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What Finland is really doing to improve its acclaimed schools

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.

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

Others/world, 15 may 2022 3:40 am gmt, editor : shiva chaudhary | .

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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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Why Finland's education system puts others to shame

Finland's presidential standard flutters over his residence in Helsinki, Finland, May 3, 2017. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins - RTS151LL

An experimental mindset at the top can lead teachers to think outside the box. Image: REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

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For as small and homogeneous as Finland may be, its repeated success in national education rankings means there are at least a few lessons the US can learn.

For one, the tiny Nordic country places considerable weight on early education. Before Finnish kids learn their times tables, they learn simply how to be kids — how to play with one another, how to mend emotional wounds.

But even as kids grow up, the country makes a concerted effort to put them on a track for success.

Here are some of the biggest ways Finland is winning in global education.

1. Competition isn't as important as cooperation.

Finland has figured out that competition between schools doesn't get kids as far as cooperation between those schools.

One reason for that is Finland has no private schools. Every academic institution in the country is funded through public dollars. Teachers are trained to issue their own tests instead of standardized tests.

"There's no word for accountability in Finnish," education expert Pasi Sahlberg once told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. Teachers are trusted to do well without the motivation of competition.

And that's because ...

2. Teaching is one of the most-respected professions.

Teachers aren't underpaid in Finland like they are in the US. In fact, they're valued a lot since Finland puts a lot of stock in childhood as the foundation for lifelong development.

To become a teacher in Finland, candidates must have first received at least their master's degree and complete the equivalent of a residency program in US medical schools. Student teachers often teach at affiliate elementary schools that adjoin a university.

The result: Teachers can be counted on to know the best pedagogical research on education that's out there.

3. Finland listens to the research.

In the US, research studies looking at what works in the classroom and what doesn't often get stuck in the mud of local school-board politics. Parents argue certain policies aren't "right" for their kids.

In Finland, research comes with no such political baggage. The government makes its education policy decisions based almost solely on effectiveness — if the data show improvements, the federal Ministry of Education and Culture will give it a shot.

"Overall, education in the United States is much more political than it is in Finland, where it's much more of a professional issue," Sahlberg told Business Insider.

In short, Finland gets things done.

4. Finland isn't afraid to experiment.

One big benefit of listening to the research is you're not beholden to outside forces, like money and political clout. Finland's teachers are encouraged to create their own mini-laboratories for teaching styles, keeping what works and scrapping what doesn't.

It's a lesson for the US: An experimental mindset at the top can lead teachers to think outside the box.

5. Playtime is sacred.

Compared to the US, where free playtime has been dwindling in kindergarten for the last two decades, Finnish law requires teachers to give students 15 minutes of play for every 45 minutes of instruction.

The policy stems from Finland's deep, almost storybook belief that kids ought to stay kids for as long as possible. It's not their job to grow up quickly and become memorizers and test-takers.

The results speak for themselves: Study after study has found that students given at least one daily recess for 15 minutes or more behave better in school and do better on assignments.

6. Kids have very little homework.

For all the things Finnish schools offer kids, what they seem to lack is homework. Many kids receive only a small amount of it each night.

The philosophy stems from a mutual level of trust shared by the schools, teachers, and parents.

Parents assume teachers have covered most of what they need in the confines of the school day, and schools assume the same. Extra work is often deemed unnecessary by everyone involved.

Time spent at home is reserved for family, where the only lessons kids learn are about life.

7. Preschool is high-quality and universal.

Some of the only opportunities many American kids get to stretch their imagination, get dirty, and play games come in preschool. The trouble is, parents are often expected to pay for that early education, setting up disparities that could last through the child's later years.

In Finland, parents are guaranteed everything. Preschool and daycare are both universal until age 7, and more than 97% of 3- to 6-year-olds take advantage of at least one, NPR reports .

More than that, though, the preschools are good. They align their curricula with one another and prepare kids along similar tracks. By the time kids start getting actual work, parents can rest assured the same lessons are getting elsewhere taught across town.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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The Hechinger Report

Covering Innovation & Inequality in Education

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

William Doyle

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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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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Education System
Fins and Fun

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.

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Arbenita Zhigolli (left) and Nada Abdi enjoy a handicrafts lesson at Lintulaakso school in Espoo, Finland.

Top of the class: Labour seeks to emulate Finland's school system

After the party’s conference pledge to scrap Ofsted and private schools, does the envied Finnish education system provide the blueprint?

I t’s early afternoon in Lintulaakson school in Espoo, near Helsinki. The younger children are having a snack before starting their after-school activities. Upstairs a group of 12-year-olds are in a craft class, cutting patterns and making clothes on sewing machines.

Outside, children play in an enormous outdoor space, equipped with a climbing frames, football pitches and basketball courts. “Hey, Petteri ,” one boy yells casually at the principal, Petteri Kuusimäki. “Next year can we start school a bit later, at 10am?” Kuusimäki jokes with them. It’s all first names here.

The Finnish education system is the envy of the world . Along with Tove Jansson’s Moomins , Nokia phones and Iittala glassware, it has become one of the country’s most celebrated exports – and it’s easy to see why.

Its students consistently score well at the top end of the Pisa international league tables, and as Kuusimäki walks me round his school he describes a kind of education utopia – a place where teachers are highly trained, revered and trusted , and children’s wellbeing is paramount.

Pupils in the school cafeteria at lunchtime.

There are no Ofsted-style inspections, no streaming by ability, no national exams until 18, no school uniforms, no school league tables and no fee-paying private schools.

At its party conference this week, Labour committed to follow Finland’s lead and not only scrap Ofsted but abolish private schools by forcing their integration with the state sector. Explaining the policy, the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, told BBC Radio 4: “In some countries, it is not allowed to charge for education in any form … in Finland, for example.”

The British Labour party is far from alone in its enthusiasm for the Finnish education system. Every year hundreds of delegations of teachers and policymakers from all over the world pour into Helsinki to see this nirvana for themselves. So popular has it become that international visits are strictly regulated and have to be paid for – a presentation costs €682 (£607) per hour and a school visit €1,240.

Children take part in a classroom discussion.

