Lessons from abroad: how can we achieve a socially just educational system?

ABSTRACT

This article draws on case studies from abroad to illustrate what to avoid and what to promote in the quest for a socially just educational system. It first looks at the range of goals different countries have pursued in relation to education. It then focuses more closely on policies in a range of European countries, that have inhibited or enabled greater educational equality, with a specific focus on England as a negative case study of what to avoid when pursuing greater educational equality. It concludes by drawing lessons from abroad to inform debates in Ireland around how to achieve greater social justice in education.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational inequalities
• social justice
• English educational system

Introduction

The orthodoxy within the field of education, and amongst politicians and policy makers, is to express concern about educational inequalities whilst failing both to engage with many of the main drivers of inequality, and to grasp the complex and dynamic interplay of educational structures, processes and practices. This is a global problem not a problem for any country alone, but international evidence (OECD 2019b) demonstrates, that some countries are much better at tackling inequalities than others. In this paper, I focus on ‘the lessons from abroad’ that Irish education can learn, both in terms of what not to do, but more positively in terms of enhancing social justice in its educational system.

Across an increasing number of countries, in particular England and the US, the goals of education have been progressively narrowed to a utilitarian remit of preparing students for the labour market. This subordination of education to economic imperatives has resulted in ‘the social and economic purposes of education being collapsed into a single, overriding emphasis on policy making for economic competitiveness and an increasing neglect or sidelining (other than in rhetoric) of the social purposes of education’ (Ball 2008, 11). In particular, the OECD has had a powerful steering role in prioritising the economic over the social purposes of education, ‘instigating more testing, measuring, rankings and comparisons’ (McNamara et al. 2021). Emphasis is placed on school autonomy, free school choice, competition between schools, regular centralised testing and school leadership (Muench, Wieczorek, and Dressler 2022). Inevitably, with such a focus, issues of social justice and equality are marginalised. As leading academics from across the world asserted in a letter to Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment, (Andrews et al. 2014):

As an organisation of economic development, OECD is naturally biased in favour of the economic role of public [state] schools. But preparing young men and women for gainful employment is not the only, and not even the main goal of public education, which has to prepare students for participation in democratic self-government, moral action and a life of personal development, growth and wellbeing.

The reduction of education to an instrument for external aims and purposes (Osberg and Biesta 2021), has residualised educational inequalities to an issue of economic inefficiency that needs to be addressed in order to enhance outputs and productivity rather than to increase social justice and contribute to human welfare and well-being.

But educational inequality is not one thing, rather it is an intricate and complicated amalgam of many different factors. The dominant doxa within education, particularly in England and the US, is one that accepts the efficacy of the market, and does not question the consequences of the preoccupation with performativity, audit, competition, and outcomes for learning processes and pedagogy (Warmington 2015). This intense focus on academic outcomes has resulted in the neglect of broader aspects of learning. For example, in England teaching hours spent on music, art and design, and design technology all fell between 2016 and 2021. It also impacted on children and young people’s sense of belonging and life satisfaction, with troubling consequences for their happiness and sense of well-being in school (Action for Childhood 2022). Furthermore, across the globe, there has been a general endorsement rather than challenge of social mobility as the main mechanism of social justice in education, a focus that emphasises individual effort rather than structural reform.

The state of Irish education

In 2018 the Irish press (Baker 2018) celebrated Ireland’s ranking as 2nd out of 41 wealthy nations in reducing educational inequality. However, despite a degree of success, there remain some deeply worrying concerns about the state of Irish education. Perhaps most concerning is the failure to educate Traveller children. The 2016 Irish census found that only 13% of Traveller girls completed second-level education, compared to 69% of the general population. Over 57% of Traveller boys ceased education at primary level, compared to 13% in the general population. Just as concerning less than 1% of Travellers attained a third level qualification (O’Brien 2018).

