Blending and building with the world’s best by Natalia Noone-Jones

BLENDING AND BUILDING WITH THE WORLD’S BEST

School’s in for NATALIA NOONE-JONES in other parts of the world.

Classrooms across the world can give us lessons on other ways to learn.

Finnish, Norwegian, German and UK schools are some of the best in the world and operate differently to our schools.

There’s something we can learn from these countries and can implement in our education system, to be more successful in teaching students. Some parts of schooling will be more successful than others. I am comparing five countries, including New Zealand to see what parts of education work better than others. I have chosen to look into how schooling works in each of these countries and find some common trends between them all.

NCEA is not working well for Kiwi students. I’m looking to some of the best to find out what we can change. A census in 2018 shows that 18.2 percent of people in New Zealand have no qualifications, 32.4 percent have Level 1, 2 or 3 qualifications and 49.4 percent have higher education. Māori statistics are much worse. 25.3 percent of Māori in NZ have no qualifications, 42.6 percent have level 1, 2 or 3 qualifications and only 32.1 percent have University Level qualifications. This means Māori are not being educated to the same standard as everyone else in New Zealand.

Norway in particular is credited with having a good education system because they strongly believe everyone should have the same access to education regardless of socio-economic background. Finland, Norway and German schools have free public schooling for everyone everywhere, including universities. is that universities cost money making it difficult for some of the population to get any higher education. I believe if public universities were free, we would see more balanced statistics between Māori and the rest of the population, and more people would get a better education. At the moment, not everyone has access to a good education, which is something I believe everyone has a right to. Those with an interest in learning and exploring their areas of interests and making a career out of it may not get the chance solely because of the financial situation of their parents. Money is not the only reason Kiwis aren’t being educated. Even though Norway has free universities, not even one in every third person in Norway has a higher education, and it tends to be children of uneducated families kept out of universities.

Though New Zealand’s higher education rates are good compared to the rest of the OECD, making education free will boost our aim to get more people into universities. High schools don’t seem to be pushing some students enough, while others get left behind. School is a lot of work and a little break every day, five days a week. It can be dragged out, tiring and for some people seem pointless. A new perspective on schooling might be what New Zealand needs.

Schools in Norway run from 8:15am to 1:10pm or 1:15 depending on the age of the pupil. Children start school at the age of 6 and finish at the age of 19, while some students may leave any time after the age of 16, and the last year of their upper secondary (high school) is optional like ours. Public universities are free even for international students, no one will be robbed of being able to follow their passion because of money. There is no mandatory testing until lower secondary (age 13), which means schools are focused on learning rather than results. Schools have one lunch and two recesses in a day, even with such short days. Some of our schools only have a total of an hour break in 6 hours of working. Though it seems like schools with such little learning time wouldn’t get much done, the statistics show their program is working with adult literacy at more than 99 percent and school expectancy for a five-year-old at 17.7 years. In Norway, the student-to-teacher ratio is 11.6 to 1. In Norwegian primary schools, the maximum number of students in a class is 28, and it is 30 for lower secondary (intermediate).

A typical school day in Finland starts between 9 and 9:45 and ends between 2 and 2:45, which is almost the length of a New Zealand school day. Compulsory schooling starts at 7 and ends at 18, meaning 12 years of compulsory schooling. Upper secondary school (high school) comprises three years of mandatory and three years of vocational learning. Finland’s focus is said to be on giving everyone an equal education. Education in Finland reflects its ‘free and relaxed way of life.’ Finland is the third highest in the Education Ranking by Countries in 2021 and it has the highest rate of high school completion in the world.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report says Finland has the best-developed education system in the world. In Finland 2017, the average class size for a Primary school was 20 students,