In the past two months there have been groups from Israel, Brazil, China and Korea. In the coming weeks there will be visits from New Zealand and Lithuania.

Meanwhile, Finland’s influence is spreading far and wide. Last month a school opened in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam based on the Finnish curriculum and pedagogical approach, with Finnish staff on the teaching team.

Kuusimäki tells me Finland’s schools are well-funded and built around the principle of equality of opportunity for all pupils. He is baffled when I try to explain that some state schools in England are so strapped for cash that they are asking parents for donations. “As you may know, everything is free in Finland,” he says, university included.

There is just one fee-paying school in the country, the International School of Helsinki, which has mainly catered for international employees of Nokia and other industries. Otherwise, charging fees is illegal and parents are happy by and large to send their children to their local school. “We really don’t have bad schools,” Kuusimäki says.

In class children are listened to and respected, school lunches are free, detentions are rare and exclusions pretty much unheard of. Kuusimäki gave his last detention 15 years ago, and is visibly horrified at the idea of excluding a child from school. “As a principal, you can’t think like that. We are responsible for these children and their lives. We can’t give up.”

But things are changing slowly. Schools are becoming more diverse – 20% of pupils at Lintulaakson school are from immigrant backgrounds, elsewhere it is 75%. The curriculum has been revised and Kuusimäki says more has had to be done to stretch gifted children.

A compulsory pre-school year for six-year-olds has been introduced to help with school-readiness, and there is talk of starting even earlier, while the minimum school leaving age has recently been raised to 18. Meanwhile, parents “shopping for schools” is on the increase.

Finnish education experts would be the first to admit they do not have all the answers and methods in one country do not always translate to another. John Jerrim, professor of education and social statistics at the University College London Institute of Education, does not believe England should be looking to Finland. “Its Pisa scores have actually been in decline. And there is no reason to believe their high scores on international tests are due to their schools. So there is no reason to try to copy Finland.”

Second-graders Menni Pietiläinen (left) and Nathan Mulote.

Not even on outlawing school fees? “The resource will just be shifted elsewhere,” Jerrim says. “There are lots of potential unintended consequences, for example, pushing up house prices near good schools.”

In 2013 the celebrated Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg paid a visit to Eton College, the most famous of the UK’s ancient, elite boarding schools. Once a maths and science teacher in Helsinki, Sahlberg now tours the world spreading the word about the wonders of Finnish education and advising on education reform.

“It was like going 200 years backwards in time,” Sahlberg recalls of his visit. “I remember thinking while walking the corridors of Eton and watching students there that even if I had a chance to enrol my own kids to that school I would probably say ‘no, thank you’.”

With its illustrious history, bizarre uniforms and £40,000 a year fees, Eton – which educated the current British prime minister and many before him – is a million miles from the modern egalitarianism of Finland’s schools.

Second grader Menni Pietiläinen reads a book after official school hours.

“I am often asked by people what is the most important thing I learned in school,” Sahlberg says. “I say that to learn to understand that there are different kinds of people in this world and that regardless where we come from we can be in same school and learn in same classroom. Eton boys won’t learn that in their school.”

Like Jerrim, Sahlberg is sceptical about other countries trying to simply copy the Finland model. “There are so many myths about what the Finnish system is and is not. This idea of copying has done a lot of damage.” Finland’s schools are rooted in the country’s distinctive history and culture; the population is small (5.5 million), and taxes are high.

“You can’t go to Finland and cherry-pick the things that seem to be interesting and say, ‘We want to do like Finland is doing’. It’s much more complicated than that.” He also thinks it’s unrealistic for Labour to promise to abolish private schools. “It’s come too far this whole private education thinking. It’s very hard to remove it altogether.”

It would be better, he says, for Labour to focus on strengthening the existing state sector in England, which has become fragmented through academisation and free schools. “Just abolishing something, saying private schools should be made illegal, it’s not going happen.”

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The University Times

Unpacking the research and philosophy behind the finnish education system, the nordic models of schooling are renowned around the world. how and why did the education system in finland come to be.

As coronavirus restrictions have obstructed access to education across the world, the fundamental tenets of our education system have come under renewed scrutiny during the last year. Distanced learning has highlighted inequality in education and the public versus private school divide into sharp relief.

Standing apart from the rest of Europe, however, the Nordic education model has long been championed as a beacon of inclusivity.

Finland is consistently ranked one of the highest countries in the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which evaluates education systems worldwide by assessing student performance in reading, maths and science. But narrow academic studies like PISA may fail to capture the spirit of education and the holistic approach to learning in Finland.

Selective recruitment programs across the country attract students with high academic credentials to the teaching profession. Finland requires that teachers obtain a master’s degree in education, valuing what Dr Jari Lavonen, director of the Finnish National Teacher Education Forum, describes as “control of input”. A culture of trust and professional prestige combine to award teachers with the autonomy to choose pedagogical method and content under a framework curriculum.

Narrow academic studies like PISA may fail to capture the spirit of education and the holistic approach to learning in Finland If you don’t have highly educated teachers, it doesn’t work

Leading Finnish education expert Pasi Sahlberg explains that cultural consensus about the role of education sets the Finnish system apart. A balance of academic achievement through formative assessment and promotion of life outside of school is essential. “The view that we have on humanity – what people are and particularly what children are – is very different from the rest of Europe. In many ways, we have a much more humanistic view on life and human rights is an extremely important part of the way people think about life and the world.”

“When you put this human rights aspect and social justice into practice, you begin to understand more why Nordic countries [including] Finland have less homework and have a little bit of a lighter workload, [why] school days are a little bit shorter and we are not testing children unnecessarily.”

Sahlberg emphasises how the Finish education system is centred around what it means to be a child: “To understand what childhood is, we understand the lives of children.”

Santeri Palviainen, the chair of the Union for University Teachers and Researchers in Finland, discusses the emphasis on cultivating a learning environment that is supportive of children from an early age. “Our approach to schools is child-centred … we don’t see children as machines who need to be tuned but we see them as human beings who have achieved a set of skills. And our whole approach stems from that.”

Although operational difficulties persist, the Finnish cultural outlook is based on functionality. Sahlberg explains: “Education systems in Finland or the Nordic countries are results of a design process, just like architecture or furniture.”

