AIBU to think the Finnish school system can't be this good....

[2boyz1girl]

brightside.me/inspiration-family-and-kids/14-reasons-why-youll-want-to-enroll-your-kid-in-a-finnish-school-368710/?utm_source=fb_rc193afb4d368&utm_campaign=13ff3e1dc863&utm_medium=cpm
And it's just the media jumping on the bandwagon.....

@2biys1girl. The inference that diversity is a problem would make sense if places like London which are the most diverse weren't doing far far better educationally than all of the coastal towns and most of the rural areas which are monocultural.

The issue teachers have is with the kids and their parents attitude towards education, not the language spoken at home.

But is Finland a more monolingual country too which would obviously make teachers jobs alot easier as all kids are on a level footing language-wise compared to the UK which is much more culturally diverse I would imagine....
I'll take your word for it that this is true, but while they may all start out speaking one language, the Finns generally speak english well, and tends to speak swedish competently also - so they must be spending some effort teaching more languages, more successfully to children, than we do n the UK.

bangingmyhead,

Got it in one.

Teachers appear to be highly respected over there. And so it should be everywhere, but it isn't in UK really although teachers are great, but they are so constrained.

Time for parents to fight back and support the educators of our children now and look for a good solution.

I think respect for teachers would be a start. And I have no schoolgoing kids now, but I often despaired at the way teachers were treated by OFSTED. Anyway.

The undergrads I teach are an international lot. I'm always waiting for the supercalifragilistic students from the top pisa countries. In vain so far; they are much of a muchness once 19.

I also live in rural Sweden and I think DS's school is bloody brilliant and pretty much like the Finnish schools described in the article. Today he spent a few hours in the forest 'hunting bears' and collecting leaves and nuts and then had his mother language lesson in the afternoon ie English with a native English speaking tutor.

I do think that most Scandivians, people from ex soviet states & Eastern Europeans are exellent linguists both written & spoken which is very interesting since most don't start reading in their own language until their 7.
The English are not know for their fluency in European languages & GCSE level does not cut it in comparison to their European counterparts

I worked for one of the largest Finnish companies in the London branch, so worked with a few Finns. They were very very good in their own very narrow field but were thrown into panic if they were expected to do anything else. The british staff could multitask and think outside the box far better than the Finns.

Finnish is the easiet langiage for a native to learn to read and write

paxillin - I may have this wrong but ...

Isn't it not so much that the PISA figures say the wonder-schools produce off-the-scale students - it's rather that most children do (very) well in the top countries?

The 'top' students in the UK do as well as 'top' students anywhere in the world - it's just that we have an enormous number of children who do not do well.

So the students that you see - the ones who've made it - are all going to be much of a muchness and on the same level (well, of course they will be - they've all met the same criteria to get into your classroom/lecture hall). The difference lies rather with the children you don't see.

A lot of the claims about the Finnish education system sound great. I think some UK schools do some of them though (the school I'm in do a couple) so I wonder if the same is the reality in Finland (that some schools do some of them rather than them all being the accepted norm.)

Two things I don't like the sound of:

1. 'There is no need to learn things by heart because we always have the internet' - I agree that tonnes of rote learning can be boring and uneccessary but that quote seems to undermine learning and gaining knowledge completely by saying 'well we can always google.' I find it really sad. Children are generally born loving to learn 'stuff' - that should be encouraged, not dismissed as pointless because they all have a smart phone or whatever.

2. You missed out the attitude towards education and the teachers. Both education and educators are respected. With fewer hours in front of children and more time to plan and prepare the lessons

I'm all for teaching being seen as a respected profession but actually I think the above is completely the wrong approach. We should be prioritising hours spent with the children - more of that and waaay less planning and preparation.

I've just been through an ISI inspection (OFSTED but for the independent sector) and my lessons were so much the worse for the detailed lesson plans and complex resources that had to be planned. I was desperate to just stop and discuss an interesting point someone had raised, go back and change tack because too many children hadn't got a concept or change an activity because I'd just had a better idea. But no, I had to stick to 'the plan' and follow the timings on my 'ridiculously structured to address and evidence every standard under the sun' piece of paper.

