Individualized Service Provision and Lessons from Special Education in Finland

Scholars have commented widely on the success of the Finnish education system. Finnish fifteen-year-olds regularly outperform their peers in other advanced countries in the demanding PISA tests of reading, mathematics, problem solving, and scientific knowledge. The distribution of these results is notable: the variance or divergence from the mean result of individual students’ results is smaller in Finland than in any other country, as is the variance of the performance between individual schools. While each quintile in the Finnish distribution of science scores outperform the corresponding quintile in other countries, it is the bottom quintile of Finnish students who outperform the most, and thereby raises the mean to the top of the international league tables.

Understanding how the Finnish schools produce these results is thus likely to shed significant light not only on the conditions for success of primary and secondary schools—a fundamental building block of the new welfare state—but also on the encompassing question of how to institutionalize effective capacitating services.

This talk explores the practices and the institutions that make them possible in relation to the general task of organizing individualized service provision in the new welfare state. We make no pretense of offering an exhaustive account of the Finnish school system or the new type of institution it exemplifies. Our focus is on the lessons to be learned from what has been achieved, and on what is to be learned to achieve more.