The City of Helsinki's plans to abolish first-grade entrance exams for bilingual education have shocked some parents. In the future, the city wants to see pupils selected through a lottery.
Each year around a dozen pupils start first grade at the Finnish-Spanish programme at Käpylä Comprehensive School, located in one of Helsinki's leafy suburbs.
A community has grown around the school over the past decade and a half, making it much more than a place for children to learn and reinforce their native language skills.
There are events focused on language and culture that are rare in the Nordic countries, let alone Finland — and that has helped make the school popular among families from Spanish-speaking backgrounds.
"Parents are very much involved in the school," Silvia Padron, a parent of a child at the Käpylä School, told Yle News. "Families expect to make friends with other families and attendance at events is pretty much 100 percent."
Spanish-speaking families are concerned about the city's proposal to change admission criteria, however.
Entrance exams serve as a filter to ensure that only kids with a high level of Spanish get in, and those just starting to learn have little chance. Padron said that if realised, the proposal to introduce a lottery would not only dismantle a functioning native-level language programme but also break up a small and vibrant community.
"If children enter who are not bilingual, you destroy the programme," Padron said, adding that if the measure passes, bilingual families would switch schools.
In her view, a better way of carrying out a lottery would be to organise a draw after kids pass a language test.
"Or they could also just change it to a Spanish-as-a-second-language school because that is entirely different than a bilingual school where you support mother tongue learning at home," she explained.
Spanish-speaking families in Helsinki have voiced their displeasure with the reform, circulating a petition they hope will gain enough momentum to stop the plans.
Families at the school argue that a lottery system shifts the emphasis from enhancing mother tongues to creating bilingual children.
They said they worry that opening entry up to a lottery would replace Spanish-speaking children with monolingual children whose parents are attracted to Spanish as a global language, but who don't speak it at home.
The parents also suggest that the reform confuses equality and equity in education.
While equality means everyone is given the same opportunities, equity recognises that people's circumstances are different, so they need other resources to reach an equal outcome.
"The concept of equality is not absolute," said Salla Raunio, who is planning to send her Finnish-Spanish bilingual child to the school.
"There needs to be the realisation that we are all different and have different starting points — some kids speak Spanish natively and that is a different situation from a monolingual Finnish child," she explained.
"Tying entrance to this type of lottery system is discriminatory against native Spanish speakers," said Gabriel Alvarez, another parent concerned about the proposal.
Padron also pointed out that entrance to the Spanish-Finnish programme has not been competitive, with most applicants generally gaining admission.
Helsinki argues for equality
Things could change dramatically from 2025, when the City of Helsinki says it wants to introduce a lottery to replace the current entrance exam. Initially, this change will be carried out as a two-year trial, although officials say they hope the move will become permanent.
In the future, the city wants to select first-grade pupils for all its special language programmes by lottery, meaning bilingual schools will no longer stage entrance exams.
"The main reason is to increase the educational equality of all children in Helsinki," Deputy Mayor of Education Johanna Laisaari (SDP) told Yle News via email.
The city argues that the reform is designed in the best interests of six-year olds.
Laisaari noted that the current entrance exam practice has led to parents enrolling their kindergartners in prep courses. This has especially been the case among families hoping to enter bilingual Finnish-English streams, according to the deputy mayor.
"The current entrance exam has even led to the fact that even young children are taking training courses to get to the certain class. This has happened especially with Finnish-English teaching," she said via email.
The city provides bilingual education at 11 schools in seven language combinations: Finnish-Swedish, Finnish-Northern Sami, Finnish-Estonian, Finnish-Russian, Finnish-Chinese, Finnish-Spanish as well as Finnish-English.
"The goal of the reform is also to harmonise the equality between all bilingual groups so that in the future everyone applies for them in the same way," Laisaari added.
Whose school is it anyway?
The Käpylä school has over time become a community hub and popular attraction for Spanish-speaking families moving to Finland. But originally, the city says it wasn't envisioned that way when it started back in 2009.
So what did Finland have in mind when it rolled out bilingual education programmes?
Olli-Pekka Malinen, an education expert at the University of Helsinki, said that decades ago bilingual language programmes aimed to build up the country's language reserves.
"But that purpose may have evolved and the goal can be debated," he said, noting how much Finland has changed in recent years.
Laisaari, however, pointed out that the city's bilingual education offering was never intended to be limited to native speakers.
"Bilingual education was originally established to expand the language skills of all children in Helsinki," Laisaari told Yle News via email. "Bilingual education was not originally established to strengthen the study of the second mother tongue."
Malinen, an education lecturer, also brought up the aspect of inclusion in education.
"Research has shown that selective programmes — be it in the arts, sports or language — are a vehicle for school choice used by middle-class parents," he said.
Regarding selective music programmes, the city said in an email it was continuously working to develop what it calls "weighted-curriculum education," and that the two-year bilingual entrance exam trial was a part of that effort.
There are as yet no plans, however, to abolish entrance exams for special programmes other than the foreign language ones.
Attending a school far away from home means parents need flexible work schedules and those are often not blue-collar professions, Malinen noted.
"Who can actually send their kid to a special school or afford a home in a specific neighbourhood?" he asked, suggesting that few families are prepared to allow their first graders to travel long distances alone.
Back in Käpylä, these arguments cut little ice. Spanish-speaking families say they are unhappy with the lack of parental involvement in the city's plans, saying they undermine inclusivity.
"There has been zero conversation with the Spanish-speaking families," Padron said.
The capital's bilingual schools were, however, never intended to cater to native speakers exclusively, according to Laisaari.
"To the question that if children whose mother tongue is other than Spanish are selected for bilingual classes, this was originally the purpose of this teaching," she said via email.
The city said the reform will free up the time used on administrative work and eventually the city's bilingual programmes will have more spots available for kids starting school.
According to the deputy mayor, from August 2025 six schools in the capital will run Finnish-English programmes, up from five this autumn.
Fully English-language programmes will, however, continue to administer language tests for prospective pupils. The reform also excludes private or foreign state schools in the Helsinki area.
The city currently provides mother tongue classes in 50 different languages for pupils speaking another language than Finnish or Swedish at home. These classes, however, mix ages and skill levels and lack a set curriculum.
The city's Finnish-language division of the education committee will decide on the two-year bilingual education trial in June.
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