11. Banning school fees Finland
British prime ministers waffle about social mobility: Finland’s Sanna Marin embodies it. Her path to the premiership at 34 began in a family shaped by divorce, deprivation and her father’s alcoholism. She had a job in a bakery at 15, but still became the first in her family to get to university—and from there, to the top.
This inspirational tale might seem freakish to Brits, when a third of our leaders started out at the same pricey school as Boris Johnson. But then Finland is always near the top of the table in social mobility data, and poor Finnish children can expect to climb the income ladder faster than their counterparts in Britain and elsewhere.
So what are they doing right? By its nature social mobility unfolds slowly: the relevant decisions were taken long ago. Back in the 1960s, private educational institutions loomed large, but were then brought within a reformed state system. Charging fees for the basic education that leads to qualifications was banned. An outright bar on independent schools could clash with civil liberties, but note that in Finland private establishments are not banned: a small number exist. The funding, however, is public. There is also a profit ban, something Sweden’s Social Democrats are now interested in mimicking, thus clamping down on the free schools that inspired England’s Gove revolution.
Why? Because it transpires that in the “bog- standard” schools of Finland, standards are not only more equal across schools, but also among the very highest in Europe.