Ireland, unlike England, does have explicit policies to address what is termed ‘educational disadvantage’, ‘the impediments to education arising from social or economic disadvantage which prevent students from deriving appropriate benefit from education in schools’. The most recent policy response is the DEIS programme initiated in 2005. It targets schools for extra support and resources based on a deprivation index. Yet, despite two-thirds of DEIS school students aspiring to third-level education, only 13.5% of them succeed in accessing higher education (HEA 2018, 19). Fleming and Harford (2021) conclude in their study of the experiences of DEIS policy in six schools that only marginal progress had been made since the introduction of the DEIS scheme. Part of the problem is that, as in England, ‘there is a lack of recognition and response at a policy level of education’s fundamental and deep-seated relationship with wider economic inequalities across society’ (Fleming and Harford 2021, 15). On the surface, it appears that Irish politicians are more aware of educational inequalities, their causes, and their consequences than their English peers. The 2019 report on educational inequality published by the Joint Committee on Education and Skills stated that the current system was both unequal and unfair. There was also an explicit recognition that inequalities were being legitimated through ideologies of meritocracy, and that existing structures were acting to reproduce social class inequalities (Fleming, Harford, and Hyland 2022). However, it is one thing to recognise the causes and consequences of inequality, it is an entirely different thing to address them.

Progress in relation to improving educational equality has been hindered rather than helped by the Global Education Reform Movement (Sahlberg 2021), promoted by the OECD and its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). As O'Donoghue and Harford (2012, 344) conclude ‘while Ireland has imported certain ideas on educational policy and practice from Britain since the 1960s, European, and possibly US, influences were probably greater’. Certainly in the current context of growing educational inequalities in the UK, and England in particular, Ireland is better placed as a giver rather than a receiver of educational ideas.

There have been positive developments, particularly in relation to literacy, with the OECD results for 2016 showing much improved literacy levels at age 16 (OECD 2020a). As Scott (2022, 43) concludes, Ireland’s National Council for Curriculum and Assessment’s enquiry into early literacy informed an ambitious programme of professional development that should be commended to English politicians and practitioners. However, for the most part, the evidence base supporting new ideas is a concern, particularly in light of the recent finding that educational research carried out in Irish universities has little impact on educational policy (O'Connor 2022). Furthermore, no country, Ireland included, escapes the clutches of policy goals driven by economic rather than educational priorities. PISA-orientated policies have been dominant in Ireland since the beginning of the twenty-first century. As Figazzolo argued in 2009, in Ireland, PISA has been and still is a catalyst for change in favour of more testing and evaluation (Figazzolo 2009, 15). However, some countries, particularly the Nordic countries, have succeeded in ameliorating the worst excesses of performativity and measurement. In particular, Ireland would benefit from paying attention to the policy directions taken by Finland and Estonia, and these are discussed later in the paper.

Lessons from abroad 1: English education

This section of the article focuses on English education and the lessons Ireland and Irish education can learn from the many mistakes made in England. Most of the data cited are based on the UK but it is important to point out that England is increasingly an outlier relative to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland with greater levels of privatisation, testing, competition and marketisation compared to the other three nations. This section on ‘what not to do’ has four foci. First, it looks at the issue of children’s wellbeing, an overlooked area in English education. Second, it focuses on the systemic aspects of educational inequality that have been exacerbated by the emphasis on markets, choice and competition. There is then an examination of curriculum and pedagogy, before finally turning to the problem of social mobility.

But before focusing on the current state of English education, it should be noted that the English education system has been elitist since its inception in the 1870s.

It began as a tripartite system with private schools for the elite, good state provision for the middle classes, and relatively poorer provision for the working classes. That three-way division has been largely maintained over the last 150 years despite a veneer of comprehensivisation spanning the latter part of the twentieth century (Benn and Chitty 1996)

