Ethnic groups in Finland, from Wikipedia:
Finnish 93.4%
Finland-Swedes 5.6%
Russians 0.5%
Estonians 0.3%
Roma 0.1%
Sami 0.1%
Finnish 93.4%
Finland-Swedes 5.6%
Russians 0.5%
Estonians 0.3%
Roma 0.1%
Sami 0.1%
I moved to Finland a couple of years ago and have two kids at school. The key differences I see (compared to Aus) are:
- later start (7 years old grade 1)
- hot lunches
- every kid gets the same education, almost no private schools, no advantage in going to a different school
- multiple languages are taught
- teaching is quite a prestigious and reasonably well paid occupation
- lots of small schools (they scale wide, not high, from a hardware perspective)
Because every time I travel north I notice quite a lot of them compared to here in Tallinn where there's virtually nil of both.
There's certainly enough of them there that I keep hearing angry anti-immigrant sentiment from finns.
Edit some examples:
http://hs.fi/english/article/South+Asian+population+grows+sh...
Finland is also not just Helsinki, you know.
also, Helsinki clearly isn't the whole Finland, but most African and Asian immigrants do live in Helsinki.
I'd put money on this being at least an order of magnitude more important than all the other factors put together.
A hypothesis: In a social democracy like Finland, you will probably join the large middle class. So when you choose your desired vocation before university you may be more likely to apply your excellent skillset to teaching rather than something else, as that's what you want to do and are suited for, and you'll probably earn close to everyone else anyway.
In some other countries, you may try to get in to law/medicine/business first, and use teaching as a fallback as it is much lower paid. The net result is that teaching can be seen as a second choice profession and not valued as highly socially. Saying "I'm a teacher" at the barbeque sends a signal that you maybe didn't do so well at school as you wanted, and got your second choice at uni.
I know of a couple of data points where this is true in Aus (and also where it is not), but I don't know if it is really widespread. Just a thought.
Teachers are given freedom to design curriculum and choose textbooks, i.e. quite entrepreneurial approach
No national tests of learning outcomes
No school league tables or rankings
Plenty of (early) attention focused on individual support for the struggling learners
The prevailing social norms have some drawbacks. Equal opportunities is a good starting point, but too often we like to punish success as a way of keeping the perceived inequalities at minimum. In some way, we can't handle success. There's not enough competition to reach the top. Quite the opposite, envy and such emotions are often not agents for activating people (as in the American dream). More often they create passivity. We're only too happy to be all middle class.