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

[2boyz1girl]

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And it's just the media jumping on the bandwagon.....

So why do they produce robots unable to cope if a spanner is thrown in the works. The finns i worked were extremely efficient but just couldnt manage anything othe than their very narrow scope. Even down to make sure the printer was refillef if someone came in at the weekend.
It was the english staff who multitasked and kept the office running, even though we did the same jobs.
The company i worked for owned most of Helsinki, the basement in HO office had a medical centre, sports centre, looms, pottery all in the basement and staff rented flats (not much bigger than studios for families) from the company, and you could even hire holiday cottages from the company.

I'm from Ireland and trained as a primary teacher there then moved to the UK and taught here. In terms of structure the Irish and British systems are almost identical but I had to quit being a teacher because the way in which the UK system is run is so unbelievably awful.

In Ireland I was trained and supervised and judged on how well the children learned. Once I was trained I was considered a professional who could decide how best to teach my class. In the UK I was given frankly bizarre, rigid instructions on how I had to teach and then I had to deliver that regardless of who I was teaching. In fact, teaching didn't seem to be the aim at all, the aim seemed to be performing for an actual or potential OFSTED inspector who would be looking for the pre-prepared script that I was supposed to parrot like an automaton.

One day I was being observed by the HT in a classroom with no whiteboard. So I just drew triangles on the flip chart and got on with it. The kids had really clicked with triangles the day before so I felt it was a great lesson - they were desperate to answer questions, they asked their own questions and very quickly grasped complex ideas about angles. Had I been in Ireland my headteacher would have said 'great job' and gone on her way. But this HT could only focus on the song and dance OFSTED would expect. I told him I didn't want to hear it. I was there to teach the children and I taught them. I couldn't listen to any more criticism.

One thing I really can't get my head around is homework. In Ireland you teach, say, multiplication, then set three multiplication exercises for homework. The child goes home, shows her parent what she's doing (so now parent is up to speed) does the exercises, then brings them into class the next day where we all correct it together. So now the child has had three consecutive exposures to the same concept and I know, as a teacher, whether she can do that particular thing or not. Based on the homework I either go over the topic again (making sure no one is left behind) or I move on. Very simple and effective. In the UK homework seemed to be random worksheets handed out and hoc, corrected alone by the teacher and never spoken of again. WTF is the point of that????

Oh and regardless of how well/badly the children were doing, I had to move on to the next topic, no matter what. Again, what's the point in that? In maths in particular, if a child doesn't get one concept there's really no point in moving on. In Ireland I would just give that concept more time, try something new to teach it. In the UK I was being constantly monitored and so had to move on or be told off. As I said, no actual interest in teaching the kids. It was all just about mindlessly delivering the crazy rigid plans

So many people making judgements about the entire UK education system from experience in one or two schools.

I think the real problem is large amounts of poor quality leadership ( I think this is true for a lot of sectors in the UK). Ofsted do not care about micromanaging teachers, and any HT who says they do has gotten it totally wrong. An HT complaining about materials being delivered by flip chart rather than whiteboard is too insecure in their ability to judge good quality teaching.

I did supply so I worked in a lot of schools and it was the same everywhere.

And the fucking wall displays! Teachers spending hours double mounting craft card. WHAT THE FUCK FOR???

manicinsomniac
Out of interest, if you were offered say 10% less time with your classes for 10% more PPA time would you want that or not?

I would, but then I feel that I could utilise that time for better teaching in class and to correctly do the other stuff that is expected of a teacher.

Book moderations (where fellow teachers check your children's books to see that you've marked them properly) were fucking humiliating. In Ireland I never marked a single book, the children marked them because then they would learn where they were going right/wrong and be able to ask questions. Teachers marking books with three different coloured pens on their own at 7.30pm is totally pointless. And then making teachers criticise each others colouring in marking is like some sort of farce.

LeCroissant I've heard many of the complaints you make from many teachers. It is totally stupid isn't it? Just complete crap, and the children suffer.

As an aside I'd also like to know why teachers have to slend valuable time doing wall mounted displays too. There must be a good reason

It is changing, but it's taking time to trickle down I think.

There are probably a lot of sLT in schools still insisting that Ofsted want to see x,y,z even though Ofsted have been trying to combat those myths for a couple of years.

I'm in Finland and DD started school this year and I can tell you a good deal of that article is bullshit.

Teachers are free to set as little or as much homework as they want so the max 30 mins of homework is bullshit, it's going to depend on your teacher and your age - more homework in the higher grades and in high school there can be a lot of independent study (there's a huge focus on independent study in high school, pupils choose their own timetables and how much they do in each block so some will steam through in two years while others will take the more usual 3 or even 4 years)

Free school transport is for 5km or further (3km for the preschool class - 6 year olds). DD has been expected to bring her own pencil case with colouring pencils although there are supplies in the class too.

