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While the Finnish education system has been celebrated for promoting equality, recent reports point to problems concerning racism within Finnish schools. Kristín Loftsdóttir suggests looking at racism from three angles: everyday racism, prior immobility, and structural racism. This chapter draws on this idea, showing how racism is present in Finnish school textbooks in history, social science and geography. Many textbooks seem to deviate from the curricular core values of equality by portraying the West as superior to the rest of the world. This is visible in different ways. While old racist or colonial words are removed from textbooks, the perspective may still only promote a Western worldview. Changes in textbooks might stay on a superficial level, rather than reaching the epistemological perspective. History textbook passages about colonial times might include images of racist caricatures to express the explicit racism of this era. Similar caricatures are being removed from consumer products, and we might ask whether they belong to history teaching, particularly if they do not encourage a discussion about continued racism. Using textbooks with racist content requires that teachers are aware of racism. The teacher needs to know how to lead critical reflection, while keeping the classroom safe from racist remarks. During a pandemic, when students are alone with textbooks, there is a particular concern about the democratic task of educating for anti-racism. This is especially important in a world largely influenced by a media discourse that makes certain racist opinions unremarked or seen as a matter of common sense.

Finland has, rather successfully, promoted an image of itself as a model of educational excellence and linguistic equity. This chapter problematises this image by analysing Finnish language education policies at the comprehensive school level. For our analysis we use a three-fold understanding of access as; (a) having the opportunity to participate in language education (getting in); (b) participating in education that is meaningful and effective for the pupil (getting it); and (c) receiving credentials that are societally legitimate and valuable assets (getting out). We elaborate on each aspect of access by debunking three myths for the Finnish context that: (a) Multilingualism is politically valued; (b) the curriculum promotes multilingual education; and (c) the education system offers equal opportunities to all, regardless of language. We conclude with a mixed picture. While initiatives have been put in place to expand participation in language learning and develop multilingual pedagogies, the societal status of national languages and constitutional bilingualism have also, somewhat paradoxically, strengthened monolingual ideologies. Such ideologies have contributed to the erasure of Indigenous and autochthonous languages from education and minimise the position of allochthonous (migrant) languages in curriculum and education. We propose several reforms in teacher education and a more systematic, long term, national supervision of (language) education policy in the service of equitable multilingual education.

This chapter discusses Finnish quality evaluation in comprehensive education, recognising that it frequently differs from that used by the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) in most countries. Instead of high-stakes testing of pupil achievement, monitoring or school inspection, Finnish quality evaluation (QE) rests mainly on sample-based national testing and self-evaluations conducted in schools and municipalities. The argument presented here is that, although reform of the Finnish education system has often taken a different path from other countries, at the level of discourse, the Finnish system is increasingly caught between the more usual approach to QE and the Finnish variant approach. This follows an analysis of the emergence and formation of the present quality evaluation discourse, consisting of historical layers of discursive practices of school-based development, performance and market-oriented quality. Between the rationalities of these discursive practices but also in relation to recent political concerns about the QE system, it remains to be seen to what extent the Finnish system is able to resist the power of the discourse into which global ideas and rationalities of quality evaluation have been imprinted.

Although Finland still has a relatively low proportion of students with a migrant background, it has not been able to ensure that immigrants and their descendants have equal educational opportunities. Education could enhance integration but migrant backgrounds have a persistent impact. In this chapter, our focus is on post-comprehensive educational decision-making processes of immigrant origin adolescent girls, with the viewpoint of the multifaceted intertwinement of gender and ethnicity. We conceptualise the educational decisions as negotiations that adolescents have to have with their families, teachers, counsellors and peers. Within these negotiations, the negotiating parties try to push the adolescent to choose those educational paths they see valued and preferred, and away from the choices they see as unfitting or less valued. As the girls ‘negotiate their identities according to situational contexts’, their agency is constructed with ongoing and reflective negotiations with other people. In this chapter, we show how adolescent girls with an immigrant background in Finland face quite similar difficulties as ethnic minorities in other European and Nordic countries when continuing their education from compulsory education. We also illustrate with three ‘transitional stories’ the key challenges that girls with immigrant backgrounds encounter when making their educational decisions and integrating to education: structural boundaries, social boundaries and acculturation.