Divided cities – divided schools? School segregation and the role of needs-based resource allocation in Finland

For a long time, Finland stood out in international pupil assessments with a rare combination of excellent overall performance and a high level of equality. However, recent PISA studies point to both deteriorating learning outcomes and increasing importance of pupils’ social background for their learning outcomes in Finland. In addition, strongly increasing socio-economic and ethnic residential segregation in many Finnish cities has had a marked effect on schools since residential patterns are a central factor in school segregation and over one third of Finnish school children live in larger cities. The growing differences between the student intakes of schools have led to strongly diverging learning outcomes and learning conditions between schools in Finland. Urban segregation has therefore become a key question for educational equality and Finnish educational policies. In this chapter, we scrutinise the ways in which school segregation is related to societal and spatial differentiation in the Finnish urban context and how this relationship is further reflected in the differentiation of the schools’ educational outcomes. Moreover, we analyse the existing needs-based resourcing responses and their effectiveness. Our empirical material is focused on the city of Helsinki, as it is currently the only city with a systematic needs-based resource allocation policy. Our chapter illustrates that the traditional egalitarian and universal “same level for all” approach of the education system in Finland seems increasingly unable to overcome the growing differences in a segregating Finnish society. To compensate for children’s unequal starting positions and the increasingly divergent learning and social conditions between schools, the Finnish education system needs stronger support mechanisms that systematically allocate resources towards the individual needs of schools.Peer reviewe