Cleverlands Page 4
This is a relatively new system. Students with special needs used to be taught in separate classes as a matter of course, but there is now more of an emphasis on inclusion – hence the various stages before students are given this extra help and different teaching. This has had a mixed reaction from teachers. It obviously makes their job harder, as they are having to cope with a greater range of needs within one class. I also spoke to a special teacher, Mikael, who was concerned that the delay caused by the obligation of teachers to record their initial attempts at addressing the problems themselves meant that children didn’t get the intensive specialist support they needed as soon as they needed it: ‘It takes such a long time to get to step three that it might take a student who is struggling in seventh grade until the end of eighth grade to get this status. It needs to start from the first grade that it’s noticed.’
Multidisciplinary Input
Finnish schools do so much more than teaching children. Finns know that sometimes what causes children to struggle are not learning difficulties but social or emotional difficulties, or health problems. I was privileged to meet the school psychologist, the school social worker and the study counsellor at one of the schools I taught in, but unfortunately didn’t have the chance to meet the school dentist, school nurse, speech therapist or family counsellor. All of these specialists are either based in one school or, in areas where schools are smaller (over 30 per cent of Finnish schools have only three or four permanent teachers), they split their time between several.
The multi-disciplinary group known as the child welfare team is a cornerstone of Finnish education, and it is a legal requirement to have one in every school. In big schools, this group meet weekly for a two-hour meeting. During the first hour, the group discuss a particular class with the class teacher – each class being discussed twice a year. They talk through each child individually, spending less time on those who are getting along well socially and academically, and focusing their attention on those who are having problems. The second hour is kept available for any teacher to come along and discuss any student. Mikael explained, ‘In the meetings, they analyse the needs for each student as a whole, as a human being, and think, “What are the underlying causes of the problems they’re having, and how can we address them?” rather than looking for a specific solution for each problem in isolation.’
This struck a chord for me as a teacher from England. English schools vary hugely in their approaches, but too many will put interventions into place that attempt to deal with a symptom of a problem, rather than its underlying cause. For example, if a student has failed his maths mock exam, he will be often be required to attend extra maths classes after school. Never mind if the reason he failed was that he has depression and can’t study, or that he’s being bullied, or that he has mild dyscalculia – a specific learning difficulty with arithmetic. Understanding the underlying causes of student difficulties is the best way to address them. This is helped in Finland by the physical presence in school of professionals who have studied these very things. But that’s not all of it. There is also a desire for this understanding, because the goals of Finnish schools are so much broader than getting students to pass exams.
The purpose of child welfare work in Finnish schools is to ‘create a healthy and safe environment for learning and growing, protect mental health, prevent social exclusion and promote the wellbeing of the school community.’ I think it is an advantgage that children’s mental health and wellbeing is just as important as (as well as closely related to) their educational achievements. I am sure that other English teachers think so too, and that many English headteachers would give their right arm to have a team full of welfare professionals in school – were right arms accepted as currency in England. But English schools don’t have this resource, because it is considered to be too expensive. Arvo Jäppinen, the Director of the Finnish Ministry of Education, had a response to this consideration about cost in his conversation with Dr Jennifer Chung of St Mary’s University. ‘It is not so costly as if the pupil would be excluded from active life. Later, she or he will cost a lot. We have, by the way, counted if the young boy, for example, will drop out, he will be excluded from active society; he will cost at least 1,000,000 euros.’40
The cost of exclusion is pretty pricey in England too. The average cost of a place in youth custody (15–17s) for those that offend is £100,000 a year.41 The vast majority of these children have been excluded from school at some point, and half of them have only the literacy levels that you would expect of children in primary school. In America, two-thirds of children who can’t read by the end of fourth grade end up in prison or on welfare.42 The strong link between literacy rates and incarceration led to the urban myth that prison planners in Texas used school literacy rates to work out how many prison cells they would need 10 years later. Of course, it would be a mistake to assume, based on these correlations, that a lack of literacy is the sole cause of crime, but some of the factors that are associated with both – e.g. trauma due to abuse or neglect and learning difficulties – are those targeted by Finnish welfare teams throughout children’s time in the education system. Yet despite all this input, it is less expensive than the alternative. As Jäppinen says, ‘School is cheaper, much cheaper.’
Chapter 3: The Finnish Comprehensive Consensus
Ei oppi ojaan kaada.