Therefore, when a lesson is not interesting for her, she can get herself involved in reading a book or sewing. that's bullshit, maybe some teachers will allow that but most will not - everyone is expected to learn everything (with extra help from the special ed teacher if needed)

Grading system is mostly correct though some schools/some teachers grade earlier and grades are of course given to the parents too, not just the children (can see them online on the Wilma system).

No uniform is correct, nor any strict rules on what you wear except that you have to wear a hat outside in winter. Shoes are not actually allowed inside so it's not children choosing not to wear shoes, they have to take them off (though that's a good thing, keeps the school cleaner and sliding around hallways in your socks is great fun!)

Sitting where you want - some model schools are getting rid of desks etc. but most schools still operate on the traditional rows of desks facing the teacher and that's where you sit. In DD's class everyone has a set place (the teacher changes the places every half term).

No standardised exams until end of high school but there's a lot of testing and other assessment done throughout the year, it's just up to the teachers how they want to assess their pupils. DD had her first test last week to assess her language and maths abilities before the parent-teacher conference.

Phenomenon-based learning has not replaced all lessons in any schools. All it is is that a couple times a year the children do a cross-curricular topic, the rest of the time lessons are divided into subjects right from the first grade like they are in secondary school in the UK, timetabled through the day.

Breaks are true, and one of the really good things that helps concentration.

Teacher quality and competition is true - only the best of the best get to be teachers here, this is one of the key things that makes the system good

They are taught lots of practical things that are needed in life, DD has been learning to sew in preschool, how to identify edible berries in the forest (and picking them and eating them ), they learn to sew, knit, do woodwork and metalwork and cook in the early grades already.

Schools are pretty much equally good (it's a bit different in the capital area) and also when you get to upper grades schools are sometimes separated into middle schools which can specialise in certain areas (like languages, sports etc.) and are competitive to get into it based on your grades.

Some schools let the children choose what they eat, many schools don't - DD's school there's only one option at lunch unless you have special dietary needs (DD gets GF lunch)

Overnight parties haven't come up yet but when I was a cleaner in a school there was one going on.

Also Finland is not monolingual, it's bilingual (Finnish and Swedish) with official minority languages (three variants of Saami, Romani, Karelian) plus large Russian speaking and Estonian speaking minority groups and in the cities many of the schools have large proportions of immigrant and refugee children speaking many different languages. Schools have to give mother tongue lessons to children in whatever language they speak whenever possible as well as teaching Finnish or Swedish as a second language.

Finnish is definitely much easier to learn how to read and write though. DD started the preschool class not knowing anything about reading except for recognising a few letters that her friends' names started with. In class they are learning one letter a week or so and separating words into syllables and just from this she can already spell many words in Finnish. When she's in 1st grade they will start properly teaching them to read and pretty much everyone will be able to read and write fluently by Christmas. It's a world apart from English!

You can't compare the Swedish or Norwegian systems to the Finnish system as although they have similarities in when they start and the quality of nursery, it's not the same in actual schools - Finland doesn't have the free school system which has been the downfall of the Swedish system and teacher quality is much higher here.

Special ed is one of the key factors, the threshold for getting help is very low. DD's class is visited by the special ed teacher once a week and she works with whatever children need it that week. Schools take an inclusive approach so they try to help within the class when possible, if not then extra classes in small groups or individual teaching to catch children up and those who need it are taught entirely in a special ed class that remains part of the main school. Very very few children with SEN aren't educated in mainstream schools.

Class sizes are small, over 24 is considered overcrowded. DD's class is 16 with two teachers (one main, one assistant) and until Christmas a 3rd teaching assistant. Class sizes for the rest of the grades in her school (up to 6th grade) are similar, some smaller some a tiny bit bigger.

Teachers have between 20 and 25 contact hours a week, the rest of the week (37.5 hours is full time) is for planning and furthering their own education.

And for such a small country, Finland has a hell of a lot of scientists, researchers, that kind of thing, but also a tendency to downplay their achievements so you don't hear much about them. I think there's something like the highest amount of patents filed per population head for instance.

Sorry for the essays! Just annoys me when media takes aspect from one school or something and tells the world that the entire Finnish education system is like that. As for the PISA results, it's not so much that the Finnish results are dropping, it's that other countries are getting better which is of course great.

They are taught lots of practical things that are needed in life, DD has been learning to sew in preschool, how to identify edible berries in the forest (and picking them and eating them grin), they learn to sew, knit, do woodwork and metalwork and cook in the early grades already

My dream is an early years system that does the same here. Sounds great and the practical skills are really really overlooked in the UK system and the quality of what little there is is poor imo at least pre-secondary.

In the new curriculum they actually have devoted more time to handicrafts, music and suchlike rather than putting more time to maths and mother tongue.

