By OECD Director for Education and Skills Andreas Schleicher
For much of the first two decades of this century, if you wanted to see the future of education, you bought a ticket to Helsinki.
Ministers came. Researchers came. Journalists came. Delegations arrived carrying notebooks, cameras and one overriding question: What is Finland doing that the rest of us are not?
And there was plenty to admire. Here was a country that seemed to have achieved what education systems everywhere claimed to want but rarely managed to deliver: high academic performance reconciled with the well-being of students; a high level of coherence in outcomes with the closest school usually also being the best school; strong teachers without intrusive teacher accountability; serious learning without turning childhood into an examination marathon.
Finland appeared to have squared the circle. Its schools were beautiful learning spaces. Its teachers were trusted. Students spent less time studying than many of their international peers and nevertheless achieved remarkable results. In the early rounds of PISA, Finland was at or near the top of the world in reading, mathematics and science.
The world understandably wanted the recipe. But education systems are not recipes. They are ecosystems, and ecosystems change. Finland in 2026 is different from Finland in 2001.
The quality of teachers remains impressive. Schools remain exceptionally well equipped. The commitment to educating the whole child remains deeply embedded in educational culture. Finnish schools still contain the workshops, laboratories, music rooms, sports facilities and practical learning environments that remind us that education is about developing human beings, not merely producing test scores.
And yet something has changed. Student learning outcomes have fallen sharply. The decline did not begin with COVID-19. It stretches much further back. Finland’s once extraordinary advantage over other countries has disappeared.
The easiest explanation – that Finland simply stopped doing what made it successful – is also the least useful one. Finnish teachers did not suddenly become less capable. Schools did not suddenly become impoverished. Finnish society did not wake up one morning and decide that education no longer mattered.
Instead, dozens of small changes began interacting with one another over the last decade. Technology entered classrooms. Social media entered childhood and smartphones colonised attention. Schools became larger and more complex. Inclusion created not just opportunities but also challenging demands for teachers, reflected in a 23% increase in the variability of student performance within schools. Efforts to build a holistic and interdisciplinary curriculum led to confusion and stretched the role of teachers. Academic rigour increasingly took a back seat to the promise of well-being. The almost sole reliance on the professional judgment of teachers – at a rate that is twice the OECD average – began to lose traction when more diverse classrooms required greater system-level leadership and more objective metrics. The share of students who feel socially connected in school declined. Families and parenting changed. The traditionally strong partnership between schools and families began to weaken, visible in a 21-percentage point drop in the share of students whose parents proactively discuss their child’s progress with teachers.
None of these developments alone explains Finland’s trajectory, but together they may. Change one gear in a machine and you can predict what the other gears will do. Change one element in an education system and families respond, teachers adapt, students behave differently, political priorities shift and society itself moves on.
Education is less like engineering and more like gardening. The soil matters, the climate matters, the gardener matters. But so do forces beyond anyone’s control.
That is why Finland’s experience should interest people beyond Finland. The important question is not simply “What happened to Finnish education?” but rather “What is happening to childhood, learning and schooling in the twenty-first century?”
Consider just four dates. 2004: Facebook appears. 2007: the iPhone arrives. 2020: COVID-19 closes schools across much of the world. 2022: generative AI enters everyday life. Each represents more than a technological or historical milestone. Together they mark a transformation in the environment in which young people grow up.
For most of human history, information was scarce and attention was abundant. Today’s information is abundant and attention is scarce. That may be one of the most consequential reversals education has ever faced. A school can provide a child with a laptop, but it cannot guarantee that the laptop fosters concentration. It can provide access to the world’s knowledge, but it cannot guarantee curiosity. It can remove difficulty, but it cannot manufacture agency and perseverance. It can make learning more entertaining, but it cannot ensure that students learn to do things that are not entertaining.
And then AI raised the stakes again. For the first time, students have at their fingertips technologies that can not only retrieve information but summarise it, explain it, translate it, write about it and, increasingly, reason with it. That could become the greatest learning accelerator humanity has invented, or the greatest shortcut undercutting learning. The difference will not be determined by the technology; it will be determined by education.
Student well-being matters. But well-being cannot mean shielding young people from the very struggle that learning embodies. It should mean asking the harder questions of which capabilities we are trying to build, and when technology strengthens them rather than substituting for the effort required to develop them. In an age obsessed with speed, convenience and efficiency, not every difficulty should be eliminated. Struggle is productive and failure is an opportunity for growth. Some slowness is educational. The few minutes spent searching for the right word, wrestling with a difficult paragraph, constructing an argument or correcting a mistake may look inefficient – but they may be exactly when learning is taking place. The decisive question is not how much thinking AI can do for students, but how much thinking students still need to do in order to become capable thinkers themselves.
There is another dimension. Teacher quality in Finland appears to have remained strong, but the environment in which teachers teach has changed profoundly. That should give policymakers everywhere pause for thought. For years, education debates have asked how to improve teachers. Perhaps we should spend more time asking how to improve the conditions in which learning takes place and good teachers work. How much of their day is actually available to work with students? How much genuine authority do they have? How much administrative friction surrounds them? How much responsibility can schools reasonably absorb from families and society? And how do we preserve the human relationships at the heart of learning as schools and classrooms become ever more complex and embedded in technology?
The Finland of 2001 cannot simply be copied in 2026 because the world of 2001 no longer exists. Nor should anyone conclude that Finland somehow got education wrong because its PISA scores declined. Many of the qualities that at first attracted the world’s attention – professional teachers, social trust, broad curricula, strong public institutions and a commitment to equity – remain important assets.
The lesson is different. Past success is not immunity from future change. Indeed, success often makes adaptation harder. When an education system becomes internationally celebrated, yesterday’s solutions can quietly become tomorrow’s assumptions. Practices created for one social and technological environment may persist even as that environment changes around them.
The most successful systems therefore need not just the capacity to learn. They also need the courage to unlearn. To ask which principles remain timeless and which practices have reached their expiry date. To distinguish innovations that genuinely deepen learning from those that merely modernise its appearance. To understand that caring for students sometimes means supporting them – but often also means challenging them.
That is why Finland still matters. Twenty-five years ago, the world looked north and asked: What can we learn from Finland? The question now is: What can Finland – and all of us – learn from what has changed?
That is a much harder question. And, for the future of education, a far more important one.
