Finnish vocational education and training experts’ reflections on multiculturalism in the aftermath of a major reform

ABSTRACT

In the present study we examine how Finnish vocational education and training (VET) experts reflect on multiculturalism in the aftermath of a major reform. The research material consists of interviews with educational policy experts in Finnish VET, namely: principals, government officials and lobbyists (N = 11). A qualitative thematic analysis reveals the following three latent themes through which experts reflect on multiculturalism: 1) multiculturalism as individualisation; 2) multiculturalism as competition; and 3) multiculturalism as shared responsibility. The results show that Finnish VET experts see multiculturalism as a critical challenge for education and working life. On the other hand, it is still unclear whether the 2018 VET reform will be able to resolve the different dilemmas and contradictions that the experts connect with multiculturalism. Experts understand multiculturalism narrowly as synonymous with immigration and as something that happens in encounters with Finns, even though it is not shared by Finns themselves. While most of the experts argue that personalisation and working life are particularly important for immigrants and students with an immigrant background, others are worried about the future of broader social competences in Finnish VET.

KEYWORDS:

• Individualisation
• immigration
• multiculturalism
• racism
• vocational education and training

Introduction

Finland is often portrayed as a culturally and ethnically homogeneous ‘model society’ of egalitarian education (e.g. Simola et al. 2017). Historically a country of emigration rather than immigration, it was the last of the Nordic countries to open its borders to humanitarian and economic immigrants in the mid-1990s (Mulinari et al. 2009). However, in the last thirty years Finland has become far more multicultural, with per capita growth of foreign-born individuals amongst the fastest in the OECD countries (OECD 2018). While persons born abroad made up only 1% of the population in 1990, in 2019 they accounted for 7.3% (OSF 2021a). The number of children with one or both parents born outside of Finland increased tenfold between 1995–2016 (OECD 2018). In Finland, multiculturalism is often understood as something that immigrants have brought with them and as something that happens in encounters with Finns but is not shared by Finns themselves (Lasonen 2005; Wahlbeck 2003). The multiculturalism that does exist in Finland, for example in terms of gender and social class, an indigenous Saami population, Roma and Tatar minorities, two national churches and a bilingual education system, is much less discussed in public or in the media than racialised immigrant ‘Others’ (Holm and Londen 2010).

‘Multiculturalism’ and ‘immigration’ are subjects of intense public and political debate in Finland, often with racist and exclusionary overtones (e.g. Rastas 2012). Finland has been described as a symbolically nationalist society that seeks to assimilate immigrants into the majority culture, mainly through working life, while simultaneously maintaining a strong commitment to multiculturalist ideology in government policy (Saukkonen 2013; Solano and Huddleston 2020). The multiculturalism debate is also present in the educational sector, where it ‘is seen narrowly as ethnic, immigrant language and immigrant religious diversity’ (Holm and Londen 2010, 107). The meanings of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘multicultural education’ are subject to ongoing reinterpretation and negotiation (Hummelstedt-Djedou, Zilliacus, and Holm 2018; Mikander, Zilliacus, and Holm 2018). An important question for the Finnish education system is how to respond to the increasing diversity of students as the system has historically been based on the idea of cultural homogeneity rather than multiculturalism (Holm and Londen 2010).

Vocational education and training (VET) is a field of education that has become increasingly culturally diverse over the last two decades in Finland, having undergone a series of significant reforms in recent years (see below). Previous research has focused mainly on the effects of multiculturalism in mandatory primary and comprehensive education (e.g. Holm and Londen 2010; Race 2015). Although ‘multiculturalism’ has been criticised as a theoretically outdated and inaccurate concept, it is still widely used in the daily life of vocational education institutes, amongst VET experts and professionals and in public discussion (Holm and Zilliacus 2009; Itkonen, Talib, and Dervin 2015). Multiculturalism and immigration received significant media attention at the time when the interview data was collected in the spring of 2018, due to the considerable social and political controversy related to the legal status of asylum-seekers in Finland (e.g. Wahlbeck 2019).

Multiculturalism and immigration were also constantly discussed during the 2018 VET reform, the largest educational policy reform in Finland in decades. According to the Prime Minister’s Office (2015), the central idea of the reform was to create a competence-based, customer-oriented and efficient VET system by merging adult and youth education together, increasing learning in the workplace and transforming funding to encourage education providers to be more efficient. A recent overview of the reform by the National Audit Office of Finland (2021) pointed out that it took place simultaneously with severe budget cuts, totalling more than 400 million euros (approximately 20%) of the entire VET budget.

