Finnish Quality Evaluation Discourse: Swimming Against the Global Tide?

Abstract

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.