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For starters, the name Finland may not quite ring any bell. This is because not very much is known about this small Nordic nation with a population that is half of Lagos State, Nigeria (I.e 5.4 million Finnish). However, what few in this part of the world know about this country is that

despite its obvious deficiency in population and land mass, Finland’s educational system has been consistently ranked as world number one.

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In August 2010, Newsweek announced that Finland is the best country in the world, a decision that was based on five (5) main criteria or indices: health, economic dynamism, quality of life, political environment and education. In December 2007, Finland once again took the Number one spot in the OECD’s PISA (Program for International Students Assessment), a test used to ascertain the abilities of secondary school students aged 15. In case you didn’t know, PISA is the most comprehensive and rigorous international yardstick of secondary school students’ attainments. 2006 PISA was conducted in 57 countries that accounted for 90% of the world’s GDP at that time. Finland came tops, beating Hong Kong and Canada. Also, in 2016, the United States was ranked 36th while Finland occupied the 12th position.

Let’s come back home. A recent ranking by Times Higher Education World University Rankings(2015) had only one Nigerian higher institution on the list: The University of Ibadan. This seems like a consolation right? Not until you find out that UI is ranked 801 in that list! Now, this expressly implies that no single Nigerian University ranks among the top 500 universities in the world. More damnable is the recent World Economic Forum ranking which puts Nigeria at 174 out of 200 in the world.

Question:

What is Finland doing differently to beat other countries including the United States? Do they know something that other countries like Nigeria do not? Well, there you go.

Since its educational reforms that began four decades ago, Finland’s educational system has been widely acclaimed as unorthodox or unconventional. Let me explain. A typical conventional educational system is more often than not evaluation driven, centralized and subject to a highly rigid and slowly evolving curriculum. Here, emphasis is placed on competition, on achieving a certain grade and using that single grade to measure the ability of a student. Contrary to this, Finnish schools go against this standard and break every known rule. Here are the top eight secrets behind Finland’s astounding success in its education system:

MORE TIME FOR PLAY

OECD studies reveal that students in Finland spend very little time on homeworks. On an average, Finnish students spend 2.8 hours a week on homework. By law, teachers must grant 15 minutes break for every 45 minutes of lecture/instruction. Finnish education believes that kids must first be taught to be kids, and playing is as much a part of that experience as learning is. The result? Finnish students develop better attitudes towards learning. In countries like Nigeria and the US, students spend as much as 6 to 7 hours per week doing one homework or the other. From personal experiences, I have seen that this puts undue mental stress on students. I have had to put off a number of ground breaking research works so that I can avoid being punished for not doing one assignment or the other.

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KIDS GET A STRONG START

Finnish kids come to school with a strong foundation. The Finnish Government has numerous packages to support families, one of which is the famous ‘Baby box’ which every Finnish parent receives at the birth of a new child. The Baby Box contains clothing, books and other infant supplies and all these free of charge. If parents chose to use Day Care systems, the government subsidizes these facilities with very highly trained staff. Lead Day Care teachers must have as a minimum requirement a Bachelor’s Degree and there is also an income based assistance for families. The maximum cost per child is about $4,500 per year. Full day pre-school is free and high quality is utilized by a great majority of Finnish households. All of these is to ensure that Finnish kids get a strong foundation before coming to school. Compare this to Nigeria where little or no attention is paid to the wellbeing of children. There are no packages for babies, no incentives, no government support schemes. Where Day Care is available, it is only a dumping ground for parents who are too busy at work.

PREMIUM ON TOP NOTCHED TEACHERS WITH EXTENSIVE TRAINING

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In Finland, teaching is as competitive as other professional courses quite unlike here where either one is a Lawyer, a Doctor or an Engineer. In fact, the teaching career in Finland is on par with these professional careers. Here is why:

a) A minimum pre-requisite for a teaching position in Finnish schools is Masters Degree (did you get that? Masters, not Bachelors!). After Masters, an intending teacher further receives specialized training with all of these subsided by the government.

b) Intending teachers are subjected to a rigorous selection process that usually results in fierce competitions. In 2012 alone, the University of Helsinki received over 2300 applications for the 120 places in its primary school teacher education program.

c) Finnish teachers spend between 5 and 7.5 years of extensive training and preparation before being allowed to teach.
Finnish teachers earn as high as – note, as high as - $45 000 per year and this is just the salary earnings of a lower secondary school teacher. Convert that to naira and you get a whopping N 16 245 000, the equivalent earning of a doctor in Nigeria! In Nigeria, a typical Professor earns about N7 000 000, half of what a Finnish Secondary school teacher earns! In fact, Nigeria ranks among nations of the world with poorly underpaid teachers and in some very unfortunate cases, teachers are owed for months without end. This often creates tension between teachers and the government.

It is then easy to understand my frustration over the news that the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) are threatening the Kano State government for going ahead to sack over 27 000 primary school teachers for failing a simple competency test which according to the actors, was set in such a way that even an average Primary 2 pupil can pass! Among the myriad of reasons we are not moving forward as we ought to in terms of education is the merciful parading of half baked teachers who in turn produce half baked students and who in turn end up as half baked employees. Clearly this is unacceptable.