Neither ‘immigrants’ nor ‘multiculturalism’ are specifically mentioned in the new Vocational Education and Training Act (531/2017). Nevertheless, the reform includes multiple provisions to render vocational education more accessible and flexible for immigrants and students with an immigrant background, such as additional funding for studies supporting learning skills, instituting less demanding language skill requirements for entry and allowing students to commence their studies all year round. In contrast to the old system, which grouped immigrants together separately based on a generalised perception of special needs, under the new system, special needs such as extra support for language learning is decided on an individual basis (Vocational Education and Training Act 531/2017). Due to simultaneous debate on the ‘refugee crisis’ and the implementation of VET reform in Finland, studying reflections on multiculturalism in educational policy likewise became topical. However, increasing multiculturalism is not only an issue for Finland but a topic that is timely even for education systems throughout the world (Race 2015).

The research questions in this article are as follows:

1) How does multiculturalism appear in the context of vocational education and training in VET experts’ speech?

2) What social, cultural and political dynamics do the VET experts discuss in relation to multiculturalism?

By analysing VET experts’ speech, the study contributes to discussion about multiculturalism and immigration in Finnish vocational education (Itkonen, Talib, and Dervin 2015; Kurki, Brunila, and Lahelma 2019; Vehviläinen and Souto 2021), which also has broader relevance for discussion about the societal dimension of VET (Lappalainen, Nylund, and Rosvall 2019; Eiriksdottir and Rosvall 2019; McGrath et al. 2020; Young and Hordern 2020). The study also contributes to research on how educational experts make sense of policymaking (Kosunen and Hansen 2018; Ozga 2020) following a major educational reform (Niemi and Jahnukainen 2020) and a societal situation in which multiculturalism is politicised (Wahlbeck 2019).

We will begin by briefly describing the Finnish vocational education system from the perspective of immigrants and students with an immigrant background. We will then look more closely at how increasing multiculturalism is managed in the context of the recent educational reform in Finland.

Multiculturalism in Finnish vocational education and training

In Finland, after nine years of mandatory primary and comprehensive education, students can choose between three years of general upper secondary education or vocational education and training. Slightly more than half of the students who finish comprehensive education continue their studies in general upper secondary education, which has traditionally been the stronger route to higher education. Around 40% of students in Finland choose to pursue their studies in one of ten vocational education and training fields¹ (OSF [Official Statistics of Finland] 2021b). Finnish VET has traditionally been state-led, combining school-based and work-based learning for students fresh out of comprehensive school, while adult learners usually carry out their studies closer to working life (Virolainen and Thunqvist 2017). The popularity of Finnish VET took off in the early 2000s after initial VET was extended to three years, universal eligibility to higher education became law and on-the-job learning was improved (Stenström and Virolainen 2018; Rintala and Nokelainen 2020a).

However, transitioning to upper secondary education is fraught with difficulties, and research indicates that students from an immigrant background (i.e. a student whose two parents or only known parent were born outside of Finland) face a more complex situation when making upper secondary education choices compared to their native Finnish peers (Kalalahti, Varjo, and Jahnukainen 2017; Kalalahti et al. 2020). Students from an immigrant background are five times more likely to study in VET than to continue with general upper secondary education, making it one of the main channels for enhancing multiculturalism through the Finnish education system, working life and society (FMEC 2016). The percentage of foreign-language speakers (i.e. students who speak a language other than Finnish, Swedish or Saami at home) in vocational education increased by more than 50% between 2010–2015, and in 2017 accounted for approximately 8% of all students (Lappi and Portin 2017), with significant differences between regions and vocational fields (e.g. Kurki, Brunila, and Lahelma 2019). While preliminary findings indicate that immigrants’ educational pathways have improved after the 2018 reform (FMEC, 2019), VET providers still consider students with an immigrant background, students with special needs and foreign-language speakers as the three groups who are most vulnerable to discrimination or educational inequality in the aftermath of the reform (Owal Group 2021).

