According to PISA, the best science students are in Finland, the best mathematics students are in South Korea and the best literature students are in South Korea as well. But Finland won overall as they scored highest in Sciences, in secondary education and in excellence and its students are considered the best in Europe.
But what is PISA? PISA stands for Programme for International Student Assessment, and is conducted every year by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) an intergovernmental organisation of industrialised countries.
PISA is a system of international assessment that focuses on 15-year-olds’ capabilities in reading literacy, mathematics literacy and science literacy. PISA also includes measures of general or cross-curricular competencies such as learning strategies. PISA emphasizes functional skills that students have acquired as they near the end of mandatory schooling.
The Programmes began in 2000, and PISA is administered every three years. Each administration includes assessments of all three subjects, but assesses one of the subjects in depth.
There are 36 countries participating in this year’s survey They are United Kingdom, Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Chinese Taipei, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Dubai (UAE), Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, China, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Krygyz Republic, Latvia and Liechtenstein. Malta has never participated in these surveys so far.
These are the overall results:
But what makes Finland so special? In Finland school is compulsory from seven to 16 years of age and many say that the secret recipe is composed of many ingredients: teachers are very well prepared, school programmes intelligent, and maximum use of resources.
Finland dedicates 6% of its GDP to education and uses every single euro well.
The magic word for Finland is “eriyttaminen” which means “differentiation”. In Finland secondary school is three years not five, and a student can do this term in two years. The best students can get seven subjects for post secondary or our Junior College but only four are compulsory. Those who lag behind are given private lessons at school. In Finland the primary objective of the teachers is to make you learn and not to make you fail.
At school, music is compulsory and every student must learn a musical instrument. They study in groups. Every student has a laptop. They eat food they prepare in class at school; they do stretching before class; they do bricolage; every school has a kitchen just like home; and every school has an anti-dyslexic task force.
After every one-and-a-half-hour lesson, the children are given half an hour break because the Finnish feel that it is absurd to expect the children to remain seated and attentive if you do not let them every now and then run and play.
At the age of 10, children know a second language: either English or Swedish. And grammar? Not even the word is allowed in class. The language classes, emphasis is on conversation, students watch DVDs, they study recipes from the country and the result is that 63% of the students in Finland participated in educational programmes overseas and that even the cleaner in the most remote village in Finland can give you directions in English.
Their method works and in the PISA survey, they came first overall, beating the Check Republic, Poland, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom. They also came first in that they scored the lowest in the variance between the different institutions around the country. In Finland such variance is of 0,08 whereas in Italy it is 0,61 – more than Azerbaijan.
But the biggest surprise is that in Finland the students are not given more than one hour of homework. Professor Jarkko Hautomaki, professor of educational science at the university of Helsinki, explains that if you give students more than one hour of homework, you will be inviting the students to cheat. And if students are not motivated to study, the school has already failed.
All teachers in Finland, from nursery upwards, must follow a five-year course at University. They have numerus clausus and only the best students are allowed in the teaching course. Last year Finland had between 800 and 5,000 applications for this course. Preparation is very rigid but the teachers get well paid: an elementary school teacher earns 2,000 euros monthly and a secondary school teacher earns 2,600 monthly.
But Finnish students are not all angels and students get punished too. But the students have a voice. The first solution for any head of school is not that of punishing the student but that of talking to the student to understand why he is behaving that way. And in the severe cases the school sends for the parents.
If a student damages a PC or a sewing machine, or any other thing used for the common good of the school, the punishments given are cleaning of classrooms or painting of walls. But as the one head of school stated, this happens very rarely as the students love their computer lesson.
Malta has many lessons to learn from the Finnish experience. Parents complain that our students are inundated with homework; that they are not allowed to express themselves and intelligence is marked by how much a student or a pupil can manage to learn by heart. And no matter how we say we change our educational system, the bottom line still remains that our children are taught to learn by heart and not that there are many things in life that makes them a better man and a better woman than just learning by heart.
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