‘A happy child is a learning child’, but not in England

As the Gregson Family Foundation Report of 2020 found, the UK performs poorly against international benchmarks for both educational attainment and children’s wellbeing. And while other countries are increasingly giving weight to the wellbeing of children, the UK continues to focus heavily, if not solely, on academic attainment. The consequences are evident in OECD league tables produced from data from PISA 2018. The UK is top of the PISA league table for students feeling miserable in school, one of only two OECD countries along with Japan where a majority of students reported feeling miserable sometimes or always in school. The UK is also one of only three countries, including Japan and the US where over 60% of students reported feeling sad in school (OECD 2019a, 178). But the UK also ranked second bottom for positive feelings, just above Slovenia. Over a fifth of UK students stated that they were not satisfied with their lives, with only Turkey reporting a higher percentage of dissatisfied students (OECD 2019a, 156). And, while almost all countries suffered a decline in life satisfaction between 2015 and 2018, the UK suffered the largest decline overall. It also had the biggest reduction of any country in the number of children who were satisfied, and the biggest increase in the number who were dissatisfied (Gregson Family Foundation 2020, 16). Low life satisfaction scores appear to be linked to students’ high fear of failure in the UK. The country was 2nd out of 35 countries for the greatest fear of failure, and the Gregson Family Foundation (2020) cautioned that UK children are amongst the most anxious in the world. The most recent report, at the time of writing this paper (Action for Children 2022), found that school pressure was the top issue that children worry about, with 49% worrying about it. Similarly, pressure from school was cited as the most important issue getting in the way of children having a successful future with 44% saying it will make it more difficult for them to have a brighter future compared to their parents’ generation.

Children and young people’s levels of wellbeing and happiness in schools is a human rights issue that urgently needs redressing. However, levels of wellbeing also raise serious social justice concerns in relation to social class inequalities. The Children’s Society (2020) found that in 2018 the UK had the second largest social class gap (after Latvia) in life satisfaction among 24 countries surveyed. British children in the highest socio-economic quarter had a mean life satisfaction score of 6.55 – compared to 5.76 for children in the lowest quarter. British children may be unhappy and anxious at school but it is working-class children who are disproportionately suffering. Yet, the narrow, fact-laden test-driven curriculum that is making so many UK students anxious, bored and unhappy, is also failing to drive up academic results. This is despite excessive amounts of working-class children’s school time being spent on ‘learning to the test’. The Children’s Society report concluded that England now has the lowest literacy, and the second lowest numeracy rates of 16–19 year olds in the OECD. The English preoccupation with testing and assessment, and the policy fixation on academic attainment alone, has been at the expense of children’s, and particularly working-class children’s wellbeing. England’s pressurised, inequitable, underfunded educational system has never really been part of the agenda, and that is probably even less the case with the current preoccupation with performance, targets and accountability. There is little space for caring and nurture in the English educational system. Instead, we have an extreme version of the care-less approach Kathleen Lynch (2022) writes about in relation to education under capitalism. One consequence is growing mistrust and ignorance of those who are different from ourselves, as children continue to be educated in social class silos, and there is little attempt to ameliorate that mistrust and ignorance through either the provision of the curriculum or pedagogic approaches. England appears to have an educational system that combines the worst of both worlds, educating children narrowly, at the same time as it promotes educational policies that make children feel unhappy at school.

Structures and values that work against equality

Another aspect of English education that is having deleterious effects on children’s education is the intense focus on competition. Growing competition and increased social inequalities in educational attainment are both direct consequences of the introduction of market mechanisms, including parental choice, linking school funding with student enrolment numbers (Heath et al. 2013), and the attempt to diversify school supply through the academies and free school programmes. The rationale was that increased competition among schools could potentially enhance attainment. Market-led policies also increased the focus on school improvement and effectiveness as more information about school performance became available to parents and the public, in the form of publicly available test score information, known as ‘league tables’. However, school choice is increasingly seen to be a problematic policy (Gewirtz, Ball, and Bowe 1994) with the most recent research showing that English parents are less satisfied with the high levels of choice provided in the English system than their Scottish counterparts who are provided with much lower levels of choice (Bhattacharya 2021).

Less emphasis was placed on a further effect of market mechanisms. Increased competition among schools raises inequality as more affluent families are better able to take advantage of the diverse opportunities created by a more market-oriented system than their less well-off peers (Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles 2005; Gibbons and Machin 2008). Thirty years ago Phil Brown (1990) wrote a prescient paper arguing that the introduction of markets and choice into English education would lead to ‘the education a child receives conforming to the wealth and wishes of parents rather than the abilities and efforts of pupils.’ School performance in English schools in the 2020s is not so much an indicator of effort and ability as the consequence of the wishes and wealth of parents.

