Education systems have been addressed to support the policy of equal opportunities for a long time. The concept of equality has changed during the history. What does equality really mean? Can it be assessed? Indicators that have been used in evaluating equality of education have varied. In Finland the implementation of equality has been measured on the basis of the distribution of education places and the availability of education up to 1980's. In the 1990's state administration launched the idea of "performativity". A political decision was made that equality should be evaluated in terms of performance. In basic education (up to fifteen years old) the goal of equality was understood so that the national aims set in the curriculum should be met equally well in all schools. The role of the national and international assessments became very important for policymaking and new indicators for assessments have been developed. One very important indicator has been regional equality. With my colleague Erkki Komulainen we have done a kind of meta- analysis concerning regional equality in education. The main purpose of our evaluation has been to estimate the magnitude of regional differences between schools and pupils in school performance. Our data consists of nine national school achievement assessments in Finland during 1998-2002 and forms an excellent basis for comparisons. The material is 35 601 pupils in 562 schools. Comparisons between extreme quartile schools and pupils as well as multilevel analysis have been made. According to our evaluation, regional differences between the capital city area and the northern Finland are evident. If we examine, how many students in each region (Northern Finland, Rest of the country and the capital city area) belong to the top and bottom quartiles, we can find that there is a statistically significant difference between regions. The number of the top quartile students in the northern region is lower than in the capital city area. If we look at how quartile schools are located in different parts of the country, we notice remarkable difference between regions. In the Northern part of Finland we have statistically significantly lower number of the top quartile schools than we have in the capital city area. In the other parts of the country the number of the top quartile schools and the bottom quartile schools is in balance. Regional differences in performances are linked to the gender. In the northern part of the country there are more bottom quartile schools and bottom quartile boys than in the other parts of the country. Regional differences are evident, although in international comparisons Finland seems to be a country where average school performances are good and differences between schools are small. This leads us to think about the quality and consequences of the indicators that will be used in policymaking especially inside EU.