I follow my termly scheme of work but, aside from that, I never plan except for an observation. And my lessons are much more positive, relaxed, flexible and individualised than they were back when I was an NQT in the state sector slaving to meet the QTS standards.

I also think people forget it is easier to learn a language if you can immerse yourself in a language.

Look at the comments. There is someone saying they teach there and it is nothing like that! The reality is very different!

You're probably right, thecatfromjapan. I'd be intrigued to compare the ones who didn't make it in their 20s.

That's largely the way the system works, Pax. I remember reading something once that suggested the Finnish system are well aware they have a problem with stretching the most able.

The other thing that tends to get forgotten, is that when the Finnish were at the top of the tables in 2000 the children taking those tests had been educated under a system that was more traditional that the one that has been developed since then. As the phenomenon based learning has kicked in, their raw scores have been falling.

A transparent orthographic system and the fact that no-one would suggest methods other than phonics to teach reading probably helps too.

paxillin The figures are grim, actually. There's a well-known piece of research out there that looks at numeracy skills in particular and correlates it with earning figures over working life, health and length of life: all lower with poor numeracy skills.

My own theory - and it's just a 'feeling', is that school can only do so much. I suspect that a lot of it is to do with socio-economic disparity. Maybe we could pour lots of money into schools to assuage the effect of that for children. Who knows? We've never really tried that. I wonder whether the effects of 'austerity' and universal credit will actually make that 'long tail' of child performance (which keeps us from the top performers in PISA) will get longer. But who knows?

Finnish education does sound a lot more child-friendly and teacher-friendly, though.

What you describe, Rafals, is exactly what happened to the Swedish school system a decade or two earlier. It used to be very highly respected, Swedish pupils did very well internationally, but in recent years standards have been slipping drastically. The introduction of free schools accelerated the slipping, as they contributed to a general lowering of standards.

I thoughtbthe problem with the Pisa scores were they eerent taken from a level playing field ie some countries including Finland did not include children with SEN whereas the UK did

I think Sweden's results fell faster than any country in the OECD. They might be performing lower than in the U.K.

That's an issue too, bruffin. Certainly the Chinese results are questionable. I think you can exclude children who are immigrants too.

So the new system saw kids' performance drop in Sweden and Finland? Do most countries collect data on adult numeracy and literacy? Do we in the UK?

I think the academy system has pushed schools into being even more authoritarian than they were 15-20 years ago. In big secondaries, it is hard to assert discipline standards without some level of firmness (and I agree that some is needed - I walked out of an interview, just out of NQT stage, at a school which was a wreck, mostly due to vandalism, and where the pupils clearly ruled the roost - a talented colleague, a few years on, got a job there and became very unstuck) but I think much of the swing has been at the expense of kids who simply cannot navigate such an authoritarian system because they don't even have the basic skills to do so.

manicinsomniac

We should be prioritising hours spent with the children - more of that and waaay less planning and preparation.

where do you think that the good lessons come from? Its not about writing "lesson plans" and "complex resources" its about having the time to correctly figure out what you are going to do.

and on a thread extolling the virtues of "better" systems that all have fewer contact hours and more preparation hours.

You can't have it both ways.

paxillin I think the free school system that cory and others are talking about was introduced in Sweden, not Finland.

Is that right, folks? I remember you posting about it really well, Cory.

I should imagine most countries collect data (numeracy, literacy, attendance, etc.), paxillin .

In adults?

There would be rioting if school was changed to start from 7. Schools start at 4 here and are basically free childcare as there is a limit to what you can teach a 4 year old..

You see it all over here that affording childcare is a real issue. Imagine if we had to fund it for every child until the age of 7.

I think schools starting at 7 in England would lead to an even bigger gap between children of various social-economic groups than already exists at 4.

I'm really not sure it would work here without some significant changes.