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  Another concern raised by critics of Finland’s comprehensive reform back in the 1970s was that even if it didn’t have a negative effect on performance overall, it might disadvantage the brightest. This is a concern felt keenly by some parents of academically-able children; those who support educational equity, but understandably worry that the pursuit of it may prevent their own children from fulfilling their potential. Thankfully, research in this area suggests that you can have it both ways. Hanushek and Woessmann went on to compare students in selective systems with students in the same part of the ability range in less selective systems, and found that there was no negative effect of later school selection on any group, not even on the brightest five per cent. Similarly, Woessmann and colleagues found that while later selection seems to raise the performance of those from less advantaged backgrounds, students from more privileged backgrounds performed at a similar level in both types of system. More on this later.

  System Structure Isn’t Everything

  The big picture seems to suggest that delaying the selection of students into different schools may be helpful for equity purposes while having minimal effects on average outcomes, but this big picture hides all sorts of nuance and detail that can only be understood by looking in more detail at the individual pieces of the puzzle. As we’re in Finland, let’s start with that part of the jigsaw.

  There was an evaluation carried out on the effects of Finland’s comprehensive reform many years after it was implemented. PISA didn’t exist back then, nor did any national test of educational achievement that could allow the comparison of scores at the end of schooling in different parts of the country. However, Finland did and still does have an expectation that all its young men will do national service in the army for a year when they are 20 – an understandable policy in a country that has spent most of its history under foreign rule. On signing-up, the new recruits have to take some cognitive tests – one verbal reasoning one numerical reasoning and one logical reasoning.

  Of these tests, you might expect the verbal reasoning and numerical reasoning scores to reflect in some way the quality of education the recruits had received, as they’d loosely correspond to what was taught in Finnish and mathematics lessons. Tuomas Pekkarinen, Roope Uusitalo and Sari Kerr, who carried out this analysis, found that recruits who’d been educated under the comprehensive system did, on average, marginally better on the verbal tests than those educated under the old two-tier system, and no differently in the other two.50 However, entirely consistently with the international evidence, the averages masked significant differences in scores between those students under the different systems whose parents had low levels of education; in all three tests, soldiers from these more disadvantaged backgrounds did better under the new system than the old.

  So it seems that the comprehensive reform contributed to Finland’s impressively equitable system, but does it add much in explaining their high results? Not by itself, no. But as mentioned earlier, a structural reform itself is only part of the story; Pekkarinen and colleagues evaluated the effects of the first four years of the reform, but there were a number of enabling factors that came into play later on. Here I’ll mention three: cultural attitudes, teacher expertise and universal expectations. The first idea was introduced to me by Ilpo.

  ‘The school system – the formal change and the cultural change – are two different things. The structural change happened in the 70s, from 1972–79, coming from up north then coming down south. But the culture of this old system and the comprehensive education that we have now, well, that took a while to change, and I see the old system still sometimes.’

  I asked what he meant by the culture of the old system, and he gave me an example of a school that was recently closed down that had held on to the old way of thinking, despite the country moving on around it. ‘In this school, they fostered that idea “you are all going to university” and “I hope you understand that you can’t go to vocational training; no one from this school goes to vocational school”. They had a false pride kind of problem.’

  So the old idea was that only certain children are cut out for academic study, and that it is inherently superior to vocational training. This stands at odds with the more modern idea on which the reforms were based – that all children can reach a certain academic level (as set out by the National Curriculum), which will allow them to choose at 16 which of several equally valuable paths they want to go down. The change to the comprehensive system introduced a new structure and with it, this new philosophy – but the latter took a little while to take hold. Teachers’ beliefs and expectations have a powerful effect on student outcomes in themselves – a surprising research finding that we’ll come back to when we get to Japan. The effects of moving to a comprehensive system will be diminished if the teachers don’t embrace the new philosophy, and instead hold on to the idea that only some students can achieve. Thankfully, it is Ilpo’s impression that this old way of thinking has largely made way for the new, more inclusive one.

  A second enabling factor that is needed to make comprehensive education work is also related to teachers; they need not only the belief that all children can achieve, but the know-how to make this happen. In the first few years of Finland’s reform teachers struggled, as they’d been trained for a different education system. I asked Maarit how she initially found teaching in the new type of schools.

  ‘It was more difficult, because I was trained teaching history and politics, so I was trained to teach qualified pupils – is that how you say it? They were chosen. These in the new school were not. It was really difficult; you have to really think of a new way to teach, because it was so heterogeneous. It was difficult I think, in the beginning.’

  The government did organise in-school training for the teachers on how to teach this new curriculum, but it took the teachers a little while to get used to it. Nowadays of course, most teachers have been trained for these circumstances right from the beginning, as part of a master’s degree in teaching.