I love DD's class, they visit their forest classroom once a week or so and are taking note of the changes in the forest as the seasons change (they've 'adopted' a tree to keep track of in particular) and have built dens and get to run around and play and climb trees (only rule is that the tree mus'n't be too tall) if they want. Their whole classroom is amazing really, there's the main class area with the rows of desks but they also have a play area at the back and two little classrooms that come off the main room where they do group work (one does actually have a sofa, and is called the sofa room, but they don't get to choose to go there, only if they are there for group work) and they have a few single staff toilets coming off their corridor so they can go whenever they need to. Downside is they're not encouraged to drink a lot of water, DD sometimes only drinks one glass at lunch time, and there is one little boy in the class who disrupts a lot and is just made to sit alone (but that's based on what DD tells me, most likely he's getting behavioural support from the special ed teacher too - the teacher told me that a few children in the class have attention disorders so it's not an easy class)

They've dropped by about 20 points in Reading and more in science and maths over the last 10-15 years. It isn't just a drop in league table positions. There's also an increase in the proportion of pupils scoring in the lowest attainment band on the test.

Difficult to pinpoint why that might be though.

Oh God. There is a lot of vapid journalistic hype about the Finnish education system, but that article really does take the biscuit. A collection of half-truths, downright fibs and stuff taken out of context.

Although you'll hear people saying that Finland is "the world's top performing education system," actually Finland was (if I remember rightly) top for one year in one test (PISA, a test which is tilted heavily towards reading comprehension). It has never performed better than average in TIMSS (the "other" big international education ranking, which focuses on harder-core science and maths and is considered a better test of university-readiness). TIMSS and PISA are both "good" tests, by the way, but they measure different things. Finland has only ever performed well in one of them.

What's more, Finland's big glory period is behind it--it topped the league tables in 2001 and has declined quite a bit since then. I'm not slagging off poor old Finland, by the way: my point is that a better summary of the Finnish education system is that "It is good in many ways and gets several very important things right" not "It is a magical fairyland utopia." Unfortunately, journalists tend to prefer the second story, because it's more exciting.

The biggest error that journalists (and others) are apt to fall into when comparing education systems worldwide is the "chronological fallacy." The performance of teenage students in any given year is a reflection on the education system as it was since they started school a decade ago. So if Finland was best at PISA in 2001, we need to be looking at what Finnish schools were like in the 1990s, not what they are like now. Any differences between the 1990s and now may well be the reasons why Finland has declined, and we should be wary of incorporating any such ideas into our own education systems.

The Finnish education system in the 1990s was basically pretty traditional--classes were (and mostly still are) taught in lockstep, without differentiation; desks were in rows most of the them; there was a textbook for each subject and lessons centered on bookwork and teacher presentations.

Much of this system is actually still in place, and trust me, the great majority of Finnish classrooms do not look anything like the whizzy trendy ones shown here, with students lolling all over the carpet etc. Try an image search for "peruskoulu" (Finnish for "elementary school") and you will see mostly very normal looking classrooms, with teachers teaching and students looking at teachers and raising hands.

That said, there has been a gradual shift towards a more soft-focused Scandinavian-style of teaching in Finland, partly as a result of influence from Sweden (the Finns are not Scandinavians, by the way, and have a very different history and culture). The Finns often joke that "Whatever the Swedes do, we always do it 15 years later"--well, this appears to be the case in their education system.

Needless to say, as the Finns have adopted a more Swedish child-centered approach to their education, well, the kids are enjoying it more and report that they feel more positively about school, but quite honestly, well, they aren't doing as well in international assessments as they used to (Sweden started bringing in these methods about 15 years earlier, and Swedish results, predictably, started declining about 15 years earlier, bang on cue). If people want have subject-free classrooms of iPads and beanbags, I guess they are welcome to do so, but it isn't going to make the kids better at maths, reading, or knowing stuff.

It is most certainly true that the Finns have always had relatively short school hours (late school start age, short school hours, long holidays) and homework hours compared to other countries, and this has indeed long been the case.

On the other hand, this has to be understood in context. Finnish is the most "transparent" or easy-to-learn writing system in Europe--it's easy for parents to teach their kids the basics before school simply by sharing picture books together, and filling in the gaps at school requires at most a few weeks. I personally would not recommend waiting till 7 in the case of English, which takes 2-3 years to learn how to read and write fluently.

And Finland's relatively weak TIMSS performance is probably connected to its short study hours and lack of homework, IMO. Remember, TIMSS (unlike PISA) requires students to actually do some serious maths. You don't get good at maths without doing shitloads of practice, pages and pages of it. Every single country that does well at TIMSS is serious about making its kids do plenty of maths homework.