Vocational education is seen to benefit individuals and society in two main ways, namely, by increasing economic competitiveness as well as by fostering social inclusion and cohesion (Nilsson 2010; Preston and Green 2008). In the Vocational Education and Training Act (531/2017, § 2) the former -increasing economic competitiveness- corresponds to VET’s goal of transmitting technical skills and general competences tailored to specific fields, while the latter -fostering social inclusion and cohesion- refers to the secondary, non-technical purpose of vocational education, i.e. developing students ‘into good, balanced and civilized people and members of society’. The dual goal of VET has historical roots (Preston and Green 2008). Kettunen (2011, 2) states that vocational education played an important role in the modernisation of the new Finnish nation-state in the early 20^th century, not only by responding to ‘needs and problems created by technological progress and industrial modernisation’ but also by creating a new social, cultural and political foundation for citizenship after the Finnish Civil War of 1918 and the Second World War (1939-1945)

Determining the correct balance between the dual goals of VET has long been the subject of educational policy debate in Finland and other Nordic countries. After competitiveness, commodification and marketisation were introduced into the Nordic education systems in the 1980s and 1990s (Simola et al. 2017; Telhaug, 2006), Finnish vocational education started emphasising employability and labour market adaptability at the expense of broader competence goals (Brunila et al. 2013; Nylund et al. 2018). Lappalainen and colleagues (2019) demonstrate in their analysis of general upper secondary and vocational education curricula of Finnish and Swedish upper secondary curricula from 1970 to the 2010s that the VET curriculum increasingly focuses on individual students’ work-related duties and responsibilities, reducing students into ‘conformist workers and/or entrepreneurs’ (Lappalainen, Nylund, and Rosvall 2019, 347). Government institutions currently seek to achieve social inclusion by pressuring immigrants and refugees to improve their employment prospects through participation in vocational training (see Masoud, Holm, and Brunila 2021).

Material and method

The research material consists of interviews with leading Finnish VET experts including government officials, principals of vocational institutes and lobbyists (N = 11). The participants are, among other things, responsible for formulating institutional, organisational and political responses to increasing multiculturalism in VET and working life.

The material can be described as expert interviews, as participants represent VET professionals. The principles of expert interviews include the idea that the interviewees’ knowledge of the topic of interest differs from that of lay people (Kosunen and Hansen 2018; Ozga 2020). It follows that instead of the interviewee speaking in general about an external subject, the expert speaks ‘from within the subject’ because the subject of the interview is part of his or her profession (Walmsley 2004). Furthermore, we understand the experts’ speech as more than just individual points of view: it both reveals and constructs the social reality of VET. The experts speak in and about the discourses that the organisations they work for produce and promote. The competing ways in which the different organisations make sense of VET actively contributes to how VET policy is achieved.

The participants were contacted directly, and all were willing to participate in the study. All the interviewees had actively followed and participated in policymaking for years in various professional roles. Interviews were conducted individually between April and June 2018, right after the VET reform had come into effect at the beginning of the same year. The length of the interviews varied from one hour to one and a half hours, with a mean of 75 minutes. The length of the transcribed material was 184 pages (in size 12 Cambria font, and with line space 1).

Challenges to expert interviews include gaining the trust of the interviewees and the fact that experts typically use jargon and specific terms in their speech (Harvey 2011). In this study, the first author had years of experience in education policy, which made it possible to get interviewees to speak confidentially and make sense of their arguments. The anonymity of the participants was ensured, and it is not possible to identify them based on the description of the material or excerpts. In the results section the interviewees are referred to as P1–P11 (Participant 1–Participant 11). Even though the number of interviewed experts was relatively high considering the limited number of people working in similar positions in Finland, the participants still represent only a select group of people who were contacted to participate in the study.

A semi-structured interview approach was selected to generate a rich discussion that allowed qualitative insight into the experts’ potentially complex conceptions of the topic. The participants were not given any definition of multiculturalism at the beginning of the interview; instead, the concept was used as an empty signifier that they could fill with their own meanings and reflections. The principles of thematic analysis were applied to the interviews. To secure transparency of analysis, Braun and Clarke (2006) suggest the use of the six-step analysis approach for coding and theme development in qualitative research. In brief, we first familiarised ourselves with the data by reading through the transcriptions several times. In the second phase, we assigned preliminary codes to identify initial patterns and topics from the data. The coding was performed inductively based on the contents of the interviews. The process was systematic in nature and covered the entire data set. In the third phase, similar codes were clustered together to create more general categories, after which the process was repeated until a reasonable number of categories was created. After the first phase of coding there were approximately 480 codes which were narrowed down to 33 categories in the next phase. Analysis eventually showed saturation in the research material: similar content began to recur (resulting from the codes and categories in the content-driven analysis). This was important, as we were not interested in individuals’ views but in the ways in which the social reality of VET is both reflected and constructed by the experts. As the participants talked broadly about many VET-related topics, only the categories related to the present research questions were taken for closer examination. The categories were then clustered into three latent themes that were given names characterising their content, reflecting the experts’ ‘underlying ideas, assumptions, and conceptualizations’ (Braun and Clarke 2006, 84) about multiculturalism in VET. The three latent themes were selected for closer analysis based on the present research questions.

