

Monday

THE best schools in the world, it is generally agreed, are in Finland. In the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies, which compare 15-year-olds' reading, mathematics and science abilities in more than 50 countries, it routinely comes top. So politicians, academics, think-tankers and teachers from all over the world visit Finnish schools in the hope of discovering the magic ingredient. Journalists come too, and now it's my turn.

And since I'm coming this far north, I want to take in Sweden too. That social-democratic paradise has carried out school reforms that make free-market ideologues the world over weak at the knees. In the 1990s it opened its state-education system to private competition, allowing new schools to receive the same amount for each pupil as the state would have spent on that child.

Sweden is my first stop. My week starts with post-breakfast coffee with Widar Andersson, an ex-chairman of Sweden's Independent Schools Association. When the independent schools reforms were first mooted in 1991, he was a member of parliament for the Social Democrats, in one of their rare spells in opposition. “I think I was the only Social Democrat in favour of the reforms,” he tells me.

In 1994, when they came into force, he and two state-school teachers opened one of the very first independent schools. It was not the first time he took on the state: years earlier he and a few other social workers had set up a private company trying innovative ways to treat drug addicts. “I learned there must be other ways to do things than those the state has decided are right, especially in a country like Sweden where the state is so large,” he says.

Then I head to the education ministry. The minister is in budget negotiations, but his officials brief me on the new government's plans (a centre-right coalition is once more in power). Copying Finland seems to be the name of the game: more teacher training, and lots of special-needs teaching. It must be galling to live next door to the world's best schools, especially when to the rest of the world, the two countries look essentially identical.

Back in London, a Russian acquaintance who lived in Sweden for many years had offered me his explanation for the gap in school achievement between Finland and Sweden: Finland never did the 70s, he says, while the Swedes did it wholesale and are still stuck there. Swedish teachers can't even take a child's mobile phone away if he is using it during class, he fumes. Bertil Östberg, State Secretary to Jan Björklund, the education minister, laughs and agrees; apparently the great mobile-phone-in-class scandal was an issue in a previous election campaign. “We will give teachers the right to confiscate mobile phones,” he assures me.

I hear that the 1970s orthodoxy—that competition and grades destroyed a child's motivation—means that Swedish children who are failing to learn can proceed right through compulsory school without anyone intervening or even noticing. If parents ask for a report, they can be given one—but it mustn't include anything that looks like a grade. I offer the sort of fatuity I imagine such documents include: “Helen has contributed nicely to classroom discussion”. It is acknowledged as a classic of the genre. The new government, I am told, will make grades and reports not only legal, but compulsory.

Next, a visit to Sodra Latin (South Latin), a popular and prestigious gymnasium (upper high school, for 16-19-year-olds). Education at this age is not compulsory, and although Sodra Latin is a state school, entry is highly competitive. It is particularly strong in music, with chamber and symphony orchestras, a jazz band and an excellent choir. The youngsters are clever and motivated. But, says the head teacher, it is the first time most have experienced competition, and many study late—the school is open till 10pm—and come in at weekends too.

I dine with Carl-Gustaf Stawström, the managing director of the Association of Independent Schools. He gives me a nice example of the way the market is providing choice and variety, as well as pressure for higher standards. His own daughter attends an independent gymnasium which crams most schooling into half-days. “If you want only to find problems, you see people who are trying to do things cheaply,” he says, “but she is a keen athlete and trains in the afternoons, so it suits her very well.”



Tuesday

I SPEND my second day in Sweden with representatives of Kunskapsskolan, Sweden's biggest chain of independent schools (it has 21 secondaries and 9 gymnasiums). It has recently been awarded a contract to open two “academies”—independent state schools—in London, and I have been intrigued by what I've heard about its highly personalised teaching methods.

At Kunskapsskolan Enskede, a few kilometres from the centre of Stockholm, I am met by Christian Wetell, its head teacher, and Kenneth Nyman, the company's regional chief. They explain the “voucher system” from which they make their money. For each pupil the school teaches, it receives from the local government what it would have spent educating the pupil in one of its own schools; in return, independent schools cannot charge anything extra, and must accept all students who apply. Provided schools follow Sweden's national curriculum, they have wide latitude in their methods and pacing.