  There was, though, a third enabling factor that was lacking in the 1970s. Its absence might explain why there was no significant impact of the new system on soldiers’ average results for the numerical reasoning task, and is a good example of why we need to take the high-level statistics with a pinch of salt. When the comprehensive reform was first implemented in Finland, students did not actually all follow the same curriculum; there were still different courses for different students in maths and languages. Maarit explained: ‘Under the new system I didn’t only teach history and politics, I taught an English class of students who were in that class because they were not very good at it. In the beginning we had two or three language groups, those who are better and those who are not so good.’

  The practice of putting children into different classes for different subjects based on their ability is called ‘setting’, and muddies the research waters slightly. In the Finnish case it was done for only two subjects, but in other countries students can be set, or streamed (put in a single ability-based group for all their subjects) in a way that makes it little different from selecting them into different schools in the first place. Yet schools that do this can still officially be called comprehensives. Take, for example, a certain secondary school in England that is not selective, but divides new pupils at age 11 into three ability groups on entry to the school. This school not only teaches them different courses, but teaches them in different buildings and has them wear different uniforms. Is this educationally any different to selecting them into different schools? We need to be aware that selection into different schools, selection into different tracks within a school (streaming) and selection into different classes for individual subjects (setting) fall along a spectrum with little meaningful distinction between them. It isn’t surprising then that the research findings on setting into different classes for different subjects are similar to those for early selection into different schools; it has almost no effect on performance, but significantly di
sadvantages students from lower socio-economic backgrounds.51

  Catering for Difference

  In Finland, this setting in maths and languages was much debated, and then finally discontinued in 1983, following internal research showing that the practice of setting was maintaining and deepening regional, social and gender inequality.52 It became illegal to group children into different classes based on test scores. Most of their classes now include children of different abilities within them, and nearly all are aiming for the same national curriculum goals. Rather than lowering the goals for the less able, they increase the support given. Ilpo thinks this might be one reason for Finland’s success in PISA.

  ‘Somehow what I think about PISA results and Finland is that traditionally we have always had heterogeneous classrooms, so that might be one explanation also. So that we don’t choose people, and group them in an academic sense but instead we have a “put them together and they get along” kind of thinking. That might be one factor.’

  There are sensible exceptions to the mixed-ability trend though – they don’t throw all children in together no matter what. As we saw earlier, children with special needs that can’t be met by the teacher or by occasional support from the special teacher are taught in a separate, smaller class in which they may pursue a modified curriculum. Children who come to the country as immigrants and don’t speak the language are taught in regular schools but in a separate class for a year, where they concentrate on getting to grips with the language before being integrated into mainstream classrooms. Those teenagers that have come from war-torn regions and have never been to school in their home countries remain in separate classes even after this first year, as they have so much catching up to do in addition to learning Finnish which is hard enough by itself, so classes are differentiated to some extent.

  One group that is noticeable by its absence, however, is a class for children who are academically gifted. I’m being deliberately specific, because Finland does have provision for students with other gifts: there are schools that specialise in music, in PE and in languages, and these schools will have one class of students within each year group who have a slightly extended curriculum – to include extra music, for example. One such student is Emma. Emma is a budding musician and is now in high school planning her applications to music college next year, but when I met her she was in the Grade 9 music class – the last year of compulsory education. Emma is also a smart cookie (she didn’t tell me this herself, she is Finnish after all – it was her teachers that told me how quickly she picks things up), so I asked her how she found it being in a class where not everyone understood the material as quickly.

  ‘It can be rather annoying if you’re one of the nerdy kids, for sure. In English, I was always the first one ready, and it would just mean more work for me, just like, “OK oh you’re done? Now just do all the other ones.” Yeah and they would often ask me to help the other kids too, like, walk around and help others. I mean, it’s alright, I didn’t mind it, but now that I think about it, it’s like, I could have got so much more done just going forward with my own work.’

  I’m told that this is an area of great discussion within Finland, with some criticising the system for its failure to stretch the brightest. Yet several of the educators I met seemed quite relaxed about it. One teacher told me:

  ‘The brightest kids, they’ll learn anyway, whatever you do with them. They’re not the ones that need the help.’ She should know, as this particular teacher had five degrees. Ilpo gave a similar argument. ‘I think when you are very talented – I mean this is realism, there are more talented and less talented people, that’s just the way of life, we are different, luckily – the thing is that when you are more talented you learn, whatever you do. If you stand on your head you learn, that’s not a problem. But in the same time, you learn different things when you have to support someone who hasn’t got that kind of talent. And if you are in the same group, sooner or later you are in that situation where you say, “well, don’t you see, it works like this and this.” And then you have a different level of learning inside your head. In that sense you learn more, and differently, and the less talented student also learns; the basic things at least.’

