Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education The Rhetoric and Reality of Gap Closing

Those among you who are interested in an international perspective on gap closing may be interested in this blog post on Finland, which has been widely commended for being one of the countries where the gap between the lowest and the highest performers in the OECD's PISA assessment is smallest, and, most importantly, cuts across SES lines and school.

Finnish performance in the programme for international student achievement (Pisa) league tables has led to an influx of educational tourism to Finland since the rankings were first published in 2001. We may have slipped in the latest judgment from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – which tests more than 500,000 pupils in 66 countries ranking performance in reading, maths and science – but we are still very much at the top tier of the world's best performing educations systems and the attention isn't likely to disappear soon.

Today's results, however, show Finland dropping out of the top 10 performers in maths, with a score of 519, 22 points lower than the last ranking three years ago. Reading skills fell 12 points to 524, while the science ranking dropped nine points to 545. Signs of this were already showing in PISA 2009, although the slippage was less than anticipated.

I am concerned that the Finnish education system is letting down our brightest students. In every country, there is a debate about whether education systems should group children according to their ability. In Finland, we have taken a firm stance not to do this based on the belief that having mixed groups has distinct advantages, such as children teaching each other.

But are we giving enough room for our most intelligent young people to flourish? Every summer the organisation I run, Technology Academy Finland, brings the brightest teenagers in the world to Finland to work on science projects together. This year, the Millennium Youth Camp welcomed 60 students from 31 countries to work on sophisticated problems such as designing sanitation systems for a space mission to Mars. At this end of the educational spectrum, where the children's ambitions are to improve on the work of Nobel prize-winners, it is vitally important to stretch the young people's minds.

In many Finnish classrooms, however, the pace is determined by the lower-achieving students. In the lower grades, all children from the most talented to the least talented are grouped together. Some commend our system for serving all students well, regardless of family background or socio-economic status. But it means our brightest cannot maximise their potential. No other country has so little variation in outcomes between schools, and the gap within schools between the top and bottom-achieving students is slim.