Public education has been virtually eliminated in England in the drive to introduce marketisation on the basis that markets in education will enhance competition and accelerate improvement. In 2021 91 per cent of secondary schools were academies, semi-privatised schools run by Academy Trusts which are not-for-profit companies. The latest Education White Paper proposes moving all schools to academy status by 2030 effectively bringing the state school system to an end. As Kulz, McGinity, and Morrin (2022, 12) argue ‘the academies programme is an instantiation of the position that market competition boosts educational outputs’. There has been a prioritising of privatisation, competition and marketisation at the expense of providing a public education service. The result is the current ‘mis-structuring’ of English education, with an excess of school types, all with different funding regimes, modes of governance, and varying levels of autonomy (Greany 2022). England no longer has a democratically controlled state education system with a clear focus on shared social values. Instead, individualisation, competition, regulation and accountability are the hallmarks of English education with negative consequences for student and teacher wellbeing, inclusion and social justice in education. English education has become increasingly fragmented and atomised with a diminishing sense of collectivity and collaboration (Reay 2017). This has had serious repercussions for both pupils’ and teachers’ sense of belonging. The OECD (2019b) identified a positive impact on achievement when students cooperated rather than competed with their peers. It also classified the UK as one of 4 countries, including the US and Brazil, where competition in schools was the most prevalent. As Ideland, Jobér, and Axelsson (2021, 96) assert, the focus of learning in the UK has become one of fitting into ‘the economic order of society’ equipping students to compete against everyone else.

Social inequalities are further exacerbated through the unfair funding and resourcing of English schools. Stark inequalities lie between the private and the state sector with the most recent statistics showing that in 2021 the gap between private school fees and state spending per pupil had risen to 6500 pounds (Sibieta 2021). While state primary schools have an average class size of 27, primary schools in the private sector have an average class size of 12 (OECD 2021, 354). The UK already has one of the highest state sector primary class sizes, second highest after Chile of all OECD countries. It also has a ratio of students to teaching staff that is the third highest after Mexico and Columbia (OECD 2021, 355). Even more concerning was that, while the norm across the majority (41) of countries surveyed was for smaller classes in disadvantaged schools than in advantaged schools, the United Kingdom was one of the few countries where both larger classes and higher student-teacher ratios were observed in disadvantaged schools than in advantaged schools (OECD 2021, 108). Instead of policies to compensate for educational inequalities, it is the more advantaged schools that have a higher percentage of highly qualified teachers, while the proportion of teachers with less than 5 years experience was greater in disadvantaged schools than in advantaged schools (OECD 2021). Furthermore, regardless of experience and qualifications, research shows that English teachers spend less time on actual teaching and learning in those schools with a large share of disadvantaged students (OECD 2021), instead focusing on discipline.

English schools are also unfairly funded with a movement away from compensating disadvantaged schools. Behind the Government’s talk of ‘level-up’ funding for 2020–2022 was a redirection of funding towards those schools that had previously been funded at a lower rate because of their more privileged intakes including fewer FSM, EAL and SEND pupils (Andrews 2020). The Education Policy Institute (Andrews 2020) found that in 2020/21 FSM pupils saw increases of 0.6% compared to an increase of 1.1% for non-FSM pupils. The think tank concluded that efforts to level up school funding in England is benefitting better-off students more than their poorer peers. The link between funding and disadvantage is being weakened by a system of levelling up which directs additional funding to more affluent schools with historically lower levels of funding. There is growing concern about the financial sustainability of the English school system, and, in particular, the introduction of a funding regime under which more deprived schools are faring worse than less deprived schools (House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts 2022).

So-called level up funding is, in effect, levelling down resources directed at the working classes and the schools they attend. This levelling down also applies to early years provision. In 2007–8, 45% of all government spending on early years and childcare support was targeted explicitly at low-income families. By 2018 the share spent on low-income families had dropped to 27% (Marmot et al. 2020). Instead of compensating for the poverty of the children attending, the norm is now for English schools and early years provision in disadvantaged areas to be impoverished in terms of infrastructure, resources and, as I discuss next, curriculum.

