Exploring private supplementary tutoring in Finnish general upper secondary education

ABSTRACT

We examine private supplementary tutoring within the context of Finnish general upper secondary education. Specifically, we focus on profit-driven private preparatory course providers who cater to individual students and their families, aiming to improve applicants’ prospects of gaining access to higher education. We examine this during a time when a recent education policy reform has renewed seeking admission to higher education in Finland, consequently impacting the private supplementary tutoring market associated with it. We draw on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and habitus as a starting point for discussing the complex dynamics between public and private actors in the field of Finnish general upper secondary education and the role of economic capital. The ethnographic data analyzed for this paper consist of field notes and interviews (n = 58) from three general upper secondary schools, produced in 2019-2020. The study aims to investigate the negotiations between the public and private spheres of education within the everyday practices of Finnish public upper secondary education during an educational policy reform. We conclude that the fields of public and private education are not separate but rather intertwined, and they can become blurred in the everyday life of schools through both temporal and spatial overlaps.

KEYWORDS:

• Shadow education
• economic capital
• privatization of education
• upper secondary education
• ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. None of the schools charge tuition fees (despite some being administratively private, fully state-subsidized independent schools), and the system is largely state-regulated and funded.

2. Apart from international baccalaureate schools, which are relatively few.

3. Despite the partnership with public education, private supplementary tutoring is not part of the formal education system and therefore in this article, we regard it as a form of shadow education.

4. Linda Maria Laaksonen conducted fieldwork and interviews at schools 1 and 2, while Sonja Kosunen conducted them at school 3.

5. Since 2021, upper secondary education has been free in Finland including e.g. textbooks (Oppivelvollisuuslaki [Compulsory Education Act] 2020/1214).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Kone Foundation [grant number 87-47672].