Pasi Sahlberg: Scotland has world-class education but not for everyone

In this exclusive interview, Sahlberg speaks to Herald education writer, James McEnaney and offers an international perspective on the state of Scottish schools. 

You are an internationally recognised expert on education who also has experience of Scotland as a member of the government’s International Council of Education Advisers. What do you tell people when they ask you about Scottish education? 

My answer to your question is, first of all, I'm not Scottish and I have never lived or work there. I've never had my own children in your schools. So, I don't have lived experience there, my view is more of an international observer - somebody who's deeply rooted in the European values and culture.  

People often ask me: 'So where are the interesting things happening in education? Where are the good ideas to improve the whole education system?’ I always have two or three countries in mind that I know well and I can comfortably say that if you visit them you'll see positive things and you'll see many more good things in education than negative ones. Scotland is one of them. 

Scotland for me is one of the strong education systems that is built on humanistic values, such as children’s rights and social justice.  

I think Scotland has a world-class education...but not for everyone. The big challenge is how to make education more equitable. 

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It is very common to hear people argue that we need to be ‘more like Finland’, especially in terms of improving our performance in the PISA league tables. What did your country do in order to perform so well in PISA tests, and should Scotland copy any policies in order to help achieve the same thing?  

First of all: get rid of any ‘copying from others’ mindset. If we know one thing about education systems it is that they are not very good travellers – they don’t move from one place to another very well. There have been many efforts during the last twenty years globally to try to copy Finnish education – for example in the Middle East, China, India and other places – and it never works as planned.  

What took Finland top of the league tables? Well, it looked a lot like the educational development and improvement that has been underway in Scotland recently.  

I was just reading the most recent National Improvement Framework and there’s a lot in it that reminds me about Finland in its journey to success earlier. 

For example, starting from the clear purpose and values of education, and engaging not only teachers and parents but also young people as part of this, are what Finland was doing 25 years ago. There is a strong focus on bringing equity more and more to the centre of education policies. Health and wellbeing (especially now, post-Covid) are seen as integral and inclusive, not just something for the kids who are at risk but for everyone. 

All of those things were, and still are, centrepieces of Finnish education.  

So if Scotland is already moving in the same direction as Finland was, where else might we find solutions to some of the problems that we are still facing?  

The solutions for how to improve the system already exist within it.  

You have some of the leading academics and education experts and very experienced leaders there who know what to do. My view is positive and optimistic when it comes to Scotland.  

But I do think there’s still room for further work in truly understanding what equity of education is and how to improve it in practice. What does it really mean?  

Equity in education is often seen in terms of what needs to be done to close the achievement gaps or make sure that equity funds and resources are allocated to the most disadvantaged schools or communities. But I think equity is a much broader issue than that. It also includes other public policy sectors.  

Excellence is easy to understand as higher student outcomes, but equity is more complicated to understand and define in exact way.  

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Lots of people think that the big issue in Scotland right now is that the curriculum has failed and that we should just 'fix' that. Do you think that would work?  

The frustrating thing in Scotland is that Curriculum for Excellence has been going on for almost 20 years now and people had high expectations that the curriculum would change everything and take Scotland to where Finland was – but everyone knows that curriculum alone is not the thing that will elevate countries’ educational performance. It’s all the other things that come with the curriculum. 

In the Finnish system in the 1990s it wasn’t the curriculum that changed things but rather what the curriculum encouraged and enabled schools to do. One of the things I’ve been saying often is that your schools could do more than you actually let them do, because of the inspectorate approach and the control mentality that is still there.  

The driving force in Finland in the 1990s was the new curriculum culture: it was a kind of engine of improvement precisely because it required schools to take ownership, show leadership and to think about how to build a self-improving education system.  

I think that’s why I admire Scottish education– it reminds me a little bit of the 1990s reform climate in Finland where there was the kind of systematic, value-based, purpose-driven, evidence-informed ethos that I see also in Scotland.  

Change is not easy or fast – that’s another Finnish lesson. Many people think the Finland just figured out the secret and then everything changed overnight. It took 25 years to build the new education system and the culture within it. I think that Scotland may be on the same kind of journey now.  

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Finally, you’re on the other side of the world now, but if life brought you to back to Scotland long-term would you worry about your own kids going to school here?  

That is indeed a test question. 

I’ve seen maybe 20 to 30 schools in Scotland during my time there and they’re not necessarily perfect but nor are they in in Finland or here in Australia – even good schools always have something that you can say you would like to see be done differently.  

But if you insist on an answer, I would say that knowing what I know, I would be confident as a parent to see my kids in a government school in Scotland.