When it comes to aspirational education models, Finland used to be all the rage. For years, policymakers and journalists flocked through Helsinki Airport in search of the elixir that fuelled the country’s success in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa).

I know, because I was one of those journalists: in 2008, I made my way to various places of learning in Finland, where a succession of baffled educators - who really didn’t think they were doing anything that special - explained how they went about their work and whether this might explain the lofty Pisa scores.

Now, however, Finland has been usurped as Europe’s star Pisa performer by its smaller neighbour just across the Baltic Sea: Estonia.

In the most recent round of Pisa data, in December 2023, Estonia was top in Europe for maths and science, and second (behind Ireland) for reading. Then, in June 2024, it emerged that Estonia had also come out on top in Europe for a Pisa test of creative thinking.

Search online for the reasons behind this success and you’ll find plenty of slightly breathless reports proffering a grab bag of reasons - but what does the person overseeing it all have to say?

Kristina Kallas is Estonia’s minister of education and research - and leader of the centrist, pro-European Eesti 200 party. She says the country’s success cannot be separated from the fact that education is the “core basis of national identity”.

“Being Estonian means being educated,” she argues.

Importance of education in Estonia

She sees similarity between Estonia and high-performing education systems in Asia: education is “seen as a resource for social and human capital development”, so the curriculum is “very ambitious” and hard work is prized.

“Estonian people still believe that education brings you a better life, so parents are ready to invest a lot of personal resources into the education of their children,” she explains.

When Geoff Masters, an international adviser on curriculum and assessment reform, analysed Estonian education’s success, he noted that, upon independence (Estonia separated from the Soviet Union in 1991), the country had “no world-class industries and few natural resources” and so “looked to education to bolster its economy, enhance national identity and productivity, build and preserve its democratic institutions and processes”.

This strong, respected education system, explains Kallas, “created the state”; school leaders and teachers were at the forefront of the independence movement - so woe betide anyone who’s got it in for teachers.

“The worst nightmare that a minister of education can have in life is a teacher strike, because the whole society will be behind teachers unconditionally and you’re completely alone,” says Kallas. Estonian teachers went on a rare strike on 21 January 2024 over pay - but everything was resolved eight days later.

The continued unity of purpose around education in Estonia - which has a population of about 1.35 million - makes Kallas’ role quite different to that of education ministers in many other countries, where competing ideologies and gaping political divides are common.

In Estonia, she says, just about everyone, regardless of political allegiance, is broadly behind the country’s approach in education.

“There is no political fight over education,” says Kallas, who spoke with Tes towards the end of January.

Her role, then, is less about staking out ideological or pedagogical territory than managing the finer, practical details of the education system: deciding on the fairest allocation of funding, working out how to ensure the curriculum is of a high standard, calibrating the best ways to gauge success.

Kallas stresses that it is not the government’s job to decide, for example, on teaching approaches or how schools hire teachers: “We don’t do ideological interference,” she says.

Teacher autonomy, as Pisa has highlighted, is “very fundamental to the system”.

Kallas has heard of many countries where teachers complain that they are restricted in the choices they can make about how to educate their pupils, which, for her, prompts existential questions about the nature of teaching and the purpose of teachers.

Teachers’ freedom

If teachers’ freedom to decide how to teach is “undermined very, very significantly”, and “if the teacher cannot make any pedagogical decisions, because they have to wait for every decision to be decided somewhere at the top” then, she asks, “Who is this person?” Are they “just a clerk” or a “pedagogical professional”?

For the latter to be true, she says, those in power must “keep the pedagogical decisions on the closest level to the child possible” - teachers’ work, in short, must revolve around the needs of children, not policymakers.

‘Being Estonian means being educated’

There is broad agreement, too, about what early education should look like and so policymakers stay out of on-the-ground decisions there, too. Compulsory, school-based education does not start until age 7 - among the latest in the world - but preschool education is very accessible and affordable, with around 90 per cent of children attending.

This is broadly comparable to preschool attendance in the UK: in 2023, take-up of funded early learning and childcare places in Scotland was at 97 per cent for children aged 3 and 4, while in England, 83 per cent of three-year-olds and 91 per cent of four-year-olds were “receiving formal childcare”.

“Our preschool is not the place where you develop children’s academic skills and knowledge - it is a place where you focus on social skills and self-management,” Kallas says.

Early years in Estonia

The Estonian preschool approach to literacy and numeracy, she adds, is in tune with children’s natural developmental progress. So, for example, the formal teaching of reading starts in school at age 7. Before that, children will be helped to recognise letters and numbers; they may be able to do multiplication up to the 5 times table and read words of one or two syllables.

“In order to develop reading skills, the children have to have self-management skills first, so the kindergarten is very much focused on [being] capable of planning your learning,” she explains.

In terms of accountability, the country is very clear on its stance around admissions. Kallas says that, despite her party’s liberalism, “the only place where I’m not liberal is when it comes to the school district residence area”.

Children from different socioeconomic backgrounds belong in the same school, she says, and “we don’t segregate inside of the school either, we don’t do any academic performance segregation until they are 16”.

There are only a handful of schools that deviate in any way from the principle that all children, regardless of academic performance, should be educated together.

Estonia, Kallas believes, is taking both a morally and scientifically sound approach, given that the human brain develops until people are in their twenties.

“Levelling up is something that is fundamentally important in education, and education needs to be a social lift for those who would break the vicious circle of social class,” she says.

