Pekka Kanervio

The School Boards between Power and Influence

The decentralized Scandinavian school structure with the municipal school committee as a central factor between the municipal council and other school interests gives the school board a central rol ...

Role and Influence of School Boards on Improving Educational Quality

Ensuring educational quality is high on the policy agenda in many countries, especially efforts regarding students’ learning outcomes.

Finnish Superintendents: Leading in a Changing Education Policy Context

Finland’s education system is regarded as one of the most effective in the world. Shared values of the Finnish welfare society continue to influence national education policies that determine how education is organized, governed, and led. Findings from a national study of the superintendency, however, suggest recent demographic and financial changes as well as ideologically driven legislative reforms are radically changing provision of education, stimulating mergers, altering organizational and governance patterns, and changing superintendents’ work. National policies are redefining the role of the superintendent from being a bureaucratic functionary to a member of an executive management team.

School Boards in Finland

In today’s global societal development, Finland in many ways seems to be an outlier relying on policies, the goals, contents and enactment of which differ from those of many other countries. Furthermore, the policies Finland relies on appear to provide outlying results concerning both the education system and the society (Risku M, Ital J Sociol Educ, forthcoming; Risku M, Kanervio P, The Finnish superintendent. In: Nir A (ed) The educational superintendent: between trust and regulation: an international perspective. Lambert Academic Publishing, New York, 2014). The many-sided outlying character of Finland makes it an interesting case of research.

Control and Trust in Local School Governance

External school inspection and state supervision represent key instruments in many European countries for improving the quality of education. Although some countries, such as England, France, and the Netherlands, have a long tradition of school inspectorates, other countries such as Sweden only recently reintroduced a school inspection system (Johansson O, Holmgren M, Nihlfors E, Moos L, Skedsmo G, Paulsen JM, Risku M, Local Decisions under Central Watch – a new Nordic quality assurance system. In: Moos L (ed) Transnational influences on values and practices in Nordic educational leadership – is there a Nordic model? Springer, Dordrecht, 2013). In Denmark, the relationship between the state and the municipalities is conducted through a public governance contract. For example, subject matter aims that used to be very broad and loose at this level were supplemented with clear aims that were developed into shared aims from 2006 onwards. Moreover, a state supervision system was introduced to standardize the quality assurance procedure. In a similar vein, Norway conducted a national quality assurance system in 2006, paired with national achievement testing systems, to chart and publish the results and a state supervision system. In contrast to Sweden, the local governance level – municipalities – in Denmark and Norway is the target of state supervision; thus, inspection and control are more loosely coupled with schools and principals at the “street level.” In Finland, the National Board of Education conducts national evaluations, and this state agency is also responsible for the national evaluation of learning outcomes. Notably, in this respect, Finland deviates from the international stream of state quality assurance and inspection, not at least linked to the political system’s resistance to ranking schools and municipalities and the external publication of performance indicators.

Educational Governance : Politics, Administration and Professionalism

The current restructuring of Nordic educational governance systems is creating new relationships between the state, local authorities and schools and, therefore, between politicians, managers and educational professionals. With inspiration from transnational agencies – primarily the OECD – new chains of governance are being created. Some elements of governance are being de-centralised, whilst other elements are being re-centralised. The couplings of economies, human resource management and operations are being loosened while at the same time the links between an educational content, aims and accountabilities are being tightened. This tendency has also led/made many municipalities to restructure the municipal political and administrative system into a more steep hierarchy.

Finnish Superintendents Are Striving with a Changing Operational Environment

When one considers Finland’s education system through the 10-year curriculum reform cycle, slogans of trust and mild evaluation or results from international surveys on learning outcomes, one may think that Finnish superintendents’ operational environment is placid and serene. The truth, however, is very different. For historical reasons, Finnish society is now undergoing many of the changes that, for example, the other Nordic countries already encountered decades ago. Of course, the same contemporary international trends which affect the other Nordic countries influence Finland as well, but because they do so in a nation that is in many ways in a different developmental phase, they often manifest themselves differently. This is what frequently makes Finland, and thus its superintendents, appear to be outliers.

Principals’ Perceptions for Finnish- and Swedish-Language Schools in Finland: An Analysis of School-Level Indices From Programme for International Student Assessment 2009

The Finnish educational system is known for its equality. However, in many key areas in national and international assessments, Swedish-language schools in Finland have lagged behind their Finnish-language counterparts. So far there is little research into the underlying reasons for this discrepancy. In this article, in order to illuminate the phenomenon, we take a closer look at a number of school-level indices based on the Finnish OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 data and compare school principals’ responses across these two school categories. Our findings reveal differences in school policies and practices, in school climate, and in school resources between the two parallel language-specific sectors of basic education in Finland.