According to Braun and Clarke (2006), the sixth step of thematic analysis involves reporting the analysis of constructed themes with excerpts from the material. We will now present the results of the analysis by first describing each of the three latent themes and secondly drawing conclusions across them. As always in qualitative analysis, the material would have allowed the formation of different codes, categories and themes. The present results are triangulated through in-depth discussion between the authors.

Results: a problem-oriented view of multiculturalism

Experts mainly discussed multiculturalism in the context of the Finnish VET reform which took place in 2018. They reflected critically on the growing role of multiculturalism in Finnish educational policymaking and working life. The experts also reflected on the various social, cultural and political implications of multiculturalism for the future of Finnish society. They moved back and forth between different levels of reflection, sometimes focusing on issues related to local practice and other times on systemic challenges, a feature that characterises expert speech in general (Walmsley 2004).

Multiculturalism was synonymous with immigration and immigrants for the experts (see Holm and Londen 2010). Overall, the experts did not indicate awareness of or interest in contemporary debates around terms like ‘multiculturalism’, ‘foreigners’ and ‘immigrants’, all of which have been criticised for being overly simplistic, essentializing and even contributing to the Othering of immigrants and students with an immigrant background in Finnish society (Rastas 2012; Kurki 2018). Some of the experts touched upon interculturality and identity but for these were rarely discussed (see Itkonen, Talib, and Dervin 2015; Hummelstedt-Djedou, Zilliacus, and Holm 2018).

We identified three latent themes through which experts reflect on multiculturalism, namely: 1) multiculturalism as individualisation; 2) multiculturalism as competition; and 3) multiculturalism as shared responsibility.

Multiculturalism as individualisation

Many of the participants talked about how the Finnish education system has thus far been unable to produce equal learning outcomes for immigrants and students with an immigrant background compared to peers with parents born in Finland (FMEC, 2016; OECD 2018). According to Participant 3, expected homogeneity has made the Finnish educational system a difficult place for students with an immigrant background to thrive:

P3: Our system is built on this homogeneous group that can read and write and who all have a degree from comprehensive education qualification and afterwards a degree from secondary education. So, all our structures are based on everyone having basically the same readiness and pre-requisites.

Participant 3 also appeared to imply that homogeneity has historically made steering education easier (see also: Holm and Londen 2010) whereas in the current situation, immigrants and students from an immigrant background are a problem for policymakers who did not previously have to think about students’ differing ‘pre-requisites’ to the same extent. Disrupted transitions between comprehensive and upper secondary education have long been a problem in Finnish education, with immigrants and students with an immigrant background particularly at risk for not continuing their studies after comprehensive education or dropping out shortly after starting (Kalalahti, Varjo, and Jahnukainen 2017; Kalalahti et al. 2020). Participant 1 pointed out how there is more emphasis on effective transitions from school to working life when (female) immigrants make choices about their upper secondary education:

P1: It doesn’t have to be like what I’ve understood in that all female immigrants are recommended to go and work in the social and healthcare sector. It might be justifiable from a labour market perspective but again there’s … there’s a little bit too much ethnic profiling when you consider that we’re talking about individuals whose vocational dreams and hopes are just as valid as anyone else’s.

Participant 1 recognised that female immigrant students are often recommended to work in the social and healthcare sector, contrary to their own desires, and that this is based on social and political pressure to improve VET labour market outcomes, particularly for immigrants (Kurki, Brunila, and Lahelma 2019; Vehviläinen and Souto 2021). Despite all the talk about individuality and autonomy being determining factors for students’ upper secondary education choices, immigrants’ choices are often constrained by essentializing stereotypes and structural discrimination (Kalalahti, 2020; Vehviläinen and Souto 2021). Participant 10 questioned how authentic students’ individual choices can really be if they are predicated on stereotypes or socially shared understandings about which VET fields are ‘allowed’ for immigrants and students with an immigrant background.

P10: … immigrants’ educational choices are pretty strongly directed by stereotypes. Some fields are allowed, and some are not-so-allowed. And that’s not a very individual-based choice anymore.