Class-differentiated teaching and learning

Setting and streaming have become endemic in English education. Children and young people from different socio-economic backgrounds are increasingly educated apart rather than together in schools that are predominantly middle or working-class, or else in different ability sets within the same schools. As a consequence, our state educational system, no less than the English private school system, is built on exclusion rather than inclusion – the educating of the different social classes in increasingly segregated spaces. This makes it easier to provide different curricular offers to different social classes with working class students much more likely to receive a narrower, more-fact driven curriculum.

In relation to teaching and learning English research points to a difference in pedagogy experienced by different social classes, with the working classes more likely to experience ‘a pedagogy of poverty’ that pays little attention to critical thinking skills and adopts a ‘drill and kill’ approach (Hempel-Jorgensen et al. 2018). Schools with predominantly working-class intakes, like the one Cushing (2021) carried out research in, are characterised by ‘absolute teacher control and extreme systems of student punishment (such as extended periods in isolation and/or detention)’ (Cushing 2021, 26). His research, and that of Kulz (2017), reveal highly regulated attempts, particularly in Academy schools, to make working-class students think, act, and talk in accordance with white, middle class behaviours. Rather than encourage deep thinking and independent learning, the norm is to develop compliance and conformity (Kulz, McGinity, and Morrin 2022). As Warwick Mansell (2022) reported, an Academy school in Cambridge made students chant ‘silence is our natural state’ before marching them into classrooms where they were expected to sit in silence. English state education is increasingly investing in a system of control, including behaviour hubs, isolation booths and a range of behaviour and performance incentive schemes, to manage poverty and working class deprivation rather than addressing it.

One of the ways that compliance and conformity is imparted is through a didactic teacher-led pedagogy that emphasises discipline and control. England has an educational system that prioritises discipline and control over student engagement and participation, and individual excellence over creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and team-work, with all the consequences that has for student well-being. Recent OECD international surveys (2019b) placed England bottom of the league table for critical thinking skills, creativity, and deep learning. At the same time, England was at the top of the league table for practices of routine learning, repetition and drill. While this limits the engagement and pleasure in learning of all children, it is also an issue of social class inequalities. It is working- class children who are subjected to the most drill and routine learning, while their curriculum offer often provides less opportunity for creativity and critical thinking skills. Janmaat and Hoskins (2019) found in their survey of six European countries that it is working-class students in English schools who suffer the most from an excessive focus on discipline as predominantly working-class schools prioritise highly managed disciplinary policies over the more liberal climate of open debate and discussion found in more middle-class schools. As a secondary school teacher in London lamented, there has been a growing trend for military-style behaviour management in working-class schools with ‘routine bag searches, detentions for slouching in class and pupils being sent into isolation for not bringing in their lunch money; police officers patrolling school corridors and Victorian-style hierarchies that deny students their rights and assign authoritarian control to teachers’ (Asbali 2022, 11).

The problem with social mobility

it’s about how we nurture outstanding talent – allowing the stars to shine

English Education Secretary 31st July 2018

In the UK a focus on meritocracy is being used to justify policies and practices that will increase rather than decrease inequalities. Mijs (2019) concludes in recent research, that citizens, particularly in the UK, but also in the US and Australia, are convinced that poverty and wealth are the outcomes of a fair meritocratic process. They are inured to growing levels of inequality because they increasingly live in class and racially segregated communities (Massey and Tannen 2016). The recent report on attitudes to inequalities after Covid-19 (Duffy et al. 2021, 75) found ‘a strong belief in meritocracy in Britain, where large segments of the country believe that individual characteristics and effort determine life chances’. Yet, as the graph above demonstrates, the UK has low levels of social mobility compared to many other developed nations. The British educational system entrenches privilege and wealth rather than challenging or diluting them. Even when working-class students succeed in going on to higher education, they fail to achieve the same grades, graduate at the same rates, or gain employment and salaries at the same levels as their privileged peers (Friedman and Laurison 2019).

