Preparing Our Children for the Future
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Finland puts flexible holidays ahead of longer school days
The length of the school year and school days, as well as the timing of holidays, is always a controversial topic. While the debate rages in the UK about whether children should spend more time at school, in Finland – which has both one of the shortest school years in the OECD and some of the best results in international education rankings – there is a push to improve learning by developing novel ways of learning, rather than increasing school days and lesson time.
Winter holidays in Finland are staggered depending on where you live. At the moment pupils in southern Finland are enjoying their last days of the winter holidays. They will be followed by the middle part of the country, and finally northern Finland.
Finnish pupils spend some of the least time at school compared to other OECD countries. In 2010, Finnish children aged 9-11 spent an average 640 hours in school a year, compared to an OECD average of 821 hours. In England, the average was 899 hours, in France, 847 hours and in Japan, 800 hours.
In Finland, by law there can be 190 school days, but official holidays usually decrease the number. During the school year there are normally four holidays. Most schools have a week’s autumn holiday, and all schools have at least a ten-day Christmas vacation, four-day Easter holidays, and a week-long winter break in February.
Local authorities have the right to determine when the school year begins, and often it starts in the middle of August. Legislation says that the school year has to end on the Saturday of the 22nd week of the year, either at the very end of May or at the beginning of June.
Because of the climate, Finns hold summer holidays sacred. In recent years there has been a debate on whether the school year should extend until later in June, and start somewhat later in August. Opinions vary and no changes have been made.
Experimenting with the school day
School weeks have five days. The number of weekly lessons vary, taking into consideration the development phase of the pupil. In the nine-year comprehensive school, pupils in the first two forms (seven to eight-year olds) have 19 lessons a week, with 30 lessons a week during the last three years (12 to 15-year olds).
The school day must not exceed seven lessons. Upper secondary school students build their study programmes independently and can finish their upper secondary studies flexibly in two to four years. The number of weekly lessons is meant to be 35, but this can vary a lot according to the students’ individual study plans.
Finnish legislation states that the duration of the lesson in both comprehensive and upper secondary education has to be at least 45 minutes, which is more or less the norm, too. But there is a continual discussion on whether splitting the school day into 45-minute sessions is really optimal for learning. As a result, schools and even individual teachers are experimenting with other kinds of school day rhythms. Fortunately, legislation and curricula offer them a lot of freedom to try this.
For pupils, and especially for teachers, the number of lessons spent in school is just part of the story. Pupils continue their learning after the school day with homework, in which Finland has a long and strong tradition. The amount of homework increases gradually as pupils progress through school.
Lessons at school are just the tip of the iceberg. As Finnish education expert Pasi Sahlberg writes, “Finnish teachers take on significant responsibility for curriculum and assessment, as well as experimentation with and improvement of teaching methods, some of the most important aspects of their work are conducted outside of classrooms.”
In OECD surveys, the Finnish education system is seen as one of the most efficient in both its use of time and money. It has to be, because Finns want to protect their children’s playful childhood as much as possible. Besides the school year and the school day being one of the shortest in the OECD, the compulsory school starting age of seven is one of the latest among OECD countries.
Longer days are not the answer
For this article, we asked school heads, directors of local provisions of education and members of local school boards how they considered the time pupils spend in schools today. Their opinion was very explicit and unanimous, and, we think, reflects a wider chorus of opinion in Finland.
They did not want to extend the number of school days or lessons. For primary school pupils, they wanted to have more playful extra-curricular activities and were happy this has been one of the focus areas of the ministry of education and culture and the National Board of Education in recent years.
Concerning the relationship between the number of school days and lessons and pupils’ attainment, our respondents did not regard increasing the number of school days and lessons as a solution. Instead, they talked about experimenting with new kinds of rhythms for the school year and school day, and investing in developing novel ways of leading learning processes and increasing pupils’ empowerment and motivation.
Markku Suortamo, Pekka Kanervio and Seppo Pulkkinen also helped contribute to this article.
What makes a teacher outstanding? 
February 3, 2016 5.01am EST
Parents eager for their children to get the best education possible often turn to lists and maps showing which local schools have been judged “outstanding” by school inspectors.
But there is a big problem in the way Ofsted, the schools inspectorate in England, decides which schools and teachers get an outstanding rating. In its guidelines for inspection, the role of emotion in this gold star standard of teaching is starkly absent. Trust, empathy, relationships, excitement and that element which is almost impossible to define, “buzz”, are crucial to outstanding teaching and learning. By failing to acknowledge these, we have ended up with an inspection system that fundamentally misses the point.
Initial findings from my own forthcoming research indicate just how difficult it is for both the students and staff who work in schools to pin down exactly what outstanding means. In interviews I conducted in England with over 50 teachers, students, governors, head teachers, principals, dinner ladies, support and school premises staff, unpicking a precise definition proved to be a problem.
