EMMA ALBERICI: Pasi Sahlberg is director-general of the ministry of education in Helsinki, but he's spending more and more of his time outside Finland teaching governments and schools the Finnish way.

Finland consistently beats most of the rest of the countries in the OECD in maths, reading and literacy at all levels of primary and high school. The secret, according to him, is to be found in Finland's highly educated teachers.

Teaching in Finland is a respected and prestigious profession, and it's paid accordingly. Gaining entry to study teaching is extremely competitive, and nearly every teacher in the country has a master's degree.

I spoke to Pasi Sahlberg from Melbourne.

Pasi Sahlberg, welcome to Lateline.

PASI SAHLBERG, FINNISH DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF EDUCATION: Thank you.

EMMA ALBERICI: Finland occupies the number one spot as far as the OECD testing standard is concerned - the so-called program for international student assessment. Australia over the last decade on the other hand has fallen behind on that same score. What do you think is behind your country's success?

PASI SAHLBERG: Well, you know, we have been working for this current situation for the last 30 or 40 years - very systematically starting from 1970s - and I think one of the keys of our good performance is that we have systematically focused on equity and equality in our education system, and not so much on excellence and achievement like many other countries have done. And now we know, also through the OECD data and research, that the equity is the one that is also bringing excellence - just like this, not only Finland, but also Canada and Korea, for example, are the same. So I think the systematic way of addressing those who are in special need and need more help is the key.

EMMA ALBERICI: When you say equality and equity, what exactly do you mean?

PASI SAHLBERG: Well, starting from the equitable funding of school system. I know that this is a current issue here in Australia, to think about how education should be funded. We have been doing pretty much those recommendations in the Gonski Report now for the last 20 years - where we try to make sure that everybody in the schools, all the schools will get the equal funding, and then the schools would be also funded according to their needs.

EMMA ALBERICI: There's been a lot of debate in Australia about school funding by the Government, particularly in the past week since the release of the Gonski Report. The biggest controversy lies in whether the Federal Government should be directing part of its budget to the private school sector, the argument being that they are just helping to fund parent choice. Do you believe that a parent's choice of sending their children to an elite private school should be subsidised by the government?

PASI SAHLBERG: This is a very difficult thing to comment on, because we don't... in Finland we don't have any private schools, and I don't know enough about the situation here to make any comments. But reading the report published, I think the recommendations that would be securing more funding, public funding for those schools who have more students in need is the right one, but I don't want to make any comments on the funding private schools otherwise, because I simply don't know enough about the situation.

EMMA ALBERICI: So how are your schools funded?

PASI SAHLBERG: Our schools are funded very close to what this report is recommending you to do. So we give schools a kind of a basic funding equally based on the number of students they have, and then we adjust the school budget based on the school's need. For example, if there are more immigrant children or pupils coming from the single parent families, the schools normally receive more funding so that they can deal with these issues easily. So there are many similarities in what we are doing now to those recommendations in the Gonski Report.

EMMA ALBERICI: Why don't you have private schools in Finland?

PASI SAHLBERG: Because we think... you know, our choice has always been to focus more on equity and equality in education rather than choice. This is often seen as the two sides of the same coin - that you either emphasise choice, school choice for parents, or the parents can choose the school - or then you put in place policies that make sure that all the schools are good. And this is what we have been, as I said, doing for the last 30 or 40 years, actually. Trying to make sure that every single school is a good school in Finland, and all the schools have good teachers, so that this would minimise the need for parents to choose the school, and we are exactly in this situation today.

EMMA ALBERICI: You've spent some time in Australia now. What do you think are the most striking differences between the education systems here and in Finland?

PASI SAHLBERG: Well, I think you have a very different approach to using... collecting data and using data and reporting the school's success. In the Finnish system we are relying much more on teachers and the schools' ability to report to parents and authorities how the schools are doing. I think the other thing is that we, in Finland, probably have much more confidence and trust on teachers' and principals' work, whereas here I realise that you have probably much more... kind of a doubtful situation, where politicians and media and public is not so sure that the schools and teachers can do what they were supposed to do, and this is something that is a big difference between these two countries.

EMMA ALBERICI: Because in Finland, you hand responsibility for decisions in education to the teachers?

PASI SAHLBERG: That's exactly so, and we have been working on this situation systematically now for the last 20 years, where we have given the authority and autonomy also to the schools from the central administration, and I think this is, frankly speaking, one of the keys also to this favourable situation that we have internationally.

EMMA ALBERICI: So you mean principals hire and fire their teachers, and have a much more autonomous reign over their schools?

PASI SAHLBERG: Exactly, and I think the most important thing in this school autonomy in Finland is that all the schools are both responsible and also free to design their own curriculum as they wish, based on the quite loose national curriculum framework. So financing and managing the school is one thing, but I think the... using teachers' knowledge and skills that we have in our system to design how they want teaching and learning to take place is the most important thing.