We don’t see children as machines who need to be tuned but we see them as human beings who have achieved a set of skills

When questioned on the focal point of the Finnish education system Sahlberg says: “It’s very simple … everything unnecessary is removed.” Although this Nordic design analogy holds intuitive appeal, the process of achieving such a straightforward educational framework required political commitment and a comprehensive overhaul to address the access inequality. Commitment to the development of a single comprehensive school system – known as “peruskoulu” in Finnish – in the early 1970s cultivated the egalitarianism at the heart of the Finnish education sector. The pandemic has revealed that the core issues plaguing education systems around the world exist in Finland, including access inequality.

Political commitment to reforms has led to a €68 million pledge by Finnish Education Minister Jussi Saramo to address socio-economic disparities exacerbated by the pandemic and remote learning. For Palviainen, however, key questions persist. “How are we going to repair the damage that was caused by the COVID epidemic? I think the schools and the universities or vocational institutions are still very much in a sort of crisis mode.”

The difference, he explains, lies in procedural response to distanced learning and the role of educators. With a high level of evaluation independence and relatively limited school closures, teachers in Finland were able to adapt or minimise their assessment methods but maintain their curriculum structure.

The process of achieving such a straightforward educational framework required political commitment and a comprehensive overhaul to address the access inequality

Programme Director of Education Finland Jouni Kangasniemi explains that since the success of Finnish students in international education assessments, foreign delegations have sought to emulate the success of the Finnish system. As part of an effort to promote Finnish education policy for global use, Kangasniemi indicates the importance of dialogue and cooperative development between potentially conflicting systems.

“Nowadays, we have lots of requests from different schools from many countries, and they are always asking: ‘How could we modify our school into a Finnish school?’”

“Everybody thinks that the Finnish approach to schools is similar, or as easy as it is to establish a British school or an American school or an Indian school. But since we don’t have these centralised testing systems, we always say that it’s a bit more complicated than just introducing the model.”

Misconceptions abound surrounding the operation and nuances of the Finnish system. For foreign teachers participating in programmes to introduce Finnish pedagogical techniques, he explains that this “two-way learning process” requires long-term implementation. “The Finnish model has been such that we always help the schools to redevelop their curricula, localise it so that it gets the best elements from Finland, and also best elements that are required by the local government so that the school has an operating plan.”

Nowadays, we have lots of requests from different schools from many countries, and they are always asking: “How could we modify our school into a Finnish school?”

Positive reception by teachers participating in programmes to implement Finnish teaching techniques, however, has not always been reflected by the parents or national education administration of partnering countries. Cultural differences – and consequent expectations – raise scepticism about the effectiveness of the Finnish model.

The central difference, according to Kangasniemi, is found in the role of summative, rather than formative assessment. “[In] many other countries you need to produce evidence for the parents or for the school inspectors. And in Finland, maybe the approach is that you need to produce evidence for the learners themselves.”

Whether the Finnish education is capable of direct exportation may depend on cultural preconceptions. But commitment to pedagogy and holistic education are important lessons to glean from a national system that uplifts students and teachers alike.

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Finland has no private schools – and its pupils perform better than British children

Finland ranked seventh in the world in oecd's student assessment chart in 2018, well above the uk and the united states, where there is a mix of private and state education.

Labour’s plan to add VAT to private school fees has refuelled a long-standing debate over state versus private education.

Rishi Sunak has accused Labour of stoking a “class war”, while the independent sector has warned of widespread closures if the plans take effect.

This system is replicated in many countries across the world. Finland , however, has no fee-paying schools at all.

Everyone from six to 18, whether in a state-run or independently-run school, is entitled to it free of charge. It’s a policy of which the Finns are particularly proud.

And it’s proven to be successful, with Finland ranked seventh in the world in 2018 on its Pisa score (the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment), well above the UK and the United States, where there is a mix of private and state education.

Parents do not contribute financially to their children’s education, and textbooks, materials, and school meals are provided free – all funded by taxpayers.

‘Education is a human right’

Pasi Sahlberg, a former teacher and policymaker in Finland turned professor of educational leadership at the University of Melbourne, Australia said Finland’s system was built on the idea “ education is considered a public service and a human right” with “equal opportunity of access to schools and universities regardless of who students are or where they live”.

He told i : “This was considered to be the central idea in having an equitable and well-functioning education system.

“In Nordic countries in general, education has been the driver of social mobility and equality in society.

“The current model of Finland’s education is still based on those common values and ideal of Nordic values where there is not much room in education for profit, especially in school education sectors.”

A relatively young nation, only gaining independence in 1917, Finland does not have embedded traditions in its education system of centuries-old public fee-paying schools.

Compulsory schooling in Finland starts at the age of seven rather than five and goes up to 18.

It began a comprehensive reform of its school system in 1970 and two years later, primary and lower secondary education (grades one to nine) became free of charge across the board. Further reforms in the early 2020s saw six-year-olds in pre-primary and upper secondary school students included in this.

It means education in Finland is now free for all Finnish citizens from pre-primary up to higher education.

Siru Korkala, senior specialist at the Finnish National Agency for Education, described the policy as the “cornerstone” of the nation’s educational policy.

“Finland’s commitment to equal access to education for all children and young people, regardless of their socioeconomic background, has been a cornerstone of its educational policy,” she told i . “By providing free education, Finland ensures that all students have equal opportunities, which can help improve overall educational standards.”

The only areas that do require any parental outlay are optional, non-compulsory activities or services, such as school trips or extracurricular activities.

Private schools in Finland

Private schools (those not operated by the government or local authorities) do exist in Finland but are mostly faith-based, Steiner, Montessori or university-run.

Of 2,100 institutions providing primary and lower secondary education, only 65 of them are private and the majority of their funding comes from the government.

They must follow the national curriculum guidelines and cannot be run for profit – charging for tuition in basic education is prohibited by the Finnish constitution.

There is one exception to this: the Helsinki International School is a fee-paying institution.

Mr Sahlberg, author of the 2021 book Finnish Lessons 3.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland , said: “Most schools are funded by local governments, they employ the teachers and run the schools.

