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Language training is an important element in Finnish education. Parlez-vous franįais? Students in east Helsinki learn French by speaking to each other. I The secret behind Finland's competitiveness in education is that every student can add to this asset as much as they want, for their entire lifetime. t's an ordinary weekday morning at the Tehtaanpuisto Comprehensive School in the east Helsinki neighbourhood of Vuosaari. The lanky students making their way into their classrooms are a cavalcade of teen fashion trends. Language teacher Anna Lötjönen ushers her students into the classroom for a French vocabulary quiz. The students sit in silence, recalling on paper the correct French words for commence, problem, see you tomorrow, hear.... commencer, un problčme, ā demain, entendre. At the end of the quiz, they exchange test papers with each other, and check and grade them. Success! Most of the students remembered almost all the French words. The comprehensive school of about 380 students is located in an ordinary residential area, the building doesn't stand out in any way and the students look like other typical teens elsewhere around the world. Despite this, Tehtaanpuisto Comprehensive School, like other Finnish schools, has the highest-ranking student performances in an international comparison. Highly-educated teachers and consistent learning results In the 2006 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Finnish 15-year-old students outperformed students in other countries by a big margin in science. Finnish students ranked second in reading after South Korea, and also second in math by a onepoint margin behind China. On average, the Finnish students scored 5060 points higher in the assessments than the approximately 500-point average of the OECD countries. The Finns have ranked at the top also in previous PISA assessments. How is this possible? Education expenses and the number of hours spent in the classroom are at par with the European average, so how can this country achieve such excellent results across the board compared to Europe's old civilised states? It's a phenomenon that has attracted a lot of international interest. Thousands of teachers, educational policy experts and journalists around the world have flocked to Finnish schools to find out more. Among others, The Wall Street Journal published a report about Finnish schools in its weekend insert in February 2008. One absolutely critical factor is the high level of education of the teachers. A university master's degree, with a major in pedagogic studies and a minor in specialised studies, is required of teachers of all levels of education. The high educational level of teachers allows them to plan their curricula and choose their teaching methods independently. The FOCUS 25
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