Birth Rate Has Been Declining For A Long Time#

The birth rate began to decline sharply in the last decade, and apart from a small corona spike, the figures have not recovered. According to the forecast, there will be almost 100,000 fewer students attending comprehensive school in 2040 than now.

At the end of last year, just under 11 per cent of the Finnish population spoke a foreign language. According to forecasts, the number of children under the age of 15 who speak a foreign language or have a foreign language background will increase by approximately 86,000 by 2040.

In Vantaa, over 40 per cent of the 515 students at Rajakylä School are foreign speakers. The range of home languages is quite large, around 30.

Just a few years ago, there were few foreign speakers in Rajakylä, while there were many in the neighboring Länsimäki School. The Vantaa Education Board decided to resolve the situation so that all grades 1–4 are now in Rajakylä, and grades 5–9 in Länsimäki.

Principal Päivi Viljamaa says that the school is doing well. Even the foreign-speaking students are a heterogeneous group. Some have only lived in the country for a short time.

“Teachers spend quite a lot of time working with parents if Finnish is not working. Not all parents can necessarily read or write, and that is of course something we have to answer for,” said Viljamaa.

Finland is in even worse trouble than other Nordic countries. The birth rate is even lower than our neighbors and immigration is lower. In addition, people are moving from the countryside to the cities more rapidly than in other Nordic countries.

The school network in Finland has already become sparser, especially in remote and small municipalities.

In the small municipality of Karijoki in South Ostrobothnia, there is only one primary school. The upper secondary school is organised jointly with neighbouring Kristiinankaupunki.

Last year, three children were born in Karijoki. Immigration is hoped to help the school survive, but there are no guarantees.

“At the current birth rate, the forecast is that in 2030 there will be only 38 schoolchildren in Karijoki. At that point, we will have to seriously consider how education will be organised. Alternatives include school cooperation with a neighbouring municipality or pupils attending primary school in a neighbouring municipality,” says municipal leader Marko Keski-Sikkilä.

Muurame municipality near to Jyväskylä, which has benefited from migration is doing well.

But even there, the decline in age groups is clearly visible. There are over 190 pupils in the ninth grade and less than a hundred in the eighth grade.

Director of Education Jukka Koivisto says that teaching has been concentrated in the city centre area at Mäkelänmäki Puukoulu. In addition, there are Isolahti and Kinkomaa schools and Nisulanmäki High School.

“We are doing reasonably well in this situation, but we must be really concerned about the number of children nationwide, so that we continue to get good taxpayers for the country,” says Koivisto.

New Tricks To Be Invented#

A changing comprehensive school is also a money hole.

“In euro terms, basic education has become more expensive in rural municipalities than in municipalities with a more densely populated population and a larger number of children,” says researcher Jukka-Pekka Jänkälä from the Study and Education Research Foundation in Ottus.

In rural areas, more and more money is spent on school transport. In the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, recruitment is increasing costs, because one teacher is no longer enough to run the daily lives of 20 students, especially in classes with a large number of immigrants.

The University of Jyväskylä carried out a study commissioned by the Ministry of Education and Culture. Research Professor Taina Saarinen emphasises that different solutions must be found for the problems of schools, because schools and municipalities are different.

As an example, she cites distance learning, which has a bad reputation after the corona years.

Distance learning can also be communal, says Saarinen.

The techniques are already in use.

Five years ago, in Vantaa, multilingual instructors were hired for schools to handle cooperation between home and school in particular. Artificial intelligence translates messages into any language.

In Ylitornio in Lapland, distance learning is used. In this case, a teacher teaches at one school, and at the other school, a school attendance assistant remotely monitors that the connections are working and that things are going smoothly.

“In addition, the municipality has made use of a mobile class teacher who goes to two different schools. So a total of three teachers run two schools,” says Hanna Lintupuro, Director of Education in Ylitornio.

Some children living on the municipal border go to school in a neighboring municipality, for example in Rovaniemi. At least there are more peers in larger schools.

“We have to remember the child’s best interests, not just clinging to their own small school tooth and nail,” says Lintupuro.

Source: Yle (in Finnish)