The Finnish National Board of Education, which organised this visit, set up an extensive programme leaving room for interaction within or after each presentation. This is especially important as during a three day visit information given can be overwhelming. An established procedure of peer interaction of ministries as well as expert interventions helped to build up a deep understanding of the issues presented. As in the previous visits preparatory material such as an extensive country report and key policy documents helped to lay the basis for the discussions. However, Peer to Peer visits are unique in allowing to gain much more insight into the “informal functioning” of the system.

Various actors at play
Presentations were given by various actors in the education system: the Finnish National Board of Education, which has a strong operational role in general educational development and ICT, the Ministry of Education, the Finnish public Broadcasting Company (Yle), a representative from the municipality of Kangasala and a teacher from the city of Helsinki.

Topics
Key topics included the new ICT policy 2004-2006, the development of the national core curricula, quality criteria for online learning resources, the in service teacher training programme Ope.fi and one of Finland’s biggest national projects the Virtual school project, and of course Finland’s strong performance in the OECD PISA survey.

Key principles
In a country where the education system is highly praised, “trust” at all levels, the high professionalism of teachers and the principle of providing a good basic education to everyone were some of the key ideas that emerged from the review visit.

Specificities
It cannot be denied that cultural and geographical characteristic influence the education system in Finland. First, there are differences between dense and less populated areas with ICT playing an important role in delivering distance education to less populated areas. Second, two official languages Finnish and Swedish mean that all teaching materials and documents from the ministry are in both languages and this is costly. Another striking feature is that there is no inspectorate in Finland. Data on schools is, for example, gathered when municipalities, which are autonomous in Finland, apply for funding.

Reflection Reports
Participating ministries will provide reflection reports on each of the peer visits in which they point out striking issues for their countries and discuss this with their peers in ministries. An in depth analysis report on the Peer Review meeting will be provided by the rapporteur of the project. European Schoolnet plans to hold a “Peer Hearing” in conjunction with the next EUN Steering Committee meeting in September to disseminate the early project results.

Parallel P2P activities
Parallel to the policy visits a number of school peer reviews between Northern Ireland, France, Finland and the Netherlands have already taken place between to be continued in September. The P2P inspectorate strand also met in Scotland to work on how different European inspectorates evaluate ICT in education.