“Central government’s funding formulas stipulate the levels of funding at local levels and provide subsidies to those local governments with less wealth.

“Efficiency is therefore a big driver of the economics of education that means schools try to do more with less funding based on their circumstances.”

World class schooling

Finland’s education system gained global attention in 2000, with the first ever published Pisa results in 2000.

The survey of 15-year-old students around the world in maths, reading and science found Finland topped the chart in reading, and came third in science and fourth in maths.

In 2018, results remained higher than most other Western nations’ in seventh place overall, just behind Canada, South Korea and Japan. The UK was ranked in 10th place and the US in 21st.

Within Finland, disparity in results between schools is negligible. “Student performance is similar across all schools in Finland,” said Mr Sahlberg.

What lessons can be learnt?

Mr Sahlberg said what the UK could take away from the Finnish model is a “complex question” and depended on what people in different parts of the UK want.

How Finnish schools teach every child to spot fake news - and what UK parents could learn

“I know Scotland and Wales are moving ahead in different ways than England, for example”, he said. “Both of those jurisdictions in the UK have produced education policies and reforms that are building more equitable education systems than they have had before.”

He maintained the best way to get higher performing education systems is to have policies which put “enhancing equity of education as a priority”.

“It is possible to have a two-tier system of schools [private and government] in this approach, but governments should, just like the OECD has advised over and again, manage school choice in the two-tier system so that state schools don’t turn out to be a second choice for parents,” he said.

Ms Korkala highlighted five key areas of focus: equality and inclusivity, fewer standardised tests, teacher education and professional respect, less homework and stress and pupil and student welfare.

She said in Finland all students, regardless of their background or learning difficulties, receive “the same high-quality education”, emphasis is on continuous assessment rather than standardised tests and teachers are “highly respected in society” with a high standard of education.

The amount of homework had been reduced to relieve pressure on pupils and all have access to student welfare services, including psychologists and school social workers and healthcare services.

Could this be the way forward in the UK?

Dr Jennifer Chung, from University College London’s Institute of Education, has studied Finland’s education system in depth. She said transferring that model would be a “challenge”.

“The issue is really the ecosystem that education system exists in,” she said.

Although Finland has “many things right” in its education policy, she pointed out that other social, economic and cultural factors in the country must also be taken into account in its success, such as: viewing teaching as a university-educated profession rather than a vocation, a high value placed on education in society and political consensus over education policy.

Whereas a “powerful private sector” and political involvement in education “makes it much tougher to exact change” in England, she said.

“There’s continuity and there’s change but if there’s too much change you won’t know if the policy is working or not.

“England’s education policy is very politically charged. You have to decide whether it’s about the policy or is it about the politics.”

A comment from the Independent Schools Council, representing more than 1,400 independent schools in the UK and overseas, would suggest it is still the latter.

Its spokesperson said: “It is our understanding that no political party in the UK is currently suggesting that they would wish to emulate this model.”

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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

With an education system which is vastly different from that of US, UK and other European countries, Finland has been at the top of the game for decades now. The education system in Finland allow students autonomy and encourage creative play instead of pitting students in a competitive race for top grades.

No Homework, No Board Exams For Children In Finland; A Cue For India

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'Why I believe homework should be banned', by one primary school student

As the discussion around state exams through the Covid-19 shutdown continues, a separate debate about the very need for homework itself rumbles on. Over the years, many have argued that homework for students in busy modern-day family structures is no longer workable.

This year, the Green Party sought to open a discussion about the banning of homework in future. Here, primary school pupil Misha McEnaney, a fifth class student from Dublin, outlines why he believes homework is more of a hindrance than a help.

IRISH CHILDREN SPEND around 274.5 hours on homework in a year. Is it a waste of time? Generally speaking, homework does not improve academic performance among children, although it may improve academic skills among older students especially lower-achieving kids. Homework also creates stress among students who could be doing other things.

I think it is a waste of time. Here’s why I think so.

Many students think homework is extremely boring and hard so it increases our stress levels. You might fight with your family or friends and that gives the impression you are angry and irritated when often it’s just because your homework is increasing your stress.

Also, a study by scholar Denise Pope at Stanford shows that out of 4,300 students at high-performance schools, 60% stated that their homework was their primary source of stress.

Movement is more important

I believe that homework eliminates time when you could be exercising, playing sports, carrying out hobbies, reading etc. So when your friends are playing outside or something exciting or important is happening you can’t go out because you’re stuck inside doing your homework.

Homework messes up your sleep cycles and it causes you to be more tired. After school when you’re tired from working you still have to do your homework, so you don’t deliver your full concentration and that makes your performance not as acceptable as it should be. This can cause your grade to go down and so that defeats the whole point of education to become better and smarter.

A study from teenink.com shows that students perform best in school when they receive 10–12 hours of sleep each night, while only 15% of teenagers in America reported themselves sleeping eight hours or more on school nights, according to the national sleep foundation of America. Sleep disruption is very bad for our health.

Teacher trust

If you’re completely booked up for the day doing sports or other activities you have no time to do your homework. Your teachers start to trust you less and less and this develops a bad view of you when it’s not entirely your fault.

It’s also repetitive so you’re doing the same work at school and there’s no effectiveness, it’s not going in. So all that homework becomes a waste because you have already completed it at school. You can also easily get distracted.

Homework takes away revision time for tests and that can affect the test scores. That develops a bad reputation for the student and for the school. The parents then assume that the teaching at the school is bad and they might move school. So the kid might lose friends and over time the school becomes less liked and popular.

All because there is too much homework.

Bad for the mood

If you don’t sleep enough it can cause mood swings which can affect students’ performance and relationships. To think we can stop all of this by just banning homework makes me wonder why schools still give out homework at all.

People who believe that homework should not be banned have reasonable points and arguments. They believe that doing homework at home can be better for the students and they would receive higher results.

They also think the parents of the students will have an idea of what type of work they are doing in the classroom, at what scale the student is doing their work and how the student is doing that work. There is absolutely no reason why parents shouldn’t know what the student’s work is like.

Some people believe that homework boosts interaction between a student and his or her teacher. Homework might develop their presentation skills. They believe that homework is “a remedy against weaknesses”. These can all be done at school. They believe it teaches the students responsibility because they have to make sure that they do their work and not lose it or destroy it.

