Greater equality the route to educational success … time to heed the lessons of Finland
The Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, in a speech at the University of Cambridge in November argued that he took an ‘unabashedly elitist’ approach to education and that a stratified system of education, with academy schools sponsored by private schools, would better serve educational standards.
He also extolled “scientific reasoning, the falsifiability of assumptions, the need to measure reliably, weigh evidence rigorously, submit to the examination of peers, all of these things which science teaches us contribute to the questioning mindset our society needs if it is to avoid error, falsity, superstition and folly.”
Yet in a speech that selectively compared educational performance in the UK with Singapore, Hong Kong, Poland and Hungary, he neglected to mention Finland. Yet this is a country that achieves competencies among 15-year olds in reading, maths and science at the very top of OECD rankings. To what do they owe this success? In an article in the Atlantic, Anu Partinen sets out the lessons from 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?: “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.”
According to Partinen, the lessons run counter to everything that the US has sought to implement (and they also run counter to everything that UK ministers have sought to learn from the US): “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?”
As Partinen concludes, “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 issues of public higher education and public secondary education are indivisible. The social mission of public education is equity. Equity is not in conflict with excellence, but may in fact be its precondition.
Hugely interesting. where can more information be obtained?