Reading has dropped 20 points since 2000 (it went up a bit in 2003 and 2006 then started dropped. Maths has dropped just 4 points (but 2012 was a lot lower than normal, and in previous years it was higher than 2000). Science has dropped the most, 27 points, but with a big drop from 2012 to 2015 as prior to that it had been rising a lot. So basically up and down a lot over the last 15 years, it's hard to see a real pattern here except for one thing, in that boy's results have dropped the most, that's a big deal and needs to be dealt with. Of course the success of the system isn't just about pisa results, better to look at adult literacy and numeracy rates and participation in further education (and actually graduation, not just starting and dropping out), adults that would have been educated in the 70s and after which was when the major changes to the education system happened, and from the study done in 2013, Finnish adults have among the best literacy and numeracy rates (only Japan did better)

These two articles address the recent drops minedu.fi/en/article/-/asset_publisher/pisa-2015-suomalaisnuoret-edelleen-huipulla-pudotuksesta-huolimatta and www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/finlands-schools-were-once-the-envy-of-the-world-now-theyre-slipping/2016/12/08/dcfd0f56-bd60-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html?utm_term=.d4cac5634bbb

Things that the Finnish education system appears to get right are that it seems to be doing a good job of getting and keeping excellent graduates in teaching, and it has a consistent and standardized curriculum (with proper textbooks) which builds up systematically from year to year and does not change every five minutes. Finland is also said to be very good at intervention and support for strugglers. The thing the article says about personalizing learning is misleading--from what I have heard, Finland basically teaches to the whole class, for the most part, without much differentiation, but students who are having difficulties get personalized help outside the classroom to help them catch up and fill in gaps. These are all really positive things and every country should be copying these things.

I think the short study hours and lack of homework are probably the weakest aspect of the Finnish model; like I said, they probably go a along way to explain why Finland is not doing any better than the UK or US in terms of getting its students college-ready in subjects like maths and science, and I strongly suspect that it is also the reason why Finland has the biggest gender gap in reading in the OECD (yes, really!). Finland's good reading scores are entirely the result of its girls, who read very well indeed. Finnish boys don't score any higher in reading than UK or US boys, in spite of being helped out by that wonderfully easy writing system and low poverty rates etc.

I think a yawning gender gap is an entirely predictable result of a system that requires few study hours from students. If you just kind of sit back and trust/hope that students will be motivated enough to want to read and study by themselves when they are not being forced to, well, that's likely to work a lot better with girls than with boys, quite honestly. A lot of boys will do bugger-all if nobody is giving them a kick in the pants, making them sit in classes and study, and setting homework with consequences if it is not done.

The 'getting college ready' is done in high school (Lukio) though Kokeshi so it's not measured by pisa or timss as high school doesn't start until 16, and is more on the level of A-Levels or the first two years of US college, with much more intense learning (but self-directed which does of course raise the issue of boys not doing as well as girls as they are becoming less and less motivated). The short hours in comprehensive school are good, they get progressively longer anyway so while the school day is only 4-5 hours in the first few years, by upper primary (grades 7-9) it's usually 6-7 45min lessons a day so plenty of time for learning.

Interesting to hear the details, Natsku! My knowledge of the Finnish system admittedly is all second-hand, so it's interesting to hear from people on the inside.

By the way--when you say "grades 7-9," what age group are you talking about? 12-15yo? So, basically covering the whole age group up to the start of high school?

I am Swedish but went to Uni here. Most of my Scandinavian friends outperformed the UK students (most of us working along side our studies as well).

The education system is different. You learn to read not so you can get a sticker but because it’s cool and exciting to read. You learn not to end up at the top table but because there is a hunger for this knowledge. These endless stickers, comparing, traffic light systems, and stat of the week does nothing but aide competition. It is hugely counterproductive.

The amount of times I have had a 4 year old in bits because he is on “lello” or not got a sticker is ridiculous! I have to constantly counter it at home and say, never mind the lello, you learned th sound today or you wrote a diagraph that is fantastic etc!

I love this country, passionately! And the teachers at our inner London primary is awesome. I salute them. But bloody hell the system is letting. Our kids and teachers down.

Yeah 12-15yrs old Kokeshi there's also an optional 10th grade for those who didn't get the grades to get into the high school of their choice so they can improve and try again the next year. High schools are competitive and some specialise in certain areas (my ex's niece for example applied for a specialist art school and got in based on her grades and her portfolio) and you can apply to any high school anywhere in the country (no catchment areas for high schools like with comprehensive schools), this means some pupils live in student accommodation at 16 to go to a high school somewhere away from home (which explains the Finnish way of parenting that encourages independence early, to get them ready to live alone at 16 if needed - it's not like boarding schools, it's completely independent living)

@whatsername17

Fantastic post. You have just written a perfect piece on why I'm job hunting like mad to escape teaching after 15 years.