Meanwhile, Estonia’s approach to inspection is evolving. Maie Kitsing, an adviser at the Ministry of Education and Research and co-author of Lessons from Estonia’s Education Success Story, says that when she moved from teaching to the civil service 23 years ago, there were 100 staff who dealt with school inspection; now it is 10.

The focus now is on “thematic” inspections that provide overviews of key aspects of the education system, with standards in schools monitored and maintained through self-evaluation.

The ministry is not there to tell individual schools where they are going wrong, Kitsing explains; a bigger priority is to provide rich data so that schools can work out for themselves where to improve.

Standardised testing

As for exams, a perception has grown that Estonia is light in this area. There are certainly fewer exams than in England.

During the “basic education” from grade 1 (age 7-8) to grade 9 (15-16), there is standardised testing at grade 4 (10-11) and grade 7 (13-14).

Right at the end of the basic education come the first exams - three in total, in Estonian, maths and an elective subject - which are used to determine whether a student goes down a more academic or vocational path.

The secondary education stage - from grade 10 (16-17) to grade 12 (18-19) - culminates in state exams in Estonian, maths and a foreign language, which must be passed to graduate and progress on to higher education.

This is where Estonia sees the jostling for position of schools and families that is familiar in many countries. League tables are compiled and used by parents to weigh up where they want their children to be schooled, a choice that becomes available only at secondary level.

This jars with a widespread view in Estonia that Masters articulates: mental health problems are believed to be “aggravated by a school system that is strongly competitive and results-oriented, at least for some students”.

Perhaps because of that, there is now a legal requirement to provide students with access to a psychologist if necessary, and there has been a drive to improve access to counselling.

As for special educational needs and disabilities, schools must provide access to a speech and language therapist if needed. There is also a requirement for every child to reach a 50 per cent threshold in the grade 9 exams, which means that teachers spend a lot of time ensuring that struggling students, whatever their needs, do not fall behind.

Supporting struggling pupils

Kallas says this results in a “very low percentage of underperforming children” - while conceding that there is a lively public debate about whether the threshold should be ditched and more attention paid to those students likely to excel in exams.

When headteachers weigh up the effort and resources devoted to strugglers, she says, “some would like to have no threshold so that they don’t have to make this extreme effort”.

But she has few such doubts: “It’s a national choice of how you build your education system and what you are expecting out of it - and in Estonia, we expect equity, we expect that the education system is a social lift. We redistribute our education financing quite heavily from the richer regions to the poorer regions.”

‘The mobile phone is a learning tool as much as a whiteboard is’

Tech equity is also an important consideration. While Kallas sees a need to explore any connections between smartphones and deteriorating mental health - more specifically, excessive gaming or use of social media - she is steadfastly against any notion of a ban in schools.

“We believe in Estonia that the mobile phone is a learning tool as much as a whiteboard, notebook or paper and pen,” she says.

The country has long “embraced technology rather than cancelling it from the school”, she says - its 1997 Tiigrihüpe (Tiger Leap) programme saw heavy investment in computer and network infrastructure.

“We connected all our schools to the internet very fast, and locked the internet in, and that brought fundamental change to the way we study and learn,” says Kallas, who sees the harnessing of new technology, such as smartphones and artificial intelligence, as the next step in that tradition.

Estonia is not immune, of course, to the issues that are occurring globally in education. While Kallas says attendance is not a concern, Kitsing, the education ministry adviser, says that recruitment is. “Young people are not interested in being teachers,” she says.

Her view is that young people want “more flexibility in their life” than is allowed by the “very strict rules” and rigid timetables of Estonian schools; a 2018 survey by the ministry found that a low - albeit rising - number of Estonian teachers think their profession is valued by society.

Teaching ‘unattractive’ to young Estonians

Masters’ analysis, meanwhile, found that “relatively low rates of remuneration have made teaching a less attractive career for today’s younger Estonians” and that the “prestige of the profession is diminishing”.

In 2020, the Parliament agreed to an annual salary increase of almost 46 per cent over four years, yet “teaching remains relatively unattractive to young Estonians, especially males, who see greater career prospects elsewhere, including in technology industries”.

The government is currently most concerned with finding ways to address teacher shortages in maths and science, and in rural areas.

However, Kallas says the biggest challenge of all is one unique to Estonia: a parallel system of Russian-language schools inside the Estonian border - 183 miles of which is with Russia - that accounts for around a fifth of the country’s pupils, in around 70 out of 500 schools.

There have been ongoing attempts over the decades to bring the two systems closer and “Russian aggression against Ukraine has accelerated this integration process”.

It has been proving “quite painful” to combine the two systems, given that, as well as a language divide, the culture and “pedagogical traditions” in the Russian schools can be markedly more traditionalist in their approach.

Now, though, Russian-language instruction is due to be phased out of schools by 2030 - with much of the resistance melting away after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Teachers are the ‘gold reserve’

Ultimately, then, as with other supposedly “model” education systems, what you find when you look beyond the headlines at Estonia is a complex web of factors contributing to success that it is difficult to unpick and transport elsewhere.

What works in Estonia is likely to be closely tied to the context of the Estonian system as a whole.

But Kallas does feel one essential principle should be ubiquitous across all systems, she says: “Teachers are the absolute epicentre of the whole education system - it’s the gold reserve that you have.”

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