Under the versions of meritocracy we find in the US, Australia and the UK, the heaviest burdens and hard work of meritocracy are all to be borne by the upwardly mobile working classes, while middle and upper class trajectories are characterised by stasis and continuity, with very little mobility involved. They, unlike their working- class peers, are not judged negatively for becoming like their parents. A focus on the experiences of working-class children and young people reveasl how the focus on meritocracy and aspiration is not progressive but reactionary, as Stefan Collini (2010, 29) has argued ‘a symptom of the abandonment of what have been, for the best part of a century, the goals of progressive politics’. The structural conditions of a deep social, political and economic crisis have been mis-defined as a problem of individual behaviours. The costs and cruelties of this ideological displacement are disturbingly evident in working-class children and young people’s accounts of educational experiences of always having to do better, to be better, and in the system’s judgment that, in the vast majority of cases, their efforts and striving are not good enough.

Yet, as Sayer (2005, 154) asserts, ‘the shaming of those who fail educationally is a structurally generated effect, even though it is felt as an individual failure’. England’s obsession with meritocracy and social mobility has masked deepening economic inequalities and their power to shape educational achievement. Instead, we have become the aspiration nation (Collini 2010) in which the prevalent belief is that anyone with enough determination, hard work and talent can be whatever they want to be. As a consequence, the working classes have become the outcasts in this English aspiration dream story, and as such, are disregarded and often treated with contempt by the more privileged in society. Nowhere is this contempt more explicit than in the regulations, rankings and assessments that permeate our educational system, sorting out the winners from the losers. Boris Johnson endorsed this sifting process in a speech where he argued ‘The harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.’ This is a brutal form of meritocracy which sees the majority as an undifferentiated mass who will inevitably struggle in life because they lack the intelligence of those who are successful and rise to the top. The focus on intrinsic worth – intelligence, talent and effort – ignores the biggest influence on who becomes successful, the wealth, cultural capital and power of parents (Brown 1990). Johnson’s words are a vivid example of the elitism, competitiveness and class superiority that drives policy in the English state educational system.

Because this paper aims for a broad overview of policies that either restrict or enhance social justice in education, there is not space to include micro-accounts of how social inequalities are played out in English classrooms, but I want to end this section with a quote from a white working-class boy about the consequences of such unjust policies and practices for children like himself:

Some kids they just can’t do it, like they find the work too hard, or they can’t concentrate because too much is going on for them. Then they are put like as rubbish learners and put in the bottom set, and no one cares about them even though they are the ones who need the most help. They should be getting the most help. (Jason in Reay 2017)

Lessons from abroad 2: Finnish and Estonian education

High-achieving systems value a broad range of outcomes rather than just narrow academic results. The focus is on conceptual understanding rather than ‘rote learning Andreas Schleicher

While English students languish at the bottom of the international league tables for life satisfaction and a sense of meaning in life, Finland and Estonia are included in the four countries that stand out as being able to combine high levels of student wellbeing with high academic attainment. In both countries, students’ life satisfaction was positively linked to low levels of bullying in schools, a sense of belonging, teacher support, an ethos of student cooperation, and a benign as opposed to a harsh disciplinary climate (OECD 2019a, 163). Both countries, unlike the UK, and to a lesser extent, Ireland, recognise that a happy child is a learning child.

Both also manage to combine high levels of educational attainment and a positive sense of wellbeing with some of the most equitable outcomes of all the countries participating in PISA (Tire 2021; Ahonen 2021). They both have a social class achievement gap that is a fraction of the one in England. Where the English educational system valorises individual excellence, they prioritise the common good. In place of England’s incoherent, unfairly funded, fragmented system, they have comprehensive school systems which are well supported at both national, regional and local levels. Both Finland and Estonia see the value of well-supported, highly trained and well-prepared teachers who merit considerable autonomy and respect. Funding levels are considerably higher than in the UK. In the academic year 2018/19 4.9% of GDP in Finland and 4.7% in Estonia was spent on education compared to 3.9% in the UK (Bolton 2021; Eurydice 2021). Their educational systems have a strong explicit focus on equality, and recognise the importance of providing adequate extra resources for both SEND and working class students. In response to the challenges of the twenty-first century, they have recently prioritised creativity and critical thinking in their curriculum offer.