  Perhaps for this reason, a lack of advanced classes before the age of 15 doesn’t seem to have a great effect at a national level on the scores of top students – in 2009 Finland were fourth in the world for the percentage of students scoring at the PISA top levels (5 and 6) in science, seventh in reading and a less impressive but still substantially above average, fifteenth in maths. From the age of 15 onwards, these students can attend academically selective schools if they choose to, and then on to selective universities from there. Oxford and Cambridge universities have societies of students from ‘comprehensive’ Nordic countries. Still, if there were one thing to improve on (which of course there is, like any other country), Finland’s schools might offer more stretch to the brightest students to keep them on their toes.

  Chapter 4: Purpose, Mastery and Trust in Finnish Teachers

  Esteet katoavat etevän tieltä.

  Barriers will disappear on the path of the skilled (Finnish Proverb)

  If I were able to stand the long, cold, dark winters, I should like to be a teacher in Finland (though when I told Emma I might be coming back to Finland in the winter she told me in a very serious voice, ‘You might die’). Coming straight from English schools, where I’d been told what colour pen I should use for my marking, teachers in Finland seemed to have a huge amount of freedom over how they did their jobs. In England I had to write out all my lesson plans in a predetermined format and send them in for review, whereas teachers in Finland don’t ever have to do this once they’re qualified, not even for lesson observations, because they’re not observed. Their professional opinion is respected in everything, to the extent that I went to one staff meeting in which the last item on the agenda was which new furniture they should order for the school canteen (lest anyone think my trip was glamorous).

  There are no school inspections. There is no teacher evaluation. There aren’t even national exams to hold teachers to account – right up to the age of 15 students’ grades are decided by the teachers. So how can Finland possibly get such good results in PISA? Not only that – how can these results be similar across schools all over the country? There is more to this story than meets the eye. The first half of the story is about motivation, and the second is about an alternative approach to quality control.

  Imagine if your education system had no external exams, no teacher observations and no school inspection. Do you think the teachers would put as much effort into their lessons? Would the schools that needed improving bother to make the necessary changes? Speaking to teachers in Finnish schools, I was reminded of the research on motivation that I studied as an undergraduate, and of a book on the subject that I read more recently: Drive, by Daniel Pink.53 Pink explains how many businesses base their policies and working practices on an outdated model of motivation, which he calls ‘Motivation 2.0’ (Motivation 1.0 is simply that we have a drive for survival).

  Motivation 2.0 is based on the assumption that humans seek reward and avoid punishment, so the best way to motivate people is through extrinsic motivation – with a carrot and a stick (I mean this metaphorically). Without these external incentives, says Motivation 2.0, humans are inert and won’t do much. However, research carried out as early as the 1940s suggests that humans have a third drive – intrinsic motivation – which explains why people will continue with some activities without any external reward, simply for the inherent satisfaction they get from the activity itself. Pink calls this ‘Motivation 3.0’.

  According to research by two eminent psychologists, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, the three elements that contribute to individuals being intrinsically motivated are:

  mastery – our desire to get better and better at what we do;

  relatedness – our desire to have positive relationships with others; and />
  autonomy – our desire to be self-directed.54

  Based on more recent research,55 Pink adds a fourth element that contributes to Motivation 3.0:

  purpose – our yearning to be part of something larger than ourselves.56

  Quite unintentionally, the Finns have created a system that plays precisely into the psychological prerequisites for intrinsically motivated teachers.

  Purpose

  This is the easy one. From a purpose perspective, teaching as a profession sells itself. It isn’t only Finnish teachers that go into the profession because they think educating the next generation is important; a study conducted by education think-tank LKMco in England found that the vast majority go into teaching because they want to help children succeed.57 In Finland, though, the calling to be a teacher has historically been even louder than this: it was literally a call to create a nation.

  Ilpo told me, ‘The role of education in our culture is huge. In the 1860s we were part of the Russian Empire, but as a separate Grand Duchy, and some of the Russians started to press the Tsar that it’s not right that Finland isn’t part of Russia. In response, Finnish legislation was ordered to build up the public school, and everyone is obliged to go there, so that they could teach the children that “we are not Swedes, and Russians we don’t want to be, let us be Finns”.’

  In this way, the education system was the foundation of Finland as a nation. The argument at the time was that if they could build up the mass culture and identity as Finnish people, then eventually they could ask for independence. Teachers were therefore seen as bastions of Finnishness with a huge responsibility, and held in very high regard. When many soldiers then went on to become teachers after the end of the Second World War, this reputation was upheld.