OAJ: Finland is not giving up school subjects
Published:
News about Finland "scrapping the school subjects" have been spreading around the world for the last couple of days. ETUCE asked the Finnish teachers' trade union, OAJ about the facts on the news. OAJ has over 120 000 members representing about 95% of the teachers in the country.According to Mr. Jaakko Salo, special advisor of OAJ "this piece of news is simply quite incorrect, Finland is not giving up school subjects. Actually our National Board of Education also corrected this false information on 26 March."
A major reform is indeed undergoing in the Finnish basic education wherein OAJ has had a significant and active role. The reform aims at the renewal of the National Core Curriculum for basic education that was completed in December 2014. The local (or school-level) curricula are under implementation and they will be in use from autumn 2016.
The new Core Curriculum emphasizes stronger collaboration between teachers and underlines correlation between different school subjects. For example, every school has to provide at least one topic-based, multi-subject project in each school year. Actually, many schools have been implementing this kind of projects for years in Finland. According to Finnish legislation, basic education is still divided into school subjects. The number of lessons for every subject is also prescribed by the government and there has been only minor changes on these norms. Therefore, the international media published a false understanding about the Finnish curriculum-reform. OAJ considers it important that school subjects have their own important role, and at the same time OAJ warmly welcomes increased collaboration between teachers. "We would not endorse the abandonment of school subjects, and therefore we would not recommend it to other countries.", said Mr. Jaakko Salo.
The strong point of the Finnish education system is the willingness of continuous improvement. The curricula are renewed every ten years based on recent research and through broad co-operation between the government and the social partners.
Read the article on "Scrapping the school subject" on The Independent