They also encourage and nurture different values to the ones of hyper-competition, elitism and self-centred excellence valorised in the English educational system. Schools in both Finland and Estonia are still commonly viewed not only as centres of learning but of caring and community. However, it is important to recognise that economic pressures emanating from the OECD that prioritise efficiency, the labour market, and measurement are beginning to have a deleterious impact on education in both countries (Jahnukainen et al. 2022). I argue that there are lessons to be learnt not only from why the two educational systems are doing well, but also from why Finland, in particular, has seen a recent decline in educational success. The next two sub-sections examine the two educational systems in more detail.

How equity made Estonia the world’s educational role model

Estonia combines high attainment with some of the most equitable outcomes of all the countries participating in PISA. In place of the rote learning endemic in English classrooms, Estonian pupils are active participants in their education rather than passive recipients of facts, and there is a highly interactive element to lessons. There is a broad and balanced curriculum unlike the narrow ‘facts and phonics’ approach in English schools. As Andreas Schleicher pointed out, ‘You have a lot of creativity in the schools. In Estonia, nobody would have this word “extracurricular” activity. For them, that is the curriculum. The assumption is that different students learn differently’ (Sylvester 2021, 4).

Its schools are also very successful at promoting fairness. While the gap between rich and poor students in England remains stubbornly high and has increased during the pandemic, Estonian students’ socio-economic status has the lowest impact on reading outcomes out of all OECD countries. A recent survey by the Gregson Family Foundation (2019) found that Estonia is one of only five countries in the world where children have both high attainment levels and high life satisfaction levels. Neither the UK nor Ireland were among the five countries. In a deliberate move away from controlling schools to supporting them, there are no regular inspections.

Relationships with parents are very different to the norm in England, as evidenced in the Ideas Festivals organised by a number of Estonian schools. The festivals involve parents and local people in workshops to explore how they might work together to enhance learning and improve their schools. As a consequence, many parents have offered time and expertise to support teachers (Carnie 2018), and there appear to be working partnerships between teachers and parents that are inclusive and democratic. However, Estonia is not immune from global neoliberal pressures to reify market forces and prioritise public-private ‘partnerships’. Recent policy reforms have been described by Aidnik (2015) as ‘an unholy alliance between market driven policies and the insurgence of private interest’; an alliance that is beginning to shift the Estonian educational system away from the idea that education should serve the common good.

Finland – learning from ‘the best’

According to Thrupp et al. (2022), the Finnish education system remains largely organised on the principle of equality, with education universally provided and funded by the state. But as Kalalahti and Varjo (2020) point out, the principle of universalism that was established in 1968 when Finland reformed its traditional education system into a fully comprehensive system, emphasised equality. Since the 1990s that principle has been diluted by ‘the rise of the evaluation of education, local economy of education and individualism’ (Kalalahti and Varjo 2020, 25). Finland has not escaped from what Hardy et al. (2021, 783) term ‘the educational spirit of the times’ which is characterised by individualisation, fragmentation and privatisation.

Despite its much lauded egalitarian educational system, Finland has implemented OECD driven reforms over the last two decades, emphasising greater school choice and workforce flexibility. The irony is that the country does more policy borrowing from failed educational systems, such as that of England and the US, as visa versa. One consequence is that ‘the egalitarian character of the Finnish comprehensive' system has undergone a transformation in the direction of more socioeconomic segregation, between or within school ability tracking, and inequality in educational outcomes (Muench, Wieczorek, and Dressler 2022, 8).

The Finnish educational system is highly decentralised with most education policy decisions taken at either municipal or institutional level with strong stakeholder participation, in contrast to the low-trust, fear-inducing surveillance system in English education. For example, Finnish teachers feel valued in society, enjoy positive working conditions, including competitive salaries in relation to other graduate professions (OECD 2020b). They also have traditionally had far less direct contact hours than English teachers (Marsh 2014). They are given protected time away from the classroom to talk and plan together, with allocated time during each day for reflection, collaboration, planning and staff development. However, the respect and value given to teachers in the Finnish educational system has been undermined, to an extent, by the right wing Sipila government of 2013–2019 whose employment policies prioritised efficiency, competition and workforce flexibility. Its educational reforms suffered from a relative lack of the usual high level of teacher input into curriculum development. As a consequence, they created a more intensified and fragmented educational work environment (Hardy et al. 2021). At the same time, the Finnish system still retains important features that continue to promote the common good. Yet, they now operate in tension with the recent imperative to follow OECD guidelines on autonomy, greater choice, and efficiency. Whilst not improving Finnish educational quality that imperative has decreased educational equality. Finland’s move in the direction of privatisation, parental choice, increased selection, competition and marketisation, albeit to a lesser extent than in England, has seen a surge in educational inequalities. The lessons to be learnt from recent educational history in Finland are first that opening up education to market forces results in a loss in equity, and second that greater educational inequalities cause a drop in educational attainment overall, but particularly for disadvantaged students.

