A large proportion of students with an immigrant background in Finland have weak skills – Minister: “Worrying” – 2024-09-30 18:25:46

Minister of Education Anders Adlercreutz (r) at the municipal market chairman’s panel on 18 September 2024. Joel Maisalmi

Differences in skills between students with immigrant backgrounds and those from the native population are still large in all assessment areas, the PISA 2022 study says.

The Ministry of Education and Culture (OKM) announced the information on Monday.

According to the study, poor reading skills and a lower socio-economic family background are often the explanations for the weak skills of students with an immigrant background.

Like all Finnish students, the reading skills of students with an immigrant background had weakened compared to 2012.

In mathematics and natural sciences, the skill differences between students with immigrant backgrounds and those from the native population had narrowed. The narrowing of the differences is due to a stronger decline in the results of students from the indigenous population.

Students with a second-generation immigrant background performed better in all assessment areas than students with a first-generation immigrant background.

A large number of people with an immigrant background have weak skills

According to the PISA definition, a large number of students with an immigrant background in Finland were weak performers.

In mathematics, 58 percent of first-generation immigrant students and 43 percent of second-generation immigrant students were weak in mathematics.

22 percent of the pupils of the indigenous population were weak in mathematics.

Minister of Education Anders Adlercreutz (r) finds the results concerning new immigrants worrying.

– Basic skills, i.e. reading, writing and arithmetic skills, are strengthened by increasing the minimum number of hours of basic education by three hours per week. The reform of learning support ensures the availability of sufficient support measures for all pre-primary and basic education students, says Adlercreutz in his ministry’s press release.

– Need-based equality funding supports the learning of students from weaker backgrounds in particular, adds Adlercreutz.

The proportion of people with weak reading skills had increased among those with an immigrant background. As many as 61 percent of first-generation immigrant students and 39 percent of second-generation immigrant students had poor reading skills in 2022.

– According to the OECD’s definition, students with weak skills are not considered to have sufficient knowledge and skills to participate fully in society’s activities, such as further studies and working life, the Ministry of Education and Culture’s press release states.

Reading fluency and home background explain

In the PISA exam, as part of the assessment of reading skills, students took a so-called reading fluency test, which was used to examine how well the student understands short sentences in the test language.

Reading fluency turned out to be a strong explanation for the variation in competence both among pupils with immigrant backgrounds and those from the native population, and explained up to half of the difference in competence between pupils from the native population and pupils with an immigrant background.

The average socioeconomic status of families with an immigrant background was also lower than that of families belonging to the native population. 52 percent of first-generation immigrant students and 43 percent of second-generation immigrant students belonged to the lowest socioeconomic quarter.

– It seems that the student’s immigrant background in itself does not necessarily predict weak competence in the PISA exam, but the essential factors are deficiencies in language skills and the family’s low socio-economic status, the ministry’s press release states.

Competence varies from school to school

The average level of competence of the pupils of the native population did not vary greatly according to the number of pupils with an immigrant background in their school.

On the other hand, the competence of students with an immigrant background was highest in schools where there were the fewest of them, and it decreased as their share of the school’s students increased.

At the same time, the average socioeconomic status of students with an immigrant background was lower, the larger their share of the school’s students was.

Nothing similar was observed in the pupils of the native population.

– When the differences in the students’ socio-economic background were taken into account, both in mathematics and in reading skills, the difference in skills between students with an immigrant background and those from the native population decreased.

Bullying common

First-generation immigrant students reported that they had experienced bullying situations at school more often than students from the general population.

Every tenth student with a first-generation immigrant background reported that they stayed home at least a few times a month because they felt unsafe at school.

The share was clearly higher than for second-generation immigrant students or students from the general population.

According to OKM, the results of the study show that in the future special attention should be paid to strengthening the skills of young people with immigrant backgrounds and to supporting learning and school well-being.

– The teaching of the school’s language of instruction and the student’s own mother tongue, as well as the support offered for learning, are of great importance to the learning and participation of young people with immigrant backgrounds.

– Regardless of the student’s immigrant background, it is also important to support weak talents who lack the skills to move on to studies after basic education, as well as students who are weakly attached to school.

This is how it was studied

The first results of the PISA 2022 study were published in December 2023. In connection with the study, a separate over-sample was used to examine in more detail the competence of students with an immigrant background and the factors connected to it. The previous similar review was done in 2012.

According to OKM, the over-sampling enables a more detailed examination of the skills of students with immigrant backgrounds and the factors influencing it.

241 schools and 10,239 pupils from Finland participated in the study. The data included a total of 1,866 (about 18%) students with an immigrant background, of which 1,060 were first-generation and 806 students with a second-generation immigrant background.

According to OKM, the oversampling does not affect the PISA results themselves, because the share of students with an immigrant background is restored in the results for Finland to correspond to their relative share (around 7%) in the entire student data.