The criticism by both Participant 1 and Participant 10 regarding upper secondary education choices being unduly influenced by stereotypes provided an interesting contrast with how almost all the participants characterised the VET system after the 2018 reform. Aside from a few critical voices, most participants described the new VET system as far more modern and practical from the perspective of multiculturalism because it was based on creating a personalised learning pathway best suited to each student’s specific needs and abilities.

Teachers and staff played a critical role in participants’ reflections on multiculturalism as individualisation. The participants described VET teachers as critical for the personalisation process, particularly in the recognition of prior know-how. As one of the key pillars of the new competence-based VET system, recognition of all prior know-how is supposed to shorten study times by making learning more individually accurate. Participant 7 connected teachers’ needs for new pedagogical skills in the aftermath of the 2018 VET reform to the personalisation of foreign-language speakers’ prior knowledge:

P7: (…) now that we’re hopefully doing the personalization much better than before, do we know how? Are we able to catch prior know-how from the backgrounds of foreign-language speakers that we can recognize? That’s something for staff and teachers and guidance counsellors to learn in order to have sufficient specs to recognize the know-how.

Echoing Participant 1’s criticism of the recommendations that immigrants receive in comprehensive education (assumedly from school staff), Participant 7 worried that VET staff may currently be lacking know-how when it comes to personalising studies for foreign-language speakers and that this may prevent them from being able to access equally high-quality personalised learning pathways.

Some participants emphasised that multiculturalism in VET is about much more than just supporting the development of individual competences. These participants framed vocational institutes as normative institutions with rules and practices defining appropriate behaviour for students and staff. Participant 2, for example, argued that VET providers should refer to the twin guiding principles of equality and personalisation as enshrined in the 2018 VET reform when making decisions about multiculturalism:

P2: (…) I see that prayer moments and other things that have maybe been part of multiculturalism will be like ‘hey can we give someone … special permission to do something differently?’ So somehow, I feel that now that the reform is coming and everyone is supposed to have their own path and their own support and their own opportunities then this will be other things as well, not just in multiculturalism.

Participant 1 explicitly connected multiculturalism with the larger shift towards personalisation in VET. The participant argued that because the 2018 reform gave VET providers more freedom to offer customised pedagogical solutions depending on students’ individual needs, the same should be done when recognising different cultural practices. Participant 2 used face veils as a concrete example of how multiculturalism is challenging rulemaking in vocational institutes:

P2: (…) when you’re the principal you have to make the guidelines. So, from a cultural perspective this is related to questions like ‘should we make a rule against covering your face?’ You start to think, ‘Hey, is this really equality? Are we making rules just so someone isn’t allowed to be different? Is this really a security issue or what is this?’ (…) So it’s like you have to think about it and if you decide to ban something and it has absolutely no effect on students from a Finnish background then you have to make sure that it’s well-founded.

Participant 2 referred to different factors such as equality, fairness and individual choice to demonstrate the internal debate that principals experience when making rules. From this perspective, managing multiculturalism involved navigating and negotiating between different, and sometimes incompatible, requests. According to Participant 2, making decisions and adopting policy in vocational institutes meant being sensitive to the cultural and political context, which stands out in contrast to other participants’ focus on the technical and pedagogical aspects of personalisation. For example, Participant 6 argued that ‘the best way, the goal’ is to focus on each student as an individual, making the students’ cultural background, and multiculturalism itself, irrelevant:

P6: I don’t know if we should talk about multiculturalism or rather about different people because there is a lot more difference there than just cultural backgrounds. So actually, the best way, the goal, is that we wouldn’t even have to talk about any multiculturalism but about different people who share their experiences (…)

According to Participant 6, students should be encouraged to focus on their individual experiences during discussions about differences. Furthermore, the participant argued that talking about multiculturalism is itself largely unnecessary because individual identities should be the starting point. This creates a dilemma, however, since focusing solely on the individual makes recognising cultural differences and deconstructing structural inequalities more difficult.

Multiculturalism as competition

VET is responsible for helping to solve two critical challenges faced by the Finnish economy: improving immigrant participation in working life and responding to the shortage of workers in certain sectors of work (OECD 2018). The 2018 reform took place towards the end of a decade-long economic recession in which widespread economic uncertainty and anxiety were increasingly channelled into anti-immigrant political rhetoric (e.g. Wahlbeck 2019). All the participants were worried about the growth of anti-immigration sentiment in Finland. Participant 7 argued that economic anxiety over limited access to jobs was fuelling nativism amongst VET students:

P7: (…) they’re afraid that their jobs will be taken when they graduate at the same time. So, like ‘oh, are we now competing for the same places? Am I going to go without, even though I was born here and I’ve paid my taxes, so am I going to end up without a job then?’

