutes per subject. Teachers need to keep in mind that students have on average 4-5 different ...

  21. There's no Homework in Finland

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  22. Do Finland students have no homework?

    Do schools in Finland give homework? According to the information available, Finnish schools have a relatively low amount of homework. Required subjects are most often covered during the school day, which reduces the need for homework. Homework is seen more as a recap of what has been learned in class, rather than a time-consuming task at home.

  23. Should Kids Get Homework?

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