But what they did tell me was that inspections are failing to recognise the crucial emotional aspects of what makes a teacher outstanding – aspects which do not feature at any point in Ofsted’s criteria.
They agreed that the emotional atmosphere in the classroom was just as important a part of being outstanding as what teachers did and what they know. Yet, while Ofsted focuses on “hard” aspects such as attainment, discipline and attendance, those people I interviewed also talked about outstanding in much softer, emotional terms.
Where is the love?
The lack of acknowledgement of the importance of relationships based on empathy is a major omission by Ofsted. Harvard scholar Hunter Gehlbach has highlighted on The Conversation that when teachers see similarities with their students – such as shared preferences, traits and values – both relationship and grades improve. I can certainly remember the lessons, and teachers, that had a buzz of activity, interactions, conversations and yes, learning.
Drilling down into what this mystical notion of buzz actually means is difficult. We can appreciate when “buzz” is present in a lesson, but the conditions for achieving this are not necessarily easy to copy or transfer from one class to another. Conditions which makes class 10A buzz could produce chaos in class 10B. This makes it almost impossible for inspectors to measure, so we need to think about a new way for inspectors to recognise those teachers that do bring emotion to the classroom.
The distance a student comes in their journey in learning is also an important part of what makes a teacher or lesson outstanding. But using their final test scores to measure this ignores the crucial soft elements that matter along the way. Ofsted requires an outstanding school to demonstrate “sustained progress which leads to outstanding achievement” – but the meaning of this is unclear. The students I have spoken to thought it meant high grades, but one teacher highlighted the example of helping a student with low self-esteem and confidence to achieve a pass. As far as inspectors are concerned, that would still be a low grade.
Ranking fever
The Conversation columnist Jacqueline Baxter writes that “educational accountability in England is an increasingly muddy system”. She goes on to suggest that the “whole system of accountability in education is worrying to say the least”.
A central part of this worry is the rise of accountability through “performativity” in the public sector – the reliance on the use of “hard” data to rank performance. In a factory making cans of soft drinks, this ranks the amount of cans made per day. If a new machine is introduced which makes more cans in the same amount of time, then performativity is used to measure that increase in output.
In relation to cans of drink, these such of performative measures work. But the performance of schools is much less easy to measure. Examination grades at first appear to be the most obvious way to assess, and compare, how well school X and school Y are doing. Yet, the two schools might be in completely different areas, serving completely different people.
Education researcher Stephen Ball suggests that there is a “tyranny of numbers” in the education system. From examining Ofsted’s guidelines, and the government’s recurring narrative for schools to be outstanding, I believe that there is also a tyranny of words – with the word outstanding the most tyrannical.
To be fair to the schools inspectorate, there is a lot of common sense in their inspection framework, but the emotional nuances of what makes outstanding teaching are completely absent from the documentation. We must spare some sympathy for inspectors trying to identify the emotional conditions which lead to an outstanding grade: it will obviously be difficult to find metrics that measure fun, smiling and love.
Yet I believe it is time for Ofsted to reconsider how its inspections and ratings reflect the essential emotional elements which underpin what makes a school or a teacher outstanding.
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How Technology is Changing the Way Children Think and Focus
Are your children prepared to think and focus for success in 21st century life?
Posted Dec 04, 2012
Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It’s what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting.
There is also little doubt that all of the new technologies, led by the Internet, are shaping the way we think in ways obvious and subtle, deliberate and unintentional, and advantageous and detrimental The uncertain reality is that, with this new technological frontier in its infancy and developments emerging at a rapid pace, we have neither the benefit of historical hindsight nor the time to ponder or examine the value and cost of these advancements in terms of how it influences our children’s ability to think.
There is, however, a growing body of research that technology can be both beneficial and harmful to different ways in which children think. Moreover, this influence isn’t just affecting children on the surface of their thinking. Rather, because their brains are still developing and malleable, frequent exposure by so-called digital natives to technology is actually wiring the brain(link is external) in ways very different than in previous generations. What is clear is that, as with advances throughout history, the technology that is available determines how our brains develops. For example, as the technology writer Nicholas Carr(link is external) has observed, the emergence of reading encouraged our brains to be focused and imaginative. In contrast, the rise of the Internet is strengthening our ability to scan information rapidly and efficiently.
The effects of technology on children are complicated, with both benefits and costs. Whether technology helps or hurts in the development of your children’s thinking depends on what specific technology is used and how and what frequency it is used. At least early in their lives, the power to dictate your children’s relationship with technology and, as a result, its influence on them, from synaptic activity to conscious thought.
Over the next several weeks, I’m going to focus on the areas in which the latest thinking and research has shown technology to have the greatest influence on how children think: attention, information overload, decision making(link is external), and memory(link is external)/learning. Importantly, all of these areas are ones in which you can have a counteracting influence on how technology affects your children.