Such tensions should not be altogether surprising. Working life has long been the principle mode of participation in Finnish society and the 2018 VET reform further entrenched access to employment as the primary goal of VET (Isopahkala-Bouret, 2014; Lappalainen, Nylund, and Rosvall 2019). Below, Participant 11 echoed Participant 7 in arguing that anti-immigrant sentiment is driven by nativist ideas about who should have preferential access to working life:

P11: If we think of Finland as a nation and what people think about immigration … in growing urban centres it’s seen as important that we need workers and people and taxpayers. But then if your own situation is sort of … maybe there’s a competitive situation of ‘who gets the job?’ then this sort of divisiveness could probably emerge, like ‘should we think of native Finns or new Finns or what?’

Participant 11 pointed out that what Finnish people think about multiculturalism depends on their personal situation. Accordingly, people living in urban centres where there is more work tend to emphasise the economic importance of immigration whereas Finns in uncertain or difficult personal and economic situations are more likely to appeal to their origin as the reason for why they should be hired over ‘new Finns’. Many of the participants presented similar hypothetical arguments revolving around essentialized notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that ‘native Finns’ could use to justify their racism or xenophobia. Participant 5, for example, used negative public perceptions about immigrant mass unemployment as an example of a political and economic issue that threatens social stability in Finland:

P5: … it’s pretty much a question of social stability at some point. For native Finns as well … in the sense that if we have mass immigrant unemployment and social benefits then those are good places for racism to grow.

Participant 5 also depicted ‘native’ Finns’ racism as resulting primarily from economic factors. This time, however, native Finns’ feelings of outrage and injustice are not due to anxiety about competing for the same jobs but rather the widespread public perception that immigrants are unjustly using ‘our’ welfare benefits.

Multiculturalism as shared responsibility

All the participants saw VET as a critical channel for making Finnish society more open and inclusive to immigrants and students with an immigrant background. They all shared an understanding that the Finnish economy is currently undergoing major changes and that these changes should also be reflected in the institutional organisation of VET (see Avis 2018). Participant 1 described how the profile of Finnish VET had changed over time in response to multiculturalism:

P1: Vocational education has been accepted as an operator that can give people from an immigrant background the chance to be employed in the Finnish labour market. And we’ve especially also accepted the multiculturalization of certain sectors of work. And … having accepted this, then it has become a natural part, maybe especially at the top level, of the profile of vocational education.

According to Participant 1, the ‘top level’ of Finnish VET have come to ‘accept’ that VET is particularly important for improving immigrant’ access to Finnish working life. It was unclear exactly which people and organisations were included in this top level. Nevertheless, the flow of influence from working life to VET was depicted as unidirectional and reactive, resulting in VET adopting a new profile as a means to employment. Participant 11 pointed out, however, that VET is also responsible for ensuring that even students ‘who are not that proficient’ receive the skills and competences that they need to participate in working life:

P11: This is probably the difficult equation: if we get students inside who are not that proficient … they also need to get out, they need to get qualifications. So, what are those qualifications like, how are their skills going to correspond with the demands of working life? So that we don’t get this kind of class-, a two-tiered labour market where there are these immigrant construction workers and then the other workers, or whatever it may be.

Participant 11 explicitly described the social inclusion dilemma in Finnish VET: on the one hand, VET is responsible for making sure that every single student completes upper secondary education. At the same time, however, VET struggles to cope with vast difference in students’ capacities. It would be counter-productive and damaging to award qualifications to students whose skills do not actually correspond with what working life values. Although this dilemma is in no way restricted to students with an immigrant background, Participant 11 specifically used ‘immigrant construction workers’ as an example of how a ‘two-tiered labour market’ might emerge. Participant 10 went even further and argued that one of the fundamental issues of multiculturalism in VET is preventing or mitigating the social hierarchization of work in Finnish society:

P10: Of course my hope is that the future division of labour in our society wouldn’t even be this … hierarchical. And of course, my fear is that this won’t be the case. And if it isn’t the case, then I think that VET providers have a major role to play and, for example, teacher education, to make sure that social mobility is possible, and people find their place somehow.