Consumers consuming

Kenneth sheds an interesting light on the thorny comparison with Finland. You have to look, he says, at what sort of students each country's system wants. Sweden aims to produce socially conscious generalists. The Finnish system, by contrast, drives rather narrowly at academic success.

We talk about the unwritten rules which children pick up by osmosis. Sweden has a Lutheran tradition: citizens are expected to work hard, do their share, solve their own problems and contribute to the general good. “The limit to freedom,” he says, “is when you negatively affect others.” Sweden's national culture thus constrains its students' apparent freedom.

Christian shows me around his school. It is bare but pleasant, with lecture theatres, open areas where students work at their own pace and classrooms with doors for tutorials.

Kunskapsskolan posts the entire curriculum on a website. Each week students agree on their goals for the next week, and the timetable of classes and lectures they will attend, individually with a tutor. They do most of the work on their own. The following week their progress will be reviewed. I am shown a student's logbook for the past term; mostly, progress has been uneventful, but on one page is the dire warning that this young person will have to work all Easter to catch up. A few weeks later, to my relief, there is a smiley face and a message: “Well done! You're back on track.”

“If I compare myself with my friends who went to a regular school,” Teo Derviskadic, a boy in his final year, tells me, “it feels I have matured more; I plan my days better. They ask me, how you can keep up, how can you decide where to be? But some kids here have missed out, because they didn't learn to take responsibility.”

After school lunch (delicious), Per Ledin, the company's CEO, takes me on to Kunskapsskolan Globen, a gymnasium nearby. Looking directly at me to see how I react, he says: “We do not mind that we are being compared to McDonald's.”

Education is a service industry; to turn a profit, a service industry needs customers. “So you only make a profit by being popular, like a hotel, which only makes money if it has guests in most rooms most nights.”

Next, he drives me to meet Peje Emilsson, one of Kunskapsskolan's founders and chairman of its board. He tells me about the company's move into England. “Personalisation is a buzz-word among British school leaders. They recognise that will be difficult with corridors and classrooms and teachers at the front.”

Peje's interest in education reform was sparked when his daughter's state school refused to let her switch from a mathematics programme to social sciences (“We need more girls in mathematics,” they told her). She moved to one of Sweden's few private schools. As I take a taxi to the airport for my flight to Helsinki, I reflect that it's hard to imagine any Swedish school—state or independent—treating a valued customer like that today.

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Wednesday

I AM feeling nostalgic. I spent two years in Finland in the late 1990s on a European Union post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Jyvaskyla in central Finland, and haven't been back since. I wonder how much things will have changed—the country had only just joined the European Union back then, and has since joined the euro and experienced an economic boom.

First stop this morning is Kulosaari comprehensive school, in a suburb of Helsinki. Finnish comprehensives teach children from seven to 16; after that almost all youngsters spend another three years in either grammar or vocational schools.

Kulosaari school is lovely. The children are calm (far calmer than those at my son's primary school in Cambridge, England) and talk to adults respectfully, but as equals.

Rex Features

Benefit from the best

Dan Wood, from Maidstone in England, one of two native English speakers on the staff, teaches children in the school's bilingual programme. He has been in Finland for ten years now, and has no intention of leaving. “My mum works in a school at home,” he tells me. “I really just don't want to go back to that system, the stress of school inspections.”

One thing surprises me: the number of children being taught in “special education” classes. I am used to children with learning difficulties being integrated into mainstream classes whenever possible. But in Finland, large numbers, including many with behavioural difficulties rather than more strictly medical problems, are taught separately.

Of the 20 children in the two special classes that I see, 18 are boys. I think again of my own nearly-seven-year-old, a clever, naughty little menace who I am sorry to say has caused his teachers and classmates considerable trouble, and wonder in which class this school would put him, and how he would fare there.

The special classes undeniably do a good job: as well as having the world's highest average standards, Finnish schools have one of the smallest gaps between the best-performing students and the worst. But Finland is also proud of its low “between-school variation”—and this looks like my first myth. There certainly is segregation in Finnish education, but it happens between classes, rather than between schools—and very, very early.

