The cornerstone of unity

42 TEACHER EDUCATION AND TRAINING 
As international scholastic assessments have shown, Finland’s system of comprehensive primary and middle 
schools produces excellent results. These schools are based on the principle of equality, so they are attended 
by all children and free of charge, have the same curriculum for all, and are the responsibility of society.
The PISA miracle is especially due to the education and training that Finnish teachers receive. 
Teachers have always been highly respected in Finland. When the first schools were founded in Finland in 
the middle of the 19th century, a teacher seminar was founded at the same time in the town of Jyväskylä. 
Employment as a teacher was the first profession open to women and offered an honourable livelihood to the 
other children of farmers when the farm was inherited by the oldest son.
Primary school teachers were called the “candles of the nation”. The school system’s task was to create a 
homogeneous educational foundation for agrarian Finland, school its citizens for the coming nation state, and 
diversify its economic foundation with new knowledge and skills. Responsibility for all this lay with the primary 
school teachers and the school boards elected by town meetings. Inspectors monitored the quality of the schools, 
which played an important role in the creation of the civil society.
Teachers are still among the most respected professions in Finland. They were in fifth place in the most 
recent opinion survey.
In the 1960s, education policies wanted to make primary schools more democratic. The result was a nine-
year comprehensive primary and middle school that helped to create Finland’s welfare state. The school reform 
strove to reduce the influence of social background and to enable all students to be able to choose any of the 
available upper secondary education options.
Basic education still needs to prepare students for working life and citizenship. Nowadays schools are in 

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constant interaction with their environment. Parents are encouraged to be more involved in their child’s school 
work, multiculturalism creates new challenges for teaching, and society is changing rapidly. Teachers need 
wide-ranging knowledge of the subjects they teach, of knowledge construction, and of how people learn, and 
they need the skills to act pedagogically and mentor very different learners. 
Class teachers and subject teachers are required to have a master’s degree, and the degree programmes 
are at universities. Class teachers have educational science as their major. Subject teachers study the field that 
they wil
l teach and also study pedagogy. At the end of their degree programmes, the teachers write a master’s 
thesis. Thus teachers acquire the knowledge, skills, and ethics necessary for professional competence. The 
teachers’ degree programmes are part of the universities’ degree programmes and fulfil their scientific quality 
criteria.
Academic education alone is not enough. Finnish teacher education combines theory with practice in 
teaching practice. This takes place in teacher training schools or regular school s, where the student teachers 
practice teaching a class under the direction of an experienced teacher. The teacher training schools run by 
the universities also help to develop subject didactics, i.e. research-based methods of teaching and learning.
In Finland, especially the most talented young people are interested in becoming teachers. Teacher 
education also enables advancing to other challenging jobs that require a master’s degree. The degree 
programme is designed such that it is not restricted to the needs of teachers and instead provides the degree 
holders with pedagogic expertise that can be of use everywhere in society.
The EU Commission has recommended that teachers be highly trained and that they have good pedagogical 
skills. The training should happen in universities and include the possibility of progressing to a PhD. And 
continuing education of teachers should also be taken care of. This has been Finland’s system.
What has been special in Finland’s teacher education and training has been the development of a research 
approach to teaching. To be able to be researchers, teachers have to be able to think systematically about their 
work, study their teaching environment, notice and apply results to their teaching, evaluate their teaching, 
improve it based on the results, and notice their own training needs.
Teachers receive continuing education alongside work. As society changes, the learning problems of children 
and young people become more and more diverse. The better we are at identifying the problems, the more 
effectively they can be solved. At present, a large continuing education programme is underway in Finland on 
the digitisation of the teaching environment and the new kind of learning this will enable.
Päivi Lipponen 
– PhD, history and social science teacher,
Member of Parliament 2007
–2015