They think the students learn much more new information as well as in school. So people think it teaches the students important life skills. They also think it keeps the students busy and entertained. I would argue that these should all be the responsibility of parents, not school.

A shift in the debate

The Green Party in Ireland has promised to explore the banning of homework for primary school children. They also vow to review primary and secondary schools curriculum “to meet the needs of the 21st century”. Catherine Martin, deputy leader of the Green Party, said that “the phasing out of homework is something that definitely should be explored”.

“This isn’t new, this has been on our policy for the past several years. And I think we really need to have a conversation on how best to develop the creative juices of our children, or really change how we do homework, homework could be, ‘go home and draw a picture of something that means a lot to you’,” she said.

“They’re so young, especially up to the age of seven or eight, it’s a conversation that we need to have”.

She used the example of Loreto Primary School in Rathfarnham, Dublin, which is currently trialling a “no-homework” programme for all classes except sixth. Ms Martin said that they had found the pilot scheme “amazing” and children were spending a lot more time with their families as a result.

Mental health considerations

Psychotherapist Mary McHugh believes that we are reducing children’s natural “curious, imaginative and creative” tendencies by “pressuring them to conform”.

“Our children from the age of three, are being trained to sit still and from five upwards, it’s expected that this is the norm.” McHugh also says that “stress is showing up at an alarming scale and we’re still applying more pressure academically younger and younger”.

Let’s look at Finland. In Finland, there is no homework in all schools. Finland agrees that there should be no homework because it increases stress, it wastes time etc. Finnish students regularly top the charts on global education metric systems.

Some 93% of Finnish students graduate from secondary school compared to 75% in the USA and 78% in Canada. About two in every three students in Finland go to college which is the highest rate in Europe. The students’ test scores dominate everyone else. These are the scores for the PISA test (Program for International Student Assessment) 2006. There are other reasons why Finland’s education system is so good but no homework is definitely an important one.

Homework increases stress levels among students. It replaces time for hobbies and sports. It messes up your sleep. It can’t always be done and that causes trouble. It’s repetitive. You can develop health problems from lack of sleep.

It takes away time for studying and also when you don’t get enough sleep you can get mood swings and that can affect performance and relationships. There are reasonable arguments for why people who believe that homework shouldn’t be banned are wrong.

We have seen that the Green Party also thinks that homework should be banned and that some schools have already trialled it. We have looked at Finland banning homework and we have seen the impact it has made compared to other countries. This is why I think homework should be banned, not just in my school but in all schools.

Misha McEnaney is a fifth class student at St Mary’s College, Rathmines, Dublin.

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Nobody knows what the point of homework is

The homework wars are back.

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As the Covid-19 pandemic began and students logged into their remote classrooms, all work, in effect, became homework. But whether or not students could complete it at home varied. For some, schoolwork became public-library work or McDonald’s-parking-lot work.

Luis Torres, the principal of PS 55, a predominantly low-income community elementary school in the south Bronx, told me that his school secured Chromebooks for students early in the pandemic only to learn that some lived in shelters that blocked wifi for security reasons. Others, who lived in housing projects with poor internet reception, did their schoolwork in laundromats.

According to a 2021 Pew survey , 25 percent of lower-income parents said their children, at some point, were unable to complete their schoolwork because they couldn’t access a computer at home; that number for upper-income parents was 2 percent.

The issues with remote learning in March 2020 were new. But they highlighted a divide that had been there all along in another form: homework. And even long after schools have resumed in-person classes, the pandemic’s effects on homework have lingered.

Over the past three years, in response to concerns about equity, schools across the country, including in Sacramento, Los Angeles , San Diego , and Clark County, Nevada , made permanent changes to their homework policies that restricted how much homework could be given and how it could be graded after in-person learning resumed.

Three years into the pandemic, as districts and teachers reckon with Covid-era overhauls of teaching and learning, schools are still reconsidering the purpose and place of homework. Whether relaxing homework expectations helps level the playing field between students or harms them by decreasing rigor is a divisive issue without conclusive evidence on either side, echoing other debates in education like the elimination of standardized test scores from some colleges’ admissions processes.

I first began to wonder if the homework abolition movement made sense after speaking with teachers in some Massachusetts public schools, who argued that rather than help disadvantaged kids, stringent homework restrictions communicated an attitude of low expectations. One, an English teacher, said she felt the school had “just given up” on trying to get the students to do work; another argued that restrictions that prohibit teachers from assigning take-home work that doesn’t begin in class made it difficult to get through the foreign-language curriculum. Teachers in other districts have raised formal concerns about homework abolition’s ability to close gaps among students rather than widening them.

Many education experts share this view. Harris Cooper, a professor emeritus of psychology at Duke who has studied homework efficacy, likened homework abolition to “playing to the lowest common denominator.”

But as I learned after talking to a variety of stakeholders — from homework researchers to policymakers to parents of schoolchildren — whether to abolish homework probably isn’t the right question. More important is what kind of work students are sent home with and where they can complete it. Chances are, if schools think more deeply about giving constructive work, time spent on homework will come down regardless.

There’s no consensus on whether homework works

The rise of the no-homework movement during the Covid-19 pandemic tapped into long-running disagreements over homework’s impact on students. The purpose and effectiveness of homework have been disputed for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, California banned homework for students up to age 15, and limited it for older students, over concerns that it endangered children’s mental and physical health. The newest iteration of the anti-homework argument contends that the current practice punishes students who lack support and rewards those with more resources, reinforcing the “myth of meritocracy.”

But there is still no research consensus on homework’s effectiveness; no one can seem to agree on what the right metrics are. Much of the debate relies on anecdotes, intuition, or speculation.

Researchers disagree even on how much research exists on the value of homework. Kathleen Budge, the co-author of Turning High-Poverty Schools Into High-Performing Schools and a professor at Boise State, told me that homework “has been greatly researched.” Denise Pope, a Stanford lecturer and leader of the education nonprofit Challenge Success, said, “It’s not a highly researched area because of some of the methodological problems.”