Many of the participants had similar concerns about increasing social stratification in the labour market and saw VET as responsible for promoting educational equality and social mobility for people with an immigrant background in Finland. According to this view, VET shared a responsibility with working life to help to solve these problems and maintain equality. Yet experts had a hard time coming up with solutions to these problems. The government officials were particularly frustrated, arguing that problems caused by changes in working life cannot be simply resolved by issuing mandates or writing new laws. The sense of shared responsibility was extended by some participants to the role of vocational institutes in helping employers create more tolerant workplaces:

P2: … it makes sense that in quite a few places where they employ people who have graduated from vocational institutes, there might be even more of this kind of talk. Racist talk and attitudes and stuff. And then they get their training here so that’s a big mission for teachers and employers and everybody to create this type of tolerant work community together.

According to Participant 2, there was a clear continuum between vocational institutes and workplaces, with the same people flowing from one to the other. In this view, it is the shared responsibility of ‘teachers and employers and everybody’ to influence the direction in which students and, by extension, workplaces move. Participant 8 was more sceptical, however, emphasising the critical importance of values and attitudes amongst ‘workers in the workplace’ as opposed to ‘the school’.

P8: It doesn’t matter how immigration-friendly, multicultural, anti-racist or whatever the school is; for young students what is extremely important – the most important thing – is relating to the workers in the workplaces. To the truck driver, to the older practical nurse … wherever they might happen to be. So, what are the values and attitudes in working life and how multicultural is our working life in its capacities and attitudes?

Participant 8 argued for the need to be realistic when considering the potential role of vocational institutes in promoting multiculturalism. Adopting a student perspective, Participant 8 argued that ‘workers in workplaces’ have far more influence on students than the staff in vocational institutes. Once students are in the workplace, teachers and staff in VET institutes are rather limited in their ability to regulate acceptable values, capacities and attitudes. Participant 8’s concern about the actual degree of multicultural ‘capacities and attitudes’ in Finnish working life provided an interesting contrast with the emphasis that many participants place on improving immigrants’ access to working life.

Discussion

In response to the first research question, multiculturalism was present in the VET experts’ speech in many different ways. Experts mostly discussed multiculturalism in terms of the main policy goals of the 2018 VET reform – individualising studies, emphasising work-based learning and speeding up labour market transitions – which encompass all students, not only immigrants and students with an immigrant background (see Niemi and Jahnukainen 2020). In line with previous research (e.g. Lasonen 2005; Holm and Londen 2010), the overall impression from the interviews is that experts viewed multiculturalism as a kind of external pressure or force, i.e. as something originating from beyond the traditional boundaries of Finnish society, which, upon being introduced, has necessitated and prompted a range of different institutional and political responses in Finnish education and working life, including within the 2018 VET reform.

In response to the second research question, a thematic analysis of the expert interviews revealed three latent themes (individualisation, competition and shared responsibility) that reflect changes in the social, cultural and political dynamics of Finnish society and particularly in the 2018 VET reform. It is important to note that the three latent themes were not exclusive to immigrants and students with an immigrant background but instead represented specific aspects of experts’ general concerns about the future of Finnish society. For example, all the participants thought that Finland was becoming more competitive and individualistic (Brunila et al. 2013; Telhaug, Mediås, and Aasen 2006). These fears were heightened in the case of immigrants and students with an immigrant background, whom the experts portrayed in a stereotypical manner as less fortunate and capable compared to their native Finnish peers (see Kurki 2018; Masoud, Holm, and Brunila 2021; Owal Group 2021).

The participants painted a picture of a toughening economic atmosphere, where a part of the Finnish population is increasingly pensive and hostile towards inroads made by ‘Others’ that are simultaneously taking ‘our’ jobs and unjustly using ‘our’ welfare benefits (see Mulinari et al. 2009; Rastas 2012; Wahlbeck 2019). Participants’ focus on economic anxiety may reflect widespread belief in ‘Finnish exceptionalism’ (Rastas 2012), which seeks to deny or obscure the existence of racism. For example, the participants differentiated between the educational system’s structural discrimination, which they saw as inadvertently driven by teachers’ or guidance counsellors’ stereotypes or lack of experience in dealing with immigrants (Hummelstedt-Djedou, Zilliacus, and Holm 2018; Itkonen, Talib, and Dervin 2015; Vehviläinen and Souto 2021) and the more direct racism of ordinary Finnish people. In their representations of racist attitudes amongst workers and VET students, the participants often positioned themselves as spectators or potential saviours. However, the experts casually employed binary categorisations of Finns and non-Finns as ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Kurki 2018; Masoud, Holm, and Brunila 2021).

