High-quality education is one of the cornerstones of our society. We must have sufficient, competent personnel for our schools, day cares and afternoon clubs. We want all children to receive the support they need.
Our early childhood education must guarantee equal opportunities for all children and we want as many children as possible to attend it at an early stage. Availability of labour is a challenge in many parts of the country. This must be solved by increasing the attractiveness of the sector and encouraging more people to apply for training. Bureaucracy must be simplified to give personnel more time to spend on the actual children.
It is worrying that an increasing number of students are finishing lower secondary school without the requisite skills in reading, writing and mathematics. We want to break the trend of boys, in particular, falling behind. In this respect we must ensure that resources correspond to the existing challenges.
All students, teachers and other school personnel must be entitled to safe, harassment-free schooldays. Everyone must be able to have a sense of belonging and community. More grownups are needed in our schools.
Research shows a rise in unhappiness among girls. In Finland we have a shortage of school psychologists and curators, especially Swedish-speaking ones, and need to train more of them.
We must let vocational education providers adjust in peace to the latest reforms. Contact teaching is also needed in vocational education.
General knowledge must have a greater emphasis in upper secondary education, and therefore the Matriculation Examination must be reformed so that it better accounts for general knowledge.
We want to scrap quotas for first-time applicants to higher education. Higher education admission criteria must not govern children’s study choices in upper secondary school to the extent that they now do.
The Marin cabinet raised income limits for student financial aid by 50 per cent. We want to raise them further. We want to enhance psychological wellbeing among students by improving their financial status.
WE WANT
- to safeguard the right to a proper education by securing access to sufficient teachers and other qualified personnel in schools and early childhood education
- to make early childhood education free in the long term
- to implement a two-year preschool system
- to secure access to high-quality teaching materials in Swedish
- to see more Swedish-language school psychologists and curators being trained
- to ensure access to and sufficient resources for student welfare services in schools
- to develop school coach activities to support the everyday lives of children and adolescents
- to prevent marginalisation, for example by reinforcing collaboration between schools, youth workshops and outreach youth work
- to invest in and develop study guidance at all levels
- to ensure information on Sami culture is included in the curriculum
- to offer more language immersion and language showering
- to develop teaching in both Swedish and Finnish to ensure it is more attractive to pupils in primary and secondary education
- to keep the second national language as a compulsory subject in the Matriculation Examination
- to reform the Matriculation Examination so that it better measures general education
- to make apprenticeship agreements a viable alternative within secondary vocational education
- to reinforce secondary vocational education, guaranteeing contact teaching
- to scrap quotas for first-time applicants to higher education
- to investigate the possibility of taking into account upper secondary school diplomas and exams in basic arts education in higher education admissions
- to keep higher education free of charge in the future
- to make the basic funding of higher education institutions farsighted and predictable
- to increase the number of student aid months and scrap the division into two phases
- to safeguard the livelihoods of students by gradually increasing study grants and further raising income limits for student financial aid, while ensuring that the number of aid months is not affected by earnings during aid-free months
- to reduce gender segregation within education
- to develop sex education, including handling of consent issues