EMMA ALBERICI: You've used the word "trust". How important do you believe that relationship of trust is between the government and the teachers?

PASI SAHLBERG: I think it's a very important. At least it's very important in our system where we are now in a situation where teachers trust their students, and principals trust teachers, and according to our national surveys parents seem to be most confident with the public school system than any other public institution in Finland. So there seems to be a kind of overall trust in the education system, so that also the minister of education can sleep his night peacefully.

EMMA ALBERICI: In the past two years, our Government has introduced standardised testing for children as young as five up to Year 12 students. Now our Prime Minister has billed those test results as a significant resource for student, for parents and of course for teachers. Do you agree that this kind of testing in Australian education represents an important leap forward?

PASI SAHLBERG: Well, I have nothing against standardised testing, per se. But, I think how the test data is used to hold teachers and schools accountable and how the school's performance is made public through websites or media - I'm not sure that this is the way we should go, at least this is not the way we have been doing things in Finland.

Anywhere where these types of things had put in place, teachers have started to focus more on teaching to the test, and curriculum has narrowed. If the test data is only collected through two or three subjects - like is often done measuring literacy and mathematics - this means that these subjects will become the most important things in a school. And the other thing is that these knowledge tests often measure only the things that can be measured and not, for example, problem solving or creativity to the extent that they should be, and this leads teachers and schools to focus on these things more than they could do otherwise.

EMMA ALBERICI: The Australian Government, on the other hand, actually promotes standardised testing as the most reliable measure of success - for students, for teachers, for schools, and of course for parents.

PASI SAHLBERG: We know very well that the inequality that our students have through the parents' socioeconomic background is a very strong factor that is explaining their performance. And in many cases, this is far beyond the teacher's control.

EMMA ALBERICI: Given that you in Finland don't have national testing, how do you know then if certain children are falling through the cracks? What safeguards are in place to pick that up?

PASI SAHLBERG: We have good teachers to do this - and this is basically the only thing we can use - that we have the schools that are responsible to make sure that each and every child is progressing and doing well in the school, so it's the teachers. It's a teacher's shared responsibility in the school and the principal working with them, and we have no other means than the school-based reporting and teachers' word for this.

EMMA ALBERICI: Here in Australia, virtually anyone can study to become a teacher. Your final year scores at high school don't have to be particularly high, and your salary at the end reflects that. How is the situation different in Finland?

PASI SAHLBERG: Well we have probably the most competitive primary school teacher education system in the world, where we can only take 10 per cent of the applicants, which means that this makes entry into teacher education in Finland very, very difficult. And it also automatically raises the quality of intake, and then the quality of teachers as well. So, it's a very different situation because the teaching has become a very popular profession among young people in Finland.

EMMA ALBERICI: So how does teaching compare to, say, studying medicine or law?

PASI SAHLBERG: If we take just the plain numbers of applicants and accepted, we have more... it's more difficult to get into primary school teacher education in Finnish universities than medicine, for example.

EMMA ALBERICI: So in Finland you actually need higher entrance scores to study teaching than medicine?

PASI SAHLBERG: You need at least the equally high high school graduation scores to become primary school teacher than to enter the school of medicine.

EMMA ALBERICI: How does that higher teacher status affect educational results in Finland, in your view?

PASI SAHLBERG: I think it's a very important thing. This has created also the situation in Finland where teachers are very highly respected because of this highly competitive way of getting into teaching, and we know that anybody who is graduating from department of teacher education must be pretty good academically, and also as a person - because of this very strict entry control.

EMMA ALBERICI: In your recent book, you observe that Finland stands outside the global education reform movement. You've used the acronym for that as GERM, and you've said it's infected the US, it's infected the UK and Australia. What is this virus you refer to?

PASI SAHLBERG: Well, this global educational reform movement is a way of thinking about reforming education that is based on ideas of competition, choice, accountability, testing. In other words, all these market-based ideas of running the education system. I'm using this term GERM, because I have found that the Finnish way of building good education system is not only different to the GERM, but it's almost the opposing way of building education policies and reforms.

EMMA ALBERICI: In what way?

PASI SAHLBERG: For example, if I take the competition idea, where in all of these countries that you mentioned, the policies are built on the idea that competition will ultimately improve the quality of teaching. In Finland we don't have these policies. We believe that cooperation and networking and sharing are the things and important things to make sure that everybody will be able to improve and do things better. Accountability is another one where, in many of these so-called infected countries, schools and teachers and principals are increasingly held accountable through the standardised tests; and in Finland, we have been trying to build trust and responsibility within our education systems rather than accountability. So, many of these GERM elements are actually opposite to what Finland has been doing.

EMMA ALBERICI: Pasi Sahlberg thank you so much for being with us tonight.

PASI SAHLBERG: Thank you very much.