After lunch I visit Helsinki's teacher-training facility. Matti Meri, a professor of pedagogy, tells me that the root of the Finnish education system's success is its extraordinary ability to attract the very best young people into teaching: only around 10% of applicants are accepted for teacher training.

By chance, a group of trainee teachers has met for coffee and a chat after two-week stints teaching abroad. They laugh when a young man who has returned from England tells them that the school emailed him a few weeks before he travelled to inform him of its dress code: no jeans or piercings, no outlandish hairstyles. He has taught in Finland with his hair spiked, in a T-shirt and frayed jeans—and no one raised an eyebrow.

At the National Board of Education, I ask Irmeli Halinen what other countries should learn from Finland. The most important lesson, she says, is to develop excellent initial training for teachers. Second, start education late and gently—Finnish children are seven before they start formal school. And she offers a third lesson: “We don't waste energy or money or time on inspections or national testing.”

I ask her about the system's weaknesses; she tells me getting rid of bad teachers is difficult. Head teachers are trained to handle alcohol problems, and can insist that a teacher attends an alcohol-abuse programme, but it is almost impossible to get rid of them if such help doesn't work. (Alcoholism is a serious problem in Finland, a country cursed—in this respect—with a history that is both Nordic and Russian.)

In Kulosaari, the head teacher, Anneli Rautiainen, said alcoholic teachers in Finland are moved between classes and sometimes even between schools, so that they don't do too much damage to any one child's education. (She hastens to point out this is not a problem she is experiencing.) On the way back to my hotel, I reflect that if Finnish teachers weren't generally so excellent, those inspections and national tests might look a bit more attractive.

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Thursday

THE OECD's PISA studies are exhibit A for the excellence of Finland's schools. Finland routinely comes top, or occasionally second, in tests every three years of 15-year-olds' abilities in reading, mathematics and science. It is impressive, but the suspicious-minded (or perhaps just the begrudgers?) wonder if it is really all down to brilliant schools.

I have a suspicion of my own. When I lived in Finland in the 1990s I learnt rather little Finnish (they speak great English, and I'm lazy), but I learnt to read words and say them correctly in about half an hour. Each letter corresponds to one sound, and only one; there are no exceptions and no combinations of letters that make different sounds, like “sh” or “th”. If a letter is repeated, it is simply said for twice as long. Is it, perhaps, just easier to learn to read and write in Finland than practically anywhere else?

AFP

Finland's high vowel-per-student ratio

This morning I am off to Helsinki University's Centre for Educational Assessment. Jarkko Hautamäki and his colleagues do not reject my theory, but they tell me that in Hong Kong, which also does very well in PISA, Chinese orthography is claimed to be part of the reason! If the same claim is made for both Chinese and Finnish, then either one is wrong or both are insufficient.

Mr Hautamäki and his colleagues believe the latter; they reel off a list of factors they think contribute to Finnish academic success. One is the ubiquity of print: “Almost every family has a newspaper delivered to the home,” he says, “and foreign language programmes are subtitled, not dubbed.”

Another is Finnish diligence. In a country with harsh weather and, until recently, a largely agrarian population, it is understood one must work, and work hard. Students took the PISA tests seriously, leaving very few questions blank. That boosted scores, since there were no marks lost for wrong answers. And Finnish children are good at tests, too, because they get them in school all the time, to help them understand how they are doing. “Tests to Finnish children are important but not scary,” he tells me.

So, I ask him, was Finland's high score a mirage, caused by nothing more profound than sensible spelling and good exam technique? No, he says; the country's schools do two exceptional things—and he can prove it, with charts.

The first shows “inter-generational income elasticity” in various countries. This is the technical term for the correlation between people's income and that of their parents. In Finland it is low: parental income is a minor influence on earning. In other words, Finns switch economic classes easily. In Britain and America, it is high, meaning the opposite. “Finns trust teachers and schools—and this chart shows that we trust them for a reason,” he says. “What Finnish schools do is genuinely effective.”

The second shows the profile of the PISA results in various countries. “Between-student” variation in Finland is extremely low, meaning a narrow gap between the scores of the most able and least able groups. This trick is easy to pull off if standards are uniformly low, but Finland's average is the world's highest, meaning it does almost unbelievably well by its weakest students.

