Back in March of this year I went to TEDxGranta and had a fab day, partly because I met Ross Sargent, co founder of Cambridge Kung Fu. Since that day I’ve kept in touch with Ross on Facebook where he shares some interesting and useful stuff. Recently he shared a video talk by Pasi Sahlberg called ‘Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland’. Here’s a link to the video (it’s a whopper – clocking in at 1 hour 20 minutes, Ross suggests you can wind through the first ten mins):
Now being a kind soul, Ross watched the talk then summarised his observations. He’s kindly allowed me to repost these as a guest post, thanks Ross. I’m inspired by what the Finnish people have achieved and as Ross says – we could do this! Here’s his summary of the talk and why the Finnish education system works, hope you like it.
1. Trust people to do their best.
2. Teach people to be responsible don’t make them accountable.
3. Value teachers especially primary school teachers above pretty much all other professions! Pay them a good salary and give them plenty of time for teaching and planning within their work hours.
4. No testing under the age of 16.
5. No external checking.
6. Start half day school at 6 (combined with half a half day of play) and full time school at 7.
7. Multiple avenues for success that are equally valued in society – both academic and practical.
8. No private education – the aim is for absolutely everyone to be given the exact same opportunities to succeed.
9. Teachers get to design their own syllabus for their school – and studies have shown that this has led to by far the least variation in academic standards across all schools of all measured countries!
Along with Singapore and South Korea, Finland is consistently in the top 3 performing schools in all known measures and has been for the last decade or so.
We live in a different country with different issues but 30 years ago Finland did not have a good education system and now they have the best, so change is possible. They were not ‘born’ with a good education system, they thought about what needed to change and made the changes they felt were needed and have continued to refine the system and will continue to do so. We could do this!