Free and compulsory schooling seems self-evident or is a taken-for-granted principle. The principle has been documented as a fundamental human right at several international conventions, e.g. in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Before these conventions, state-supported ‘mass schooling’ was embraced in most parts of Western Europe in the nineteenth century (see e.g. Ramirez & Boli 1987). However, the foundations of contemporary mass education systems have been more or less in a state of flux during the past three or four decades, owing to the decentralisation, deregulation and the introduction of quasi-markets. In this paper I am tackling the reconstruction of and interplay between the free public funding and provision of compulsory primary and lower secondary education in the Finnish policy texts in the 1990s.

From about the mid-1970s onwards, new ideas and concepts started spreading across national borders shifting the ways of thinking in terms of public policy at large, including education policies. One example is a group of ideas that has since been called ‘new public management’. It might be described as a toolbox of ‘market solutions’ for the public sector and the provision of public services. Conceptual tools include performance, competition, quality, efficiency and effectiveness (see e.g. Hood 1991; Pollitt & Bouckaert 2017). These ideas have flown into education policy as well; Ball (1998) talks about “the increasing colonisation of education policy by economic policy imperatives”.

Whitty and Power (2000) (among others) have studied the provision and funding of mass education systems from the marketisation and privatisation perspectives. They point out the difficulties in analysing these processes and drawing a distinction between them when quasi-markets are concerned. In a recent study Gerrard, Savage & O’Connor (2017) examined the expressions and meanings of ‘the public’ regarding school funding and schooling. They refer to “broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models…transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education.” This is also the difficulty that I have been facing studying the Finnish policy texts: it is not just a question of public/private division, but a ‘within public’ division.

In Finland, primary and lower secondary schools are publicly funded. The basis of state subsidies was changed from earmarked grants to a formula-based grants system (per-pupil funding) in 1993 (Act on Planning and Government Grants for Social Welfare and Health Care 733/1992; Act on the Financing of Education and Culture 705/1992), giving municipalities more autonomy to use these funds, municipal tax revenues remaining the municipalities’ main source of income. The current Basic Education Act (628/1998) that replaced the Comprehensive School Act (476/1983) came into force in 1999. Municipalities are obliged to provide ‘basic education’. They can provide it themselves (they are the main providers), or in conjunction with other municipalities, or they can have a contract with other, authorized education providers. In addition to private education providers there are comprehensive schools run by the state or by universities. 

My research question is: How have funding and the provision of schooling been reconstructed in the policy texts? The objective of the research is to understand the interplay between and the discursive formation of the school provision and funding policy.

The data consist of government proposals and the related committee reports from the 1990s, when a shift in discourse from ‘the planning state’ towards ‘the competition state’ began to be realised in the legislation of government grants and education; school choice ideas were introduced, for instance. I am using a discourse-analytical approach (see Simola 1998/2000; Simola, Heikkinen & Silvonen 1998; Simola, Kauko, Varjo, Kalalahti & Sahlström 2017). In order to analyse the discursive formation of school provision and funding, I am interested in the concepts used, the bases of legitimation, actor relations, problematiques and silences in the policy texts, bearing in mind the specific socio-historical context.

One of the concepts which takes part in the interplay between funding and provision of education in the policy texts is ‘maksuttomuus’, a noun that might be translated as ‘freeness’ referring to the ‘free’ in the “free compulsory schooling”. That and the introduction of school choice ideas led me to think more carefully about the relationship between the different public/private modes of funding and provision of schooling. It seems that previous research on school funding in particular, is mainly Anglo-American, or surveys conducted by OECD and Eurydice, for instance. Finnish compulsory schooling has become a current topic in international discussion, but less is known about its funding. In Finland school funding is a neglected area of research, and in other Nordic countries there have been few studies to my knowledge. Therefore, I hope the new knowledge generated by the research will also be relevant to the European context.

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