Experts who are more sympathetic to take-home assignments generally support the “10-minute rule,” a framework that estimates the ideal amount of homework on any given night by multiplying the student’s grade by 10 minutes. (A ninth grader, for example, would have about 90 minutes of work a night.) Homework proponents argue that while it is difficult to design randomized control studies to test homework’s effectiveness, the vast majority of existing studies show a strong positive correlation between homework and high academic achievement for middle and high school students. Prominent critics of homework argue that these correlational studies are unreliable and point to studies that suggest a neutral or negative effect on student performance. Both agree there is little to no evidence for homework’s effectiveness at an elementary school level, though proponents often argue that it builds constructive habits for the future.

For anyone who remembers homework assignments from both good and bad teachers, this fundamental disagreement might not be surprising. Some homework is pointless and frustrating to complete. Every week during my senior year of high school, I had to analyze a poem for English and decorate it with images found on Google; my most distinct memory from that class is receiving a demoralizing 25-point deduction because I failed to present my analysis on a poster board. Other assignments really do help students learn: After making an adapted version of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book for a ninth grade history project, I was inspired to check out from the library and read a biography of the Chinese ruler.

For homework opponents, the first example is more likely to resonate. “We’re all familiar with the negative effects of homework: stress, exhaustion, family conflict, less time for other activities, diminished interest in learning,” Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, which challenges common justifications for homework, told me in an email. “And these effects may be most pronounced among low-income students.” Kohn believes that schools should make permanent any moratoria implemented during the pandemic, arguing that there are no positives at all to outweigh homework’s downsides. Recent studies , he argues , show the benefits may not even materialize during high school.

In the Marlborough Public Schools, a suburban district 45 minutes west of Boston, school policy committee chair Katherine Hennessy described getting kids to complete their homework during remote education as “a challenge, to say the least.” Teachers found that students who spent all day on their computers didn’t want to spend more time online when the day was over. So, for a few months, the school relaxed the usual practice and teachers slashed the quantity of nightly homework.

Online learning made the preexisting divides between students more apparent, she said. Many students, even during normal circumstances, lacked resources to keep them on track and focused on completing take-home assignments. Though Marlborough Schools is more affluent than PS 55, Hennessy said many students had parents whose work schedules left them unable to provide homework help in the evenings. The experience tracked with a common divide in the country between children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.

So in October 2021, months after the homework reduction began, the Marlborough committee made a change to the district’s policy. While teachers could still give homework, the assignments had to begin as classwork. And though teachers could acknowledge homework completion in a student’s participation grade, they couldn’t count homework as its own grading category. “Rigorous learning in the classroom does not mean that that classwork must be assigned every night,” the policy stated . “Extensions of class work is not to be used to teach new content or as a form of punishment.”

Canceling homework might not do anything for the achievement gap

The critiques of homework are valid as far as they go, but at a certain point, arguments against homework can defy the commonsense idea that to retain what they’re learning, students need to practice it.

“Doesn’t a kid become a better reader if he reads more? Doesn’t a kid learn his math facts better if he practices them?” said Cathy Vatterott, an education researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. After decades of research, she said it’s still hard to isolate the value of homework, but that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned.

Blanket vilification of homework can also conflate the unique challenges facing disadvantaged students as compared to affluent ones, which could have different solutions. “The kids in the low-income schools are being hurt because they’re being graded, unfairly, on time they just don’t have to do this stuff,” Pope told me. “And they’re still being held accountable for turning in assignments, whether they’re meaningful or not.” On the other side, “Palo Alto kids” — students in Silicon Valley’s stereotypically pressure-cooker public schools — “are just bombarded and overloaded and trying to stay above water.”

Merely getting rid of homework doesn’t solve either problem. The United States already has the second-highest disparity among OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations between time spent on homework by students of high and low socioeconomic status — a difference of more than three hours, said Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University and author of No More Mindless Homework .

When she interviewed teachers in Boston-area schools that had cut homework before the pandemic, Bempechat told me, “What they saw immediately was parents who could afford it immediately enrolled their children in the Russian School of Mathematics,” a math-enrichment program whose tuition ranges from $140 to about $400 a month. Getting rid of homework “does nothing for equity; it increases the opportunity gap between wealthier and less wealthy families,” she said. “That solution troubles me because it’s no solution at all.”

A group of teachers at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, made the same point after the school district proposed an overhaul of its homework policies, including removing penalties for missing homework deadlines, allowing unlimited retakes, and prohibiting grading of homework.

“Given the emphasis on equity in today’s education systems,” they wrote in a letter to the school board, “we believe that some of the proposed changes will actually have a detrimental impact towards achieving this goal. Families that have means could still provide challenging and engaging academic experiences for their children and will continue to do so, especially if their children are not experiencing expected rigor in the classroom.” At a school where more than a third of students are low-income, the teachers argued, the policies would prompt students “to expect the least of themselves in terms of effort, results, and responsibility.”

Not all homework is created equal

Despite their opposing sides in the homework wars, most of the researchers I spoke to made a lot of the same points. Both Bempechat and Pope were quick to bring up how parents and schools confuse rigor with workload, treating the volume of assignments as a proxy for quality of learning. Bempechat, who is known for defending homework, has written extensively about how plenty of it lacks clear purpose, requires the purchasing of unnecessary supplies, and takes longer than it needs to. Likewise, when Pope instructs graduate-level classes on curriculum, she asks her students to think about the larger purpose they’re trying to achieve with homework: If they can get the job done in the classroom, there’s no point in sending home more work.

At its best, pandemic-era teaching facilitated that last approach. Honolulu-based teacher Christina Torres Cawdery told me that, early in the pandemic, she often had a cohort of kids in her classroom for four hours straight, as her school tried to avoid too much commingling. She couldn’t lecture for four hours, so she gave the students plenty of time to complete independent and project-based work. At the end of most school days, she didn’t feel the need to send them home with more to do.

A similar limited-homework philosophy worked at a public middle school in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A couple of teachers there turned as much class as possible into an opportunity for small-group practice, allowing kids to work on problems that traditionally would be assigned for homework, Jessica Flick, a math coach who leads department meetings at the school, told me. It was inspired by a philosophy pioneered by Simon Fraser University professor Peter Liljedahl, whose influential book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics reframes homework as “check-your-understanding questions” rather than as compulsory work. Last year, Flick found that the two eighth grade classes whose teachers adopted this strategy performed the best on state tests, and this year, she has encouraged other teachers to implement it.