Attention
You can think of attention as the gateway to thinking. Without it, other aspects of thinking, namely, perception, memory, language, learning, creativity(link is external), reasoning, problem solving, and decision making are greatly diminished or can’t occur at all. The ability of your children to learn to focus effectively and consistently lays the foundation for almost all aspects of their growth and is fundamental to their development into successful and happy people.
Attention has been found to be a highly malleable quality and most directly influenced by the environment(link is external) in which it is used. This selective attention can be found in the animal kingdom in which different species develop attentional skills that help them function and survive. For example, wolves, lions, tigers, and other predators have highly tuned visual attention that enables them to spot and track their prey. In contract, their prey, including deer and antelope, have well-developed auditory attention that allows them to hear approaching predators. In both cases, animals’ attentional abilities have developed based on the environment in which they live.
The same holds true for human development. Whether infant recognition of theirparents(link is external)’ faces or students paying attention in class, children’s immediate environment determines the kind of attention that they develop. In generations past, for example, children directed considerable amounts of their time to reading, an activity that offered few distractions and required intense and sustained attention, imagination, and memory. The advent of television altered that attention by offering children visual stimuli, fragmented attention, and little need for imagination. Then the Internet was invented and children were thrust into a vastly different environment in which, because distraction is the norm, consistent attention is impossible, imagination is unnecessary, and memory is inhibited.
Technology conditions the brain to pay attention to information very differently than reading. The metaphor that Nicholas Carr uses is the difference between scuba diving and jet skiing. Book reading is like scuba diving in which the diver is submerged in a quiet, visually restricted, slow-paced setting with few distractions and, as a result, is required to focus narrowly and think deeply on the limited information that is available to them. In contrast, using the Internet is like jet skiing, in which the jet skier is skimming along the surface of the water at high speed, exposed to a broad vista, surrounded by many distractions, and only able to focus fleetingly on any one thing.
In fact, studies(link is external) have shown that reading uninterrupted text results in faster completion and better understanding(link is external), recall, and learning than those who read text filled with hyperlinks and ads. Those who read a text-only version of a presentation, as compared to one that included video, found the presentation to be more engaging, informative, and entertaining, a finding contrary to conventional wisdom(link is external), to be sure. Additionally, contrary to conventional educational wisdom, students who were allowed Internet access during class didn’t recall the lecture nor did they perform as well on a test of the material as those who weren’t “wired” during class. Finally, reading develops reflection, critical thinking, problem solving, and vocabulary better than visual media.
Exposure to technology isn’t all bad. Research(link is external) shows that, for example, video games and other screen media improve visual-spatial capabilities, increase attentional ability, reaction times, and the capacity to identify details among clutter. Also, rather than making children stupid, it may just be making them different. For example, the ubiquitous use of Internet search engines is causing children to become less adept at remembering things and more skilled at remembering where to find things. Given the ease with which information can be find these days, it only stands to reason that knowing where to look is becoming more important for children than actually knowing something. Not having to retain information in our brain may allow it to engage in more “higher-order” processing such as contemplation, critical thinking, and problem solving.
What does all this mean for raising your children? The bottom line is that too much screen time and not enough other activities, such as reading, playing games, and good old unstructured and imaginative play, will result in your children having their brains wired in ways that may make them less, not more, prepared to thrive in this crazy new world of technology.
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Children under ten ‘should not own smartphones’
Survey finds that majority of parents believe that young children should not own smartphones
Children under the age of ten should not be allowed to own a smartphone, a majority of parents believe, according to a new survey
Internet Matters, a non-for-profit organisation working to keep the internet safe, found that 85 per cent of parents of primary school children want an age requirement enforced.
Currently, as many as 65 per cent of children aged between eight and 11 years old own a smartphone.
Newcastle has been nicknamed the “smartphone capital of Britain” – more than 90 per cent of eight to 11 year olds own a device.
Second is Nottingham at 90 per cent. London sees fewer young children owning smartphones at just 55 per cent. In Brighton just four out of ten children in that age bracket own such a device.
“With such a huge amount of young people owning smartphones and the acceptable age of doing so being 10, parents need to be more aware than ever of what their children are doing online,” Carolyn Bunting, General Manager at Internet Matters, told the Mirror.
Some experts have suggested apps should come with health warnings
“That’s why we have launched our brand new online safety guide, so that parents remember these safety precautions in their back to school shopping list for their children.
“We would urge parents to ensure they have the conversation with their children about how to be responsible on their phones and ensure that the safety settings are in place across all their devices and search engines.”
The survey was produced by Internet Matters as part of its Back to School e-safety advertising campaign, that includes a new online safety guide which helps parents keep their children safe online.