Via The Independent: Are Finnish schools the best in the world? Excerpt:
The task is as hard as weeding out the brightest youngsters for places on Oxford and Cambridge Universities' most popular courses. There are 16 candidates for every vacancy and somehow the 2,000 applicants have to be whittled down to 120 by the time the course starts.
We are not talking about law and medicine at Britain's most prestigious universities, though. This is Finland and the applicants are desperate for a job in what is the most sought-after profession in their country: teaching.
Finland is the country that has topped the international league table of the developed world's education systems for almost all of the past decade. And England's Education Secretary, Michael Gove, has been taking a close look at its policies to see if there is anything he can glean from them to improve standards over here.
Finland's top-level ranking is based on its performance in the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests of 15-year-olds around the globe in reading, maths and science. It is published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Professor Jari Lavonen, the head of the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Helsinki, is the man with the enviable task, in some eyes, of whittling down the pack. He is in no doubt as to how Finland has got to this position.
"We decided all teachers should have a master's degree – putting teaching on an equal footing with law and medicine," he says. "Teacher education is therefore very attractive." Figures showed that the highest-flying youngsters then started flocking to the profession because of its new-found prestige.
The applicants are all given a book to read before being grilled on their understanding of it. Then the 300 top performers are interviewed before the remaining 120 are offered places.
"We want to find out how suitable a person is for teaching," he says. "Last year, it was more difficult to come on to a primary-education programme than to go to medical school. The competition was more heavy."
Mr Gove has already said he would like to go down the Finnish path. A common theme among three of the top-performing nations – Singapore, South Korea and Finland – is that they all attract the best talent into the profession by setting high standards for recruitment.
Mr Gove's answer to this is to limit entrance to the profession to those who have better than a third-class degree. He has come in for a fair amount of criticism here, with teachers' leaders arguing that it would prohibit people such as the Conservatives' own maths guru, Carol Vorderman, from entering the profession. The brightest people in their subject area may not always be the best communicators in the classroom, so the argument goes.
Professor Lavonen is wary of the idea that foreign governments can "cherry pick" parts of the Finnish education system and ignore the rest.
There is, he argues, a second part of the equation: the introduction of a free compulsory education system for all, which goes hand in glove with the recruitment process to create a successful education system. It is illegal to charge fees in the Finnish education system, so even those schools that are run privately take their funding from the state. Its schools are comprehensive in that there is no selection of pupils.
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