Education won’t knock you down in the ditch. (Finnish proverb)
November 22nd, 1963, marked the death of President J. F. Kennedy, and the birth of a new education system for Finland. Just before the news of the assassination came in, Finnish politicians had been celebrating the passing of a bill that mandated the creation of a comprehensive education system for all children, to replace the two-tier system that divided children into different types of schools at the age of ten. Looking back to educational changes in the decades leading up to Finland’s stellar PISA results in the first round of testing (2000) is very important, as it is these policies that can best give us a clue as to the cause of their success – not what has happened in the decade since.
Maarit, a history and politics teacher I stayed with, who is just recently retired (and makes excellent ‘Sister’s sausage soup’) began her teaching career in this old system as a substitute teacher in an upper elementary school. But this was not the kind of school she went to herself. ‘In the old days, when I was at school, I could go to secondary school after the fourth grade, because I got through the exams. Those who didn’t pass those exams stayed in elementary and would then go to upper elementary school.’
Ilpo Salonen, Executive Superintendent of Basic Education in a region just outside Helsinki, kindly met with me one rainy morning on the fifth floor of the local government office block to chat to me about his opinions and experiences of Finnish education. He too went to school under the dual-track system. ‘The old system was that you had better schools, and then the schools that led to vocational training, and you couldn’t change between those tubes. I went through that. From one tube you went to the university, and from the other tube you went into vocational training. And you were 10 when you chose; there were no possibilities to change your mind.’
The education bill that passed in 1963 had been a long time coming; the idea for a comprehensive system had been initially suggested by a cross-party committee (which met 200 times) some 16 years earlier, and it took another 16 years before the system was implemented across the whole of Finland. An idea put forward in 1947 was only fully realised in 1979. This might seem frustratingly slow, and I know I would hate it were I a politician, policymaker or parent involved, but it might also be part of the reason for the system’s subsequent stability and success.
The first 16 years between the initial suggestion and its passing in parliament were a time of conflict, debate and, ultimately, consensus-building. There was initially intense criticism from the universities and the grammar school teachers’ union, who thought that comprehensivisation would lead to all sorts of ills. A f
urther report in 1959 recommending a move towards comprehensive education was unable to unite different political parties. Eventually, after much debate and discussion, it was realised by a majority (163 in favour with 68 opposed) that Finland could not afford for any of its citizens to leave school without a higher level of education than had been offered to most children at the time. In the words of Ilpo: ‘When we are five million, we can’t afford to drop anyone. In here everyone counts’, and Maarit: ‘In Finland, we like to give possibility to everybody.’
Having such a lengthy discussion and building cross-party consensus, rather than having a majority government forcing legislation through regardless, may be why the comprehensive system in Finland has remained relatively uncontested in the years since. Both before and since the surprising PISA results in 2000 when Finland came top in the world, Finnish citizens of all political persuasions have expressed equally high satisfaction in their education system. This is in contrast to their Scandinavian neighbours in Sweden and Norway, where social democratic voters have had a more favourable impression of their education systems than their conservative fellow citizens.
Another factor that may have contributed to its success was the slow lead-in time. The second half of the 1960s was spent developing and piloting a new curriculum for the new schools, to find out what methods worked best for this brand new system in which pupils of different abilities and backgrounds would be taught the same thing. Hundreds of teachers were involved in this process. Even when it was eventually implemented, it didn’t happen all at once: it began in the north, in Lapland, where education was most in need of reform, and was rolled out down the country over the next seven years. It was accompanied by special in-service teacher training, to ensure that teachers were able to teach the new curriculum in the way it was intended – quite a task, when teachers had previously been trained to either teach academically-able children academic subjects, or ‘less academic’ children a watered-down version of this content. This eventual consensus on the importance of educating all children to a higher standard may have had an effect in itself on the Finns’ ability to fully implement this reform.
What did this new system look like? All children were to be educated in the same schools, with the same curriculum, for nine years rather than four. The idea was that every child could and would keep up with this curriculum, and would therefore be in a position at age 15 or 16 to choose whether they’d like to go to the gymnasium (an academic school, not a place to work on your abs) or to a vocational school, where they could study to enter the trades.
At the time, this meant merging previously separate ‘elementary high schools’ and ‘secondary schools’ into one, which was a bumpy process that could not have happened without a legal mandate. More unusually, the government also made all private schools a part of this system, meaning they became funded by the government and were not allowed to charge fees or select students based on ability. Contrary to popular belief, this means that private schools do still exist in Finland, in that some schools are run by non-state organisations such as the church, but they lack the economic, social or academic selectivity common to private schools in other nations.
Comprehensive Education: Helpful or Not?