Teachers know that plenty of homework is tedious and unproductive. Jeannemarie Dawson De Quiroz, who has taught for more than 20 years in low-income Boston and Los Angeles pilot and charter schools, says that in her first years on the job she frequently assigned “drill and kill” tasks and questions that she now feels unfairly stumped students. She said designing good homework wasn’t part of her teaching programs, nor was it meaningfully discussed in professional development. With more experience, she turned as much class time as she could into practice time and limited what she sent home.

“The thing about homework that’s sticky is that not all homework is created equal,” says Jill Harrison Berg, a former teacher and the author of Uprooting Instructional Inequity . “Some homework is a genuine waste of time and requires lots of resources for no good reason. And other homework is really useful.”

Cutting homework has to be part of a larger strategy

The takeaways are clear: Schools can make cuts to homework, but those cuts should be part of a strategy to improve the quality of education for all students. If the point of homework was to provide more practice, districts should think about how students can make it up during class — or offer time during or after school for students to seek help from teachers. If it was to move the curriculum along, it’s worth considering whether strategies like Liljedahl’s can get more done in less time.

Some of the best thinking around effective assignments comes from those most critical of the current practice. Denise Pope proposes that, before assigning homework, teachers should consider whether students understand the purpose of the work and whether they can do it without help. If teachers think it’s something that can’t be done in class, they should be mindful of how much time it should take and the feedback they should provide. It’s questions like these that De Quiroz considered before reducing the volume of work she sent home.

More than a year after the new homework policy began in Marlborough, Hennessy still hears from parents who incorrectly “think homework isn’t happening” despite repeated assurances that kids still can receive work. She thinks part of the reason is that education has changed over the years. “I think what we’re trying to do is establish that homework may be an element of educating students,” she told me. “But it may not be what parents think of as what they grew up with. ... It’s going to need to adapt, per the teaching and the curriculum, and how it’s being delivered in each classroom.”

For the policy to work, faculty, parents, and students will all have to buy into a shared vision of what school ought to look like. The district is working on it — in November, it hosted and uploaded to YouTube a round-table discussion on homework between district administrators — but considering the sustained confusion, the path ahead seems difficult.

When I asked Luis Torres about whether he thought homework serves a useful part in PS 55’s curriculum, he said yes, of course it was — despite the effort and money it takes to keep the school open after hours to help them do it. “The children need the opportunity to practice,” he said. “If you don’t give them opportunities to practice what they learn, they’re going to forget.” But Torres doesn’t care if the work is done at home. The school stays open until around 6 pm on weekdays, even during breaks. Tutors through New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development programs help kids with work after school so they don’t need to take it with them.

As schools weigh the purpose of homework in an unequal world, it’s tempting to dispose of a practice that presents real, practical problems to students across the country. But getting rid of homework is unlikely to do much good on its own. Before cutting it, it’s worth thinking about what good assignments are meant to do in the first place. It’s crucial that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds tackle complex quantitative problems and hone their reading and writing skills. It’s less important that the work comes home with them.

Jacob Sweet is a freelance writer in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, among other publications.

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When Homework Was Banned

Published: November 3, 2023

In the early 1900s, Ladies' Home Journal took up a crusade against homework, enlisting doctors and parents who say it damages children's health. In 1901 California passed a law abolishing homework!

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Get involved: Should homework be banned?

Published 6 days ago
comments Comments

Do you think you should have to do homework?

Well primary school children in Poland don't have to do it anymore after the government banned it.

Under the new rules, teachers can't give out compulsory homework - that's homework you have to do - to children aged seven to nine.

Meanwhile any homework given to children aged nine to 14 is optional and won't count towards a grade.

Do you think kids should have to do homework or should schools in the UK ban it like they have in Poland? Take the vote and let us know in the comments.

What do children in Poland think of the changes?

There are mixed opinions among the children in Poland about the change.

Julian who is 9 said: "I like to do my homework because, after that, I know I will have more time to do other things, when I have done it, I will have time for other things that are also important."

But 11-year-old Ola is celebrating the changes. She loves music and drawing and hopes it means she has more time for her hobbies.

She said: "I am happy because this homework, I did not like it too much.

"It didn't really make much sense because most people in my class, in the morning would copy (it) from someone who has done the homework or would transcribe (it) from some (internet) pages. So, it didn't make sense."

Ola's mum doesn't agree, she said: "I am not very pleased, because it helps the child really remember their lessons, the homework. And helps (parents) stay on top of what the child has really learnt and of life at school."

Why did Poland ban homework?

The Polish government introduced strict limits on homework from the beginning of April as a way to improve the education system in the country.

The decision was announced by Education Minister, Barbara Nowacka who said: "When I read research regarding the mental health of children, their overload with learning, the reasons of depression, of tensions, stress, or loss of interest in learning, one of the factors, the one that could be removed fastest, was the burden of homework."

Is banning homework a good idea?

Not everyone agrees that banning homework is a good idea.

A charity called the Education Endowment Foundation suggests that homework in primary school can help children learn important skills, help get ready for tests and improve the connection between home and school.

We want to know what you think about homework. Let us know in the comments below.

Children in Poland rejoice over new limits on homework

Polish fifth grader sitting at computer at home

The Polish government has introduced strict limits on the amount of homework pupils must do in a bid to modernise the education system. But some parents and teachers aren't convinced by the changes.

Teachers will no longer give required homework to children in the first to third grades.

While homework is now optional for students in grades four to eight and doesn’t count towards a grade.

Perhaps inevitably the decree has been warmly received by pupils.

“I’m happy because this homework, I did not like it too much,” said 11-year-old Warsaw pupil Ola, “It didn’t really make much sense because most people in my class would copy it in the morning from someone who had done the homework.”

But not everyone is convinced. Sławomir Broniarz, the head of the Polish Teachers' Union, says that while he recognises the need to ease burdens on students, the new rules have been imposed without adequate consultation with educators.