Conclusion

Irish educational policy, no less than English, is subject to the dictates of the OECD and its global monitoring system, PISA. But the OECD has always been, and remains, an economic institution led by economists. Economics, as a discipline, has a poor track record on social justice and inequality (Kvangraven and Kesar 2020; Walraevens 2021). Under the auspices of guiding education and educational improvement across the globe, the OECD has presided over the neglect of central concerns of education, including the well-being and happiness of children and teachers, relationships in classroom and schools, the promotion of collegiality and team-work, and students’ moral, civic, physical and artistic development. As McNamara et al. (2021, 169) conclude:

If schools are steered by economic motives that are more concerned with value for money, outputs, and international rankings; and if teachers are subjected to accountability regimes that bring about, inter alia, more monitoring of performances and benchmarking against externally prescribed and imposed standards; more reporting, meetings, paperwork and generally increased workloads; attention could paradoxically be taken away from teaching, relationships, caring, and all of the other immeasurable aspects of school life that help improve not only performances in the narrowest sense, but experiences in the broadest sense.

However, England, and Ireland to a lesser extent, have already reached the stage where key qualitative aspects of teaching and learning, that promote democratic citizenry and enhance social justice, have been subsumed by the ill-advised focus on measurement, value-for-money, and accountability. Yet, while Finland and Estonia have been much more successful at retaining fairness, cohesion, and equality as educational goals, we need to remind ourselves that despite the high achievement, and high standing internationally of both educational systems, neither are immune to international pressures. The stated goals of Estonian and Finnish education emphasising equality and justice are increasingly in tension with neoliberal policies, endorsed in countries across the globe, but particularly in England, US and Chile, that promote individual choice, competition, marketisation, and the measurement of results. Furthermore, as Seppanen et al. (2022) argue, despite Finland’s reputation for having the most public of education systems, the rise of private edu-businesses in Finland constitutes ‘a threat to democracy and Finland’s commitment to public education’. Similarly, in the Estonian context, there has been a growth of parental choice policies in Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, that have introduced an element of elitism into its educational system (Ubakivi-Hadachi and Nimmerfeldt 2021). Both countries may still be ‘the best’ globally, but it is important to recognise it is a much diminished ‘best’ which has been subject to the damaging pressures of the OECD performativity agenda, and the dictates of Neoliberalism more generally. It is perhaps not so much that the two countries have egalitarian educational systems but rather that they have relatively egalitarian systems when compared to other countries such as England, Chile and the US. The cautionary tale for Ireland is that educational systems underpinned by neoliberal values of competition, efficiency, free choice, flexibility and regular testing, endorsed and promoted by global institutions such as the OECD, neither enable high education quality nor promote equality. Irish education would be better served if policymakers heeded the message of one of its own leading intellectuals when she writes of the importance ‘of creating new knowledges and understandings of how to care, and how to think with care' (Lynch 2022, 212). Children’s futures across the globe merit a much more reflexive amalgam of care, creativity, imagination and criticality than the instrumental short-termism, exemplified in the case-study of England, that education has been subjected to for far too long.

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Diane Reay

Diane Reay grew up as a free school meal pupil on a large council estate and was the first in her family to go to university. She became an inner city, primary school teacher for 20 years, trying to make education a more positive experience for working class children than it had been for her. It was her failure to achieve this that led to a change in direction and a research career in order to understand working class educational experiences. She is now Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge. Her latest book Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes, was published by Policy Press in 2017.