The future is already here,” the science fiction writer William Gibson once said, “it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In debates over the form and function of a country’s education system, those involved in schools in England might feel that the future is everywhere else and definitely not here.

We are constantly reminded that other systems are doing it better: whether the comparisons are with Asian nations and their children’s facility with maths, or with Germany and its vocational training system, or even with our sister nations in the UK when it comes to job-readiness, literacy or teacher workforce development. Whatever it is, apparently it’s better elsewhere and England had better catch up.

But what if we’ve got this the wrong way round? Like a Formula One driver who is so far ahead on the track that it looks, to a casual observer, as if he’s at the back of the pack, what if England were the future of education?

I muse on this not as a prelude to a nationalistic jamboree celebrating how great we are - I have no doubt there is much that England needs to improve on in every area, from system governance to curriculum to CPD. If we are a racing car, we are one that’s been obviously and hurriedly patched up more than once, and whose engine is throwing out plenty of fumes.

But taking all that into account, I’d suggest that the education system in England is actually miles ahead of, for example, Finland - a country I was fortunate enough to visit recently. This might seem an extraordinary claim, given that whenever there is a league table for education, Finland is at the top.

Finland is the star pupil of international schooling and a high-flyer outside the classroom, too. Everyone who visits says how well it is doing in all the ways that aren’t quantified - its teachers are autonomous, it has no Ofsted-style centralised inspectorate and its children take hardly any exams (just one at the end of upper secondary school).

Not only is Finnish education universally agreed to be excellent but the society it serves is identified as one of the fairest in the world. The latest measure of Finland’s Gini coefficient - a calculation of the level of economic inequality in a given society, where 0 indicates perfect equality and 1 total inequality - put it at 0.27, tucked in with the country’s Scandinavian neighbours, Sweden (on 0.28) and Denmark, Iceland and Norway (all 0.26), and well below the UK (0.35) and the US (0.39).

Possibly Finland’s 20th-century history has led to a tendency towards moderation. Modern Finland won its independence from Russia in the chaos after the Bolshevik Revolution. And, unlike other former possessions of that empire, it avoided being forcibly reintegrated into the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Thereafter, Finns existed in a careful balancing act throughout the Cold War: theirs was an “actively neutral” democratic country with a market economy, which traded with the West, living in the shadow of - and staying on good terms with - the Soviet giant.

Sustaining consensus

Finland’s education system clearly draws from, and depends on, that tradition of valuing consensus - sustaining educational practices that would swiftly break down in a more divided society.

For example, progressive voices in England who praise Finland’s system rarely comment on the high levels of selectivity that operate within it. At the end of comprehensive schooling (around the same time as our children take GCSEs), Finnish students are graded in a basket of subjects that are then averaged to generate a grade-point average (GPA) out of 10. The University of Helsinki has two training schools and there was no pupil in either of them this year with a GPA lower than 9.38.

In England, the competition to get children into those schools would be ferocious. Here, the tests used to decide who gets into the most selective environments are scrutinised minutely. But in Finland, GPA is determined by unmoderated teacher assessment. It is as though entry to a grammar school were determined not by an 11-plus exam - the validity and reliability of which could at least be dissected and debated - but by primary teachers’ judgement alone. Such a system has been maintained because there appears to be more faith among Finns that all education options, even the less selective ones, will be good. As a result, there is less obsession with ensuring any particular outcome.

The consensus runs so deep that its features and effects do not always register with those involved. The Finnish national curriculum - the concept of which has existed for longer than the country has been an independent nation - is so baked into school practice and teacher training that teachers do not even recognise it as a constraint on their practice. Those I asked found it difficult to conceive how they could not teach the national curriculum. One headteacher said she did not need to spy on teachers to ensure they were delivering the national curriculum because other teachers and students would come and tell her if it wasn’t happening!

To those tired of England’s rowdy educational culture wars, this might sound delightful. However, the reason I think Finland is the past and England is the future is not because I can’t see why such harmony might be nice but because I think Finland is far more likely to lose it than England is to gain it.

The reason England has massive brawls over curriculum policy within an education system where standardised testing and high levels of accountability are essential is because - contrary to some of the political rhetoric of the past three years - we are a remarkably diverse and open country.

If our education system is under strain, it is precisely because we are a modern, heterogeneous nation committed to a liberal philosophy that values and encourages different points of view - and therefore such views come into rumbustious conflict with each other.

This is not to say that Finland is a closed or oppressive society - of course it is not - but it is a far, far less diverse one than ours. Of its just over 5 million people, around 90 per cent are ethnically Finnish and more than half of the rest are Finnish Swedes. Just under three-quarters of the population say they adhere to the Lutheran church.

In such an environment, maintaining a strong consensus about curriculum content is more straightforward because there are fewer voices demanding that other points of view should be incorporated.

Up until now, I imagine few in the system would argue with the headteacher who said to me that she considered the purpose of the school curriculum was “to make all our students Finnish”.

Finland is changing fast

But this will not be the case for much longer: Finland is changing fast. Ethnic and socio-economic diversity are increasing. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development suggests Finland is the member nation that has seen the fastest-growing gap between different socio-economic groups over the past decade. Immigration is changing the ethnic make-up of Finnish cities. With greater diversity comes a greater need to ensure fairness to all concerned.

Already, the Finnish education agency has acknowledged a need for more and better exemplification of grade standards for GPA judgements to avoid lack of consistency across schools. It may find more action is necessary: well-designed, standardised testing is an essential pillar of fairness in a diverse society. Sats and GCSEs exist in England not because the government wishes to be cruel to children and teachers but because we know that teacher assessments often underestimate the capacity of many pupils, especially the most disadvantaged ones.

Strict catchment areas, coupled with growing immigration localised in specific parts of Finland’s cities, is creating schools that are much more diverse than those elsewhere, and there is evidence of house-price effects on homes around the most successful schools. The challenges we are already facing in England have also reared their head: in the course of visits to schools, I heard from teachers who were becoming concerned about increasing workloads related to managing reduced literacy and numeracy skills among children of all backgrounds in the early years.

This is not to wish for Finland’s decline as an educational superpower. It is simply to recognise that pressures are building there, and England’s experience of similar changes would suggest these are likely to severely undercut the consensus that has sustained the nation’s success until now.

England’s many errors in structuring, funding and supporting schools have not come about because we are behind the world but because we are ahead of it. What England has to offer the rest of the world is the example of how a diverse and tolerant liberal democratic state - one experiencing substantial social and economic change - manages its school system.

In education, we are often exhorted to prepare our students for a future we cannot imagine but, in England, we can imagine it because we are living it. The future is here and we should be helping to distribute it.

John Blake is curriculum research and design lead for Ark Curriculum Partnerships, before which he was a policy researcher and teacher

This article originally appeared in the 2 August 2019 issue under the headline “Ahead in the race?”