When Finland's finance minister Riikka Purra (Finns) revealed her draft budget proposal on Wednesday, her plans to abolish the Finnish National Agency for Education garnered much attention and reaction.
Minna Kelhä, director general of the agency — which is known as Opetushallitus (OPH) in Finnish — told Yle that Purra's suggestion came as a complete surprise.
"Yes, it did, and also as a bit of a shock," Kelhä said, adding, "Especially since there is a project underway to merge ten Finnish education administration agencies into five. Parliament approved this just before the summer holidays."
Under Purra's proposal, the agency's activities would be transferred to the Ministry of Education and Culture. This means that, instead of being an independent authority as it is now — with freedom to prepare Finland's school curricula — its operations could in future be under political guidance.
"If all the legislation and the implementation of that legislation and all other educational development were in the same agency or ministry, it is difficult to see how it would not have any impact," Kelhä noted.
Finns Party criticised agency's "woke ideology"
Minister Purra's announcement on Wednesday of her plans to abolish OPH come in the wake of sustained criticism in recent months levelled at the agency from members of her own party.
In a statement issued in June, seven Finns Party MPs — including party deputy chair Teemu Keskisarja — accused the agency of spreading "woke ideology".
The term "woke" generally refers to having an awareness of social and political injustices, particularly in relation to race, gender, sexual orientation as well as other forms of discrimination.
"It cannot be that the leading expert agency in Finnish education is sharing intersectional pseudo-information on its website about ‘anti-racism’, ‘microaggressions’, ‘white normativity’ and ‘cisnormativity’. Producing such fashionable nonsense underestimates the intelligence of teachers and erodes the credibility of OPH as an expert agency," the statement by the seven Finns Party MPs said.
Joakim Vigelius, another Finns Party deputy chair, told Yle's Ykkösaamu breakfast TV show on Thursday that in his view OPH has tried to interfere too much with teachers’ freedom to decide on the content of their own lessons.
"Teachers have extensive autonomy in Finland, but unfortunately OPH has issued regulations and guidelines that aim to interfere with an individual teacher's opportunities to teach," Vigelius said, but did not specify which regulations and guidelines he was referring to.
He did however further criticise the agency for failing to develop Finnish education in line with other countries, citing Finland's drop down the PISA rankings as well as the increasing use of smartphones in the classroom.
"OPH should also be responsible for supporting the development of every school's learning environment to the right level, but over the past 10–20 years, our learning environments have become even worse," he said.
How much will abolishing the agency save?
OPH director general Minna Kelhä declined to comment to Yle on whether there is any political or ideological motivation behind Purra's plans to abolish the agency.
However, she did note that if the objective is to achieve savings for the state — as the government looks to find another one billion euros to balance Finland's books — abolishing the education agency was not going to make much of a difference.
"OPH offers a very wide range of different services. If these services are to be maintained, then of course it would not result in huge savings," Kelhä pointed out.
"When this process of merging agencies is already underway, which will come into effect at the beginning of next year and is intended to achieve administrative savings, I do not see it as reasonable in that sense to make such a new decision now, which would then happen again in a year," she said.
Kelhä further noted however that it is currently difficult to assess the full effects of Purra's proposal because the agency has yet to receive any information about why the decision has been made and what the potential savings might be.
