Over the past half century, Finland has improved its education system, and now it is internationally recognized as having one of the leading education systems in the world. Those parents who spend countless hours trying to find out ways to help their children to have better grades, better teachers, or better schools may want to take a leaf out of Finland´s book. Finnish students consistently score near the top in the Program for International Student Assessment -commonly known as PISA - for reading, mathematics and science literacy; the reason for these results is that in Finland, teaching is a highly desired profession, the educational policies focus on equality and well-being, authorities trust schools, and political parties agree on the direction of educational reforms. .
The main point why political parties agree on the direction of educational reforms, as Pasi Sahlberg explained in 2012, is that Finns understood that if they wanted to remain extant as a small and independent country, they had to educate every citizen. This motivation helped them to succeed in reaching unanimity on issues such as the comprehensive school system. The comprehensive education system is able to cope with inequalities that students bring to the classroom to have an acceptable educational performance. A reasonable way to look at this point is by measuring the between-school variation of student achievement in PISA studies. In 2012, Sahlberg showed the results saying that "in the 2009 PISA reading literacy scale performance variation between schools in Finland was 7.7% compared to the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] average variation of 42%" (p.4); this shows that Finland´s between-school variation is the minimum of the 2009 PISA studies.
Finnish students, Pasi Reinikainen (2012) observes, have had "outstanding success in PISA studies during the last decade" (p.