NO STANDARDIZED TESTS

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This is perhaps one of the most incredible stories behind Finnish education. There are no standardized tests for Finnish students up until the age of 16. The underlying principle here is to discourage competitiveness and support cooperation. Students are under no pressure to perform. In fact, the overall learning scheme is designed in such a way that each child is allowed to learn at his/her own pace and are only introduced to new stuff when they have mastered the current ones. There is no hurry to meet a deadline for a particular lesson, no emphasis on written examinations and/or tests.

Very little premium is placed on grades.

In other words, Finnish kids don’t have to worry about whether or not they pass a course or not, whether their score is in the upper ninety percentile at least for their first 16 years. This is because Finland views grades or statistical data as an anathema/yardstick for measuring performance among students. The result? Consistent ranking as the world’s number one educational system, beating the highly regimented US education sector where undue emphasis is placed on competition. Sadly, it is this undue emphasis on grades, on tests and examinations has produced some of the worst graduates who parade flamboyant grades but know nothing! Because students know that what ultimately counts is to score an A or pass a course at all cost, they are forced to cram and cram notes of lectures a day or two to the examinations.

QUALITY OF SCHOOLS

Finnish law ensures that all public schools offer the same high quality of education. One of the factors that helps Finnish schools fare so well is the nationwide focus on achieving equality both amongst schools and amongst students. When students struggle, the state is quick to provide resources to help them catch up, a goal which teachers embrace. You know the most puzzling part? Finnish law frowns at private schools. In other words, all Finnish students attend public schools. Now, this is not so true of Nigeria where public schools are underfunded, dilapidated and offering much reduced quality of education. In a statistical report released by the Federal Ministry of Education in 2009, Nigeria has 54, 434 public schools and 7,129 junior secondary schools. Standard of education is hardly the same and often poor in output. This unfortunate decline in public school education provides a comfortable ground for private schools to thrive, usually with fees that are outrageously high and effectively beyond the reach of average income earners. Finland's education policy developers obviously considered this and so ensured that critical infrastructure needed to ensure high quality of education should be evenly distributed across all public schools, thus effectively weakening private learning institutions. Even where such schools thrive, government laws provide rigorous restrictions or checks on the school fees charged.

TEACHERS ARE ALLOWED MUCH FLEXIBILITY

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This is the most craziest success stories of Finnish education. Here, teachers are not restricted to any rigorous course outline or curriculum. Finnish teachers are granted full liberty to research new teaching methods and concepts and be abreast with current trends in the subjects they teach. The system has been structured in such a way that teachers spend less time in the classrooms and more time on research. Thus, you see various innovations spring up here and there in Finland schools. What a teacher teaches today may not necessarily be what he gets to teach in a year or perhaps months from now. This is a lot different or divorced from what generally obtains here where teachers are either incompetent or too lazy to research more on their fields. Thus you see Nigerian teachers recycling old lecture notes of well over 10 years ago. For instance, there are eight discovered solar planets in the cosmos. In Nigeria, students will most likely be taught that there are still nine solar planets!! When teachers are allowed to independently develop their contents through research, massive innovations result.

NO DIRECT TRANSITION TO UNIVERSITY/POLYTECHNIC AFTER NINTH GRADE

Upon graduation from ninth grade (equivalent of Senior Secondary School), Finnish students have the options of either spending four years in a Occupational Training School or Upper Secondary. The idea is to further train students on hands on practical knowledge (as in the case of OTS). By the time students graduate from eitherpost secondary schools, they are much better equipped to face University/Polytechnic education. However, in Nigeria students gain direct entrance into the university after completing the basic secondary education and if successful in the public entrance examinations required for admission. The result? Poor and highly unprepared students end up in the universities which makes it hard to properly train them. I have personally taught university students with little or no knowledge of Calculus and Algebra, and in some very embarassing cases, students that cannot even write their names!

HIGH BUDGET ALLOCATIONS TO EDUCATION

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The 2018 Nigerian Federal Government Budget allocates a miserly 7% to education, representing a 19% deficit in the UN minimum benchmark. This shows once again the lackadasical manner with which education is being handled in the country. Finland's budgetary allocation to education for 2018 forms 20% of the overall budget.

About €11 billion out of €55.4 billion will be spent in 2018 on education.

Compare that amount to the shallow amount allocated to education in Nigeria year in year out and you will readily understand why there is a lot of rot in our education system today.

CONCLUSION

There is an urgent need to utterly restructure the current education system in Nigeria. Finland's current education system is not more than half a century now, having begun a reformation that swept through the early 1970s. Yet, it has repeatedly toppled every system in the world. Nigeria can learn from this. The idea is not to copycat any foreign. After all, it is the frequent copying of models rather than deveoping a truly indigenous system that has crippled education in Nigeria. Apart from paying lip service to this sector, government must employ technocrats and be willing to implement the recommendations provided.

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