In the afternoon, I go to the Finnish parliament to meet the education minister, Sari Sarkomaa. Before the meeting, I peek into the empty debating chamber. There are large naked figures carved on the walls, one with particularly plump buttocks. It is typical of this utterly unprudish nation. Finns cannot understand the foreign habit of wearing swimming costumes in the sauna (a Finnish invention); Finns pile in naked, family with guests, all generations together.

Ms Sarkomaa is completely—and rightly—obsessed with keeping the status of teachers high. “We will do anything possible to keep the profession attractive,” she says. “Yes, salary is important [teachers did pretty well in the last public-sector pay deal], but many other factors can help. We need to improve the training of school principals. Such highly educated workers want to have highly qualified managers.” If Finnish teachers ever decided to turn militant, they would be able to bring the country to its knees in no time.

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Friday

FINLAND'S schools may lead the world, but its universities are nothing special. This bothers the Finnish government. “As a country that thinks its future is purely dependent on its know-how, we cannot afford average results in universities,” says Jyrki Katainen (pictured), the finance minister.

This is my last appointment before I fly back to London, and Mr Katainen is telling me that his government thinks greater independence and a bit of capital may help the country's universities to specialise and innovate. So it has offered any universities willing to set up charitable foundations a deal too good to refuse: any money they raise by 2010, the government will top up by 2.5 times as much.

Reuters

Katainen: Equality booster

Finland is hardly the only country worried about the global reputation of its universities. As with schools, the advent of international rankings has made list-watchers of everyone. The Shanghai Jiao Tong and THE rankings are enormously important both for universities, which are increasingly reliant on international students, and for countries, who take their positions on the charts quite seriously.

Most countries have decided that the way to break into the top ranks is to boost a few chosen universities rather than fund all equally. They look to America, which dominates the top of both rankings. Its elite private institutions have enormous endowments and attract top names; small liberal-arts colleges provide a more intimate education; many state universities offer an excellent education at a keen price; and its community colleges give no-frills tuition to locals and often serve as a springboard for future progression.

So, I ask Mr Katainen, does the Finnish government hope to see an elite emerge? The answer is a flat no. That would not be the Finnish way: equality is one of the country's fundamental values

Fees for university study are also off the agenda. “There is not even a debate about this. We think that as a nation we can get the average quite close to the top,” he says coolly. I have my doubts that the same trick can be pulled off with universities as with schools—but if anyone can do it, it will be the Finns.

I leave for the airport with a lot to think about. I've seen two very different ways to organise state schooling, and there's no question which one I preferred.

The problem is, it wasn't the one that produced the best results.

I loved Sweden's profusion of different sorts of schools—surely different methods work for different children. I loved the way competition was forcing schools to think more pointedly about quality—Kunskapsskolan's head teachers know that when a student is unhappy with what they offer, they risk 70,000 kronor walking out the door. And most of all I loved that Swedish parents are in control of state education—municipalities can't close small rural schools against the wishes of local parents in the name of efficiency, for example, because parents would simply threaten to open their own schools.

But it is Finland's no-choice, teacher-knows-best version of schooling that beats the world. That poses challenges, both for my orthodox free-market beliefs and for other countries desperate to bottle the magic and export it.

Can it really be true that if you dismantle schools inspectorates, make it practically impossible to sack teachers and refuse to publish exam results (officials and schools get to see how Finnish students do on national tests; parents and children don't), you can make every school a good school?

Somehow, I doubt it. After all, England's schools could do pretty much what they liked in the 1970s, and many did, with hardly impressive results.

Finland's secret is simple: its teachers are so highly regarded that the very best young people compete for this coveted job. The successful few study for at least five years and are actually taught how to teach (you would be surprised how rare this is on teacher-training courses). And then, once they start work, their students pay attention and work hard (when I asked Finns whether there were some families who despised education and resented schools, they seemed puzzled by the question).

I have seen what works. But I don't know how my country—where anti-intellectualism is rife, and where, sadly, all too often those who can't do, teach—could replicate it.

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