Almost all the experts argued that the VET reform’s goals of greater personalisation and student self-governance are beneficial for immigrants and students with an immigrant background, although many were also worried about how these can best be achieved in practice. Such concerns were widespread in the Finnish media at the time of the interviews due to the fast schedule of the reform and the fact that it was being implemented simultaneously with major budget cuts (National Audit Office of Finland 2021). In the reformed and defunded VET system, students are responsible for connecting themselves to working life as efficiently as possible, reflecting increased demands for efficiency and productivity (Isopahkala-Bouret, Lappalainen, and Lahelma 2014; Lappalainen, Nylund, and Rosvall 2019). The ideal student is a self-directed individual who moves along his or her personalised path, sometimes studying together with classmates but preferably on their own in a workplace environment (Rintala and Nokelainen 2020b). This is also the ideal for immigrants and students with an immigrant background, who are supposed to be cost-effectively integrated into working life based on personalised technical skill needs and irrespective of anything else (Brunila et al. 2013; Masoud, Holm, and Brunila 2021).

The experts discussed multiculturalism primarily through a Nordic welfare state lens, which has traditionally prioritised access to education and employment as the keys to addressing socioeconomic inequality and has only recently started paying more attention to the struggle for recognition amongst marginalised groups (Kivisto and Wahlbeck 2013; Telhaug, Mediås, and Aasen 2006). Many of the experts emphasised how important working life is for integrating immigrants and students with an immigrant background into Finnish society, further entrenching the idea of working life as the primary mode of participation in Finnish society (Isopahkala-Bouret, Lappalainen, and Lahelma 2014; Lappalainen, Nylund, and Rosvall 2019). However, the participants appeared to simultaneously endorse and fear the growing role of working life in VET. Some of the experts were very worried about the growing economic hierarchization and stratification in Finnish society and saw VET’s increasing focus on working-life as contributing to this development. At the same time, however, working life was seen as the critical precondition for participation in Finnish society.

The VET experts’ talk about shared responsibility is closely related to VET’s social inclusion and cohesion function (Preston and Green 2008). Because VET is a work-bound environment where skills and competences enhancing students’ employability in chosen vocations are strongly emphasised at the expense of other social aspects, it provides little space for addressing such societal issues as multiculturalism dialogically (Isopahkala-Bouret, Lappalainen, and Lahelma 2014; Lappalainen, Nylund, and Rosvall 2019). The lack of time and shared social spaces makes it hard to build community bonds and develop trust between students and staff, both of which are necessary for discussing controversial societal issues effectively. Isolation and exclusion from conversations around critical societal issues entails risks for democratic values (compare McGrath et al. 2020; Wheelahan 2015).

The study is not without its limitations. The typical characteristics of expert interviews, such as speaking from an institutional perspective, the use of special terms and jargon (Harvey 2011) and speaking ‘from within the subject’ (Walmsley 2004) were all visible in the research material. It is difficult to draw a distinction between participants’ personal reflections on the topic and reflections directed by the agendas of the participants’ employers or the sense of political correctness in a professional position. However, the atmosphere in the interviews was generally confidential and the participants were even willing to discuss sensitive and difficult issues for their employer organisations.

Conclusions

The analysis of Finnish VET experts’ reflections on multiculturalism indicated that although multiculturalism is considered a critical challenge for education and working life, it is still framed in much the same way as in the early 2000s (e.g. Wahlbeck 2003). This study strengthens previous observations (Brunila et al. 2013; Isopahkala-Bouret, Lappalainen, and Lahelma 2014; Lappalainen, Nylund, and Rosvall 2019; Nylund and Virolainen 2019) that employability and labour market adaptability continue to dominate VET policymaking. It is possible that emphasising working life at the expense of broader competence goals makes it more difficult for VET students, in particular immigrants and students with an immigrant background, to actively participate in the kinds of broader societal conversations that are integral to life in a democratic society (Eiriksdottir and Rosvall 2019; Young and Hordern 2020).

The specific national characteristics of Finnish VET are that it is a state-led system that combines school-based and work-based learning and is relatively popular amongst students (see Virolainen and Thunqvist 2017; Rintala and Nokelainen 2020a). This makes it difficult to generalise the findings to other contexts. Yet the fact that education and working life are becoming increasingly multicultural in many countries would indicate a need for more comparative international research on the subject.

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation.

Notes

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