The Nordic countries could teach us about teamwork in education
Last month I had the opportunity of working with NordNet – a network of educational policy researchers from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The network exists to exchange information, learn from each other's projects and to pool knowledge of educational improvements. This autumn, it was reflecting on the impact of the EU and the OECD on Nordic education systems. My job was to act as their "critical friend".
In some ways the Nordics are a disparate group of countries: Denmark has only a tenth of the land – and Iceland a thirtieth of the population – of Sweden. National gross domestic products are fairly similar, except for that of Norway, which has been swollen by its oil and gas revenues, and Iceland, which has been hit by the financial crisis. On the gini index (showing the relative "equality" of their societies), their positions are close. They also spend similar proportions on their education systems, with Denmark spending the most and Finland the least.
In comparison with the UK, the Nordic countries generally have more land, but far fewer people. They are a little richer, but more equal. They traditionally also spend more on education than the UK. In terms of values, they are committed to the idea of bildung – a difficult-to-translate German word often taken to mean the formation of a child within an education milieu that aspires to liberty and human dignity as well as academic prowess.
In the latest Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests for 15-year-olds, Nordic education results differ considerably. Finland tops the field – as it usually does – and Norway languishes at, or just below, the OECD average. Apart from science, the UK is generally in the middle: better than some, but much worse than others.
All the Nordics – with the exception of Iceland – have higher staying-on rates at 16, similar rates in tertiary education, but far higher levels of participation in lifelong learning than the UK. (According to the Eurobarometer survey, 56% of Danes are involved in some form of continuing education, compared with only 40% in the UK.) In the last adult literacy survey, all the Nordic participants outperformed the UK sample.
The Unicef survey of children's national conditions, like the "happiness" scale drawn up by researchers at York University, firmly places the Nordics among the best and the UK among the worst. And an OECD analysis of "earnings mobility" and "income inequality" show that Nordic countries are high on the former and low on the latter – in direct contrast to UK figures.
Our politicians, of all parties, appear fascinated by Nordic education although, up to now, it has been Sweden's policy of school choice rather than the impressive success of Finnish comprehensives on which they have focused. If only they could free themselves from their ideologies and switch their interests, they would learn a great deal about how to improve the academic success of all pupils in all schools.
The purpose of our meeting was to look at some of the educational problems faced by Nordic countries. And, as we know from best-selling novelists such as Stieg Larsson, they have a dark side. We considered why there was so much variation in outcomes among such similar countries and whether there really was a Nordic model. We also noted that Swedish results have gone down in every Pisa test since 2000, and wondered why Finnish students, despite doing so well, seem to dislike school so much more than their lower-scoring Norwegian peers.
We discussed the challenges facing school leaders today, how best the idea of a "school for all" could be preserved, the trends from play to more formal learning in early childhood education, the impact of quality assurance on higher education, and the spread of "closed learning and behaviour packages" that schools have to buy into and whose details are not available to outsiders. Nordic researchers are engaged in many ongoing studies but, as yet, no blindingly obvious answers emerged from our deliberations. Their collaboration will continue.
I was impressed by the democratic spirit as well as by the energy and honesty of the meeting – undertaken in pretty faultless English. If it is not already happening, it would make sense for English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland policy researchers to meet in a similar programme – perhaps with a Nordic critical friend – to consider what lessons can be learned from each other's recent experiences as well as how best to prepare for the forthcoming period of austerity.
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