One of the major current issues in (higher) education policy - in my opinion - is the issue of excellence versus equity. Is it most important to focus on the masses and see to it that everyone gets the same high quality education? Or should the country’s prime talents be nurtured and given the opportunity to fully exploit their opportunities. Or, better yet, can you do both?
The BBC Radio Documentary series ‘The Changing World’ investigates the dilemma, and what better places to visit than Finland on the one hand and the UK and US on the other. Finland is generally seen as the success story in creating a high quality egalitarian knowledge society. Finland shows very good results on the global tests like PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), TIMSS (Third International Mathematics and Science Study) and IALS (International Adult Literacy Survey).
In addition, they manage to do so without having schools that really fail. The range between the outcomes in the best and the worst schools is very small. An interesting observation in the interviews is that the consistent high performance of Finish schools is not only a consequence of their egalitarian education system, but also of the stability and equality in Finnish society as a whole. Major differences between suburbs or districts don’t exist and therefore major quality differences between schools don’t exist either. This of course sets limits to the transferability of the Finnish system.
Filed in: Competition, Finland, Higher Education, UK, USA | 
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