If you look at the 15 year olds or 16 year old Finns who are leaving this basic school, most of them have been in special education throughout their schooling. Which means that special education actually is nothing special. So you are a special child or student if you haven't been, if you haven't ever used special services.
We are putting a lot of emphasis on the early detection of any difficulties and problems that the students in our schools may have and this is a very different policy to many other countries where these measures are designed in a way that they are implemented. only when the problems have emerged and are too visible. But we don't think like this in Finland.
I think we believe in this early intervention to make sure that those who are likely to be in trouble will be recognized early and provided help and support as quickly as possible. It's twice, twice, twice... What's the mark of the potency? Two, three, four, five.
Good. We as subject teachers cooperate with the special teacher in cases where we see that an individual student has problems with their studies. It might be problems with concentrating on a theme, it might be reading and listening difficulties, especially in languages and math. What we do is that we contact the special teacher at the very early moment.
We call it the first intervention. We talk with the special teacher. and try to arrange a time that she or he could be able to come and join me as a subject teacher to my classroom and then focus on the problem.
All the old, familiar words that we all know. I have a feeling that the students will come here with a mind. This is not a place for violence, but we get here. This was...
Allu. This was... Uuli.
The special teacher is available for a couple of hours and then she picks the student to a separate classroom and helps him or her there. And we also make an individual learning plan for that individual student. And by taking these measures we try to guarantee that no one is lagging behind. It's almost impossible to take three more of her. It's really...
Have you always had the difficulty of taking them? No. It's new.
The student welfare team gathers on a weekly basis and... The subject teachers inform the group with different cases. There might be bullying, skipping classes, learning difficulties, behaviour problems, all kinds of things. That's why I'm so concerned. I think he has the ability to write small stories in English.
He is very broad-minded and now that the English language has started here, he does a lot of work at home in English. And then these individual problems are dealt with case by case in this weekly meeting that every school in Finland has. He clearly has an external problem with himself, that he feels that he is useless.
With this policy we are trying to really make it easy for everybody to say, yes, I have some areas where I need help now. Is there anybody who can help? Rather than trying to hide these things, and in many cases when you do this, in the later years they will come and accumulate even more difficult problems.
So I think with this we have been able to positively affect both the equity of the system and also the quality of the system.