“In general, the teachers think that this happened too quickly, too hastily,” he said.

Broniarz argues that removing homework could widen the educational gaps between children who have strong support at home and those from families with less support and lower expectations.

Poland's education system has undergone a number of controversial overhauls with almost every new government making changes. This has often left parents and teachers confused and discouraged.

And sitting in the middle is third grader Julian.

"It’s a little bit uncool that there is no more homework. But when there is no homework, that’s also rather cool,” he said.

Students are using chatgpt to do their homework. should schools ban ai tools, or embrace them, chinese parents protest against 'stress caused by children's homework', homework - marks out of 10 for learning.

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Poland’s children rejoice as homework is banned. The rest of the world watches on for results

O la Kozak is celebrating. The 11-year-old, who loves music and drawing, expects to have more free time for her hobbies after Poland ’s government ordered strict limits on the amount of homework in the lower grades.

“I am happy,” said the fifth grader, who lives in a Warsaw suburb with her parents and younger siblings. The lilac-colored walls in her bedroom are covered in her art, and on her desk she keeps a framed picture she drew of Kurt Cobain.

“Most people in my class in the morning would copy the work off someone who had done the homework or would copy it from the internet. So it didn’t make sense,” she said.

The government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk enacted the ban against required homework this month amid a broad discussion about the need to modernise Poland's education system, which critics say puts too much emphasis on rote learning and homework, and not enough on critical thinking and creativity.

Under the decree, teachers are no longer to give required homework to kids in the first to third grades. In grades four to eight, homework is now optional and doesn't count towards a grade.

Not everyone likes the change – and even Ola’s parents are divided.

“If there is something that will make students enjoy school more, then it will probably be good both for the students and for the school,” said her father, Pawel Kozak.

His wife, Magda Kozak, was skeptical. “I am not pleased, because (homework) is a way to consolidate what was learned,” she said. “It helps stay on top of what the child has really learned and what’s going on at school.”

(Ola's brother Julian, a third grader, says he sees both sides.)

Debates over the proper amount of homework are common around the globe. While some studies have shown little benefit to homework for young learners, other experts say it can help them learn how to develop study habits and academic concepts.

The rest of the world will be watching Poland’s results closely.

Poland's educational system has undergone a number of controversial overhauls. Almost every new government has tried to make changes — something many teachers and parents say has left them confused and discouraged. For example, after communism was thrown off, middle schools were introduced. Then under the last government, the previous system was brought back. More controversy came in recent years when ultra-conservative views were pushed in new textbooks.

For years, teachers have been fleeing the system due to low wages and political pressure. The current government is trying to increase teacher salaries and has promised other changes that teachers approve of.

But Sławomir Broniarz, the head of the Polish Teachers' Union, said that while he recognized the need to ease burdens on students, the new homework rules are another case of change imposed from above without adequate consultation with educators.

“In general, the teachers think that this happened too quickly, too hastily,” he said.

He argued that removing homework could widen the educational gaps between kids who have strong support at home and those from poorer families with less support and lower expectations. Instead, he urged wider changes to the entire curriculum.

The homework rules gained impetus in the runup to parliamentary elections last year, when a 14-year-old boy, Maciek Matuszewski, stood up at a campaign rally and told Tusk before a national audience that children “had no time to rest.” The boy said their rights were being violated with so much homework on weekends and so many tests on Mondays.

Tusk has since featured Matuszewski in social media videos and made him the face of the sudden change.

Education Minister Barbara Nowacka said she was prompted by research on children’s mental health. Of the various stresses children face, she said, "the one that could be removed fastest was the burden of homework.”

Pasi Sahlberg, a prominent Finnish educator and author, said the value of homework depends on what it is and how it is linked to overall learning. The need for homework can be “very individual and contextual.”

“We need to trust our teachers to decide what is good for each child,” Sahlberg said.

In South Korea, homework limits were set for elementary schools in 2017 amid concerns that kids were under too much pressure. However, teenagers in the education-obsessed country often cram long into the night and get tutoring to meet the requirements of demanding school and university admission tests.

In the US, teachers and parents decide for themselves how much homework to assign. Some elementary schools have done away with homework entirely to give children more time to play, participate in activities and spend time with families.

A guideline circulated by teachers unions in the US recommends about 10 minutes of homework per grade. So, 10 minutes in first grade, 20 minutes in second grade and so on.

The COVID-19 pandemic and a crisis around youth mental health have complicated debates around homework. In the US, extended school closures in some places were accompanied by steep losses in learning, which were often addressed with tutoring and other interventions paid for with federal pandemic relief money. At the same time, increased attention to student wellbeing led some teachers to consider alternate approaches including reduced or optional homework.

It's important for children to learn that mastering something "usually requires practice, a lot of practice,” said Sahlberg, in Finland. If reducing homework leads kids and parents to think school expectations for excellence will be lowered, “things will go wrong.”

The Independent is the world’s most free-thinking news brand, providing global news, commentary and analysis for the independently-minded. We have grown a huge, global readership of independently minded individuals, who value our trusted voice and commitment to positive change. Our mission, making change happen, has never been as important as it is today.

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Finland to close some border crossings with Russia after rise in asylum seekers

Finnish neo-Nazis used 3D printer to make guns in preparation for ‘race war’

Finland recovers ship’s anchor close to damaged Baltic Sea pipeline

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Pádraig Mac Bhrádaigh: “Ní Chóir go gCaithfí dul Tríd an mBéarla chun Teacht ar an nGaeilge”

William McCrum: Trinity’s Forgotten Sporting Hero

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Is Léir go Bhfuil Dearcadh na nGalltachtaí ar an nGaeilge ag Athrú

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Finland has no private schools – and its pupils perform better than British children

‘Education is a human right’

Private schools in Finland

World class schooling

What lessons can be learnt?

How Finnish schools teach every child to spot fake news - and what UK parents could learn

Could this be the way forward in the UK?

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There's no Homework in Finland

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Nobody knows what the point of homework is

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There’s no consensus on whether homework works

Canceling homework might not do anything for the achievement gap

Not all homework is created equal

Cutting homework has to be part of a larger strategy

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When Homework Was Banned

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