Now, just because Finland does something, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good or useful thing. There are a few measures we can look at when trying to work out if comprehensive schools are useful or not compared to their alternatives: their effect on results, their effect on how much a student’s outcomes depend on their parental background (i.e. the equity of a system) and their effect on the dispersion of results (equality). Most would agree that higher results and greater equity are worthy goals, all else being equal (the relative importance of these things is what is more contentious). Not all would agree that equality of results is necessarily a good thing – for many this will depend on whether the narrowing of the gap between the best and worst results is due to the lowest performing doing better, or the highest performing doing worse. There is research out there investigating the effect of comprehensive systems on such things, but as with any system-level research, we should remember to take the findings of this research as clues rather than proofs of ‘what works’; the success of an education reform depends only partly on what that reform is, and partly on how (and where) it is implemented.
The kind of research that is relevant here relates to the age at which students are first selected into different schools (often ‘vocational’ and ‘academic’) based on their perceived ability. In Finland the comprehensive reform moved the age of first selection from 10 to 15 or 16. Comprehensive education is simply the practice of having all students in the same types of schools, so in other words, a comprehensive school system is one that delays that first selection into different types of schools until children are older.
If overall results, equality and equity are simultaneously improved in a system by having this first selection at one stage over another, then there can be little argument about the direction in which the research clues point. If, on the other hand, equity or equality is at the expense of results, or results at the expense of equity, which option to pursue becomes a question of values about which people will inevitably disagree. Should we sacrifice equity and equality for high performance? Or should we sacrifice the education of the brightest children for the benefit of the masses? Fortunately, the evidence suggests that on this issue, these three goals are not in conflict with one another.
One of the most significant studies in this area was carried out by two economists, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann, who investigated the effects of early selection on variance in results (‘inequality’) and average performance.43 They employed a clever method of comparing countries that allowed them to ensure that the relationship of interest – between age of first selection and inequality – was not caused by any other differences between the education systems, such as the economic inequality in that country, or the quality of teachers. They did this by comparing the inequality within each country at primary school, before selection takes place, and the inequality in the same system at the end of lower secondary school, when selection has happened in some countries but not others. This graph demonstrates the changes in inequality – notice that in all but one of the countries that select (track) early, inequality increases in secondary school, whereas in all but two of the countries that don’t select students into different schools until later (not tracked) inequality is reduced by secondary school.
Figure 2: From Woessmann (2009)44
Not all will agree that inequality in results is necessarily a problem, especially as this variance could potentially just reflect the brightest from all backgrounds doing particularly well in early-selecting systems, and could therefore be an argument in favour of early selection. A more interesting question then is how this practice effects children from poorer backgrounds, or in other words, ‘what effect does early selection have on equity?’ Does early selection into different schools support equity by giving academic chances to the brightest from all backgrounds? Or does it reduce equity by denying chances to those who haven’t had intensive support at home?
Woessmann and some other colleagues analysed the PISA 2003 data, and used the OECD’s measure of student background to investigate its effects on students’ scores in countries with different selection arrangements.45 In line with previous studies, they found that the later the age at which students were selected into different schools, the lower the impact of student background.46 No matter what common sense may tell you, the empirical evidence suggests that leaving the division of students into different types of school until they are a little older means students’ scores at age 15 are more likely to reflect their potential and effort, and less likely to reflect the size of their parents’ pay cheques.
This is consistent with the situation in Finland, which has one of the most equal education systems in the world, both in terms of spread of results (equality) and the impact of background (
equity). Before you assume that this is just because Finland has fewer social divisions anyway, it is important to note that Finland has not always been a relatively classless society. Shortly after Finland became independent from Russia in 1917, a civil war erupted, leaving deep divisions between different classes in society. Having a more open education system was one of the factors – along with unprecedented prosperity – that contributed towards the gradual dissolution of differences between social classes in terms of taste and conduct (and accent, I was told) over the period since.47 Of course, having a comprehensive system alone is not enough to bring about relative educational equity – there are other ostensibly comprehensive systems, such as England and the US, with an equity record that is nothing to be proud of, and we will come to why this might be a little later on. Nevertheless, it does seem to help move a system in an equitable direction.
So far then, the comprehensive option is looking sensible. But what about overall performance? Comprehensive education might make the system fairer, but is that at the expense of student outcomes? Hanushek and Woessmann looked at this too. The results aren’t quite as clear-cut as those on the age of selection and inequality; they did find a statistically significant difference in scores between students in different types of systems, but this difference – in favour of systems with later selection – was only marginal. Other studies confirm that there is, at the very least, no negative effect on overall performance as a result of delaying selection,48 and in several individual country cases, including Poland and Lithuania, pushing back the age of selection has had a positive effect on performance.49