The Finnish school system has received wide international attention and appraisal since the success in the OECD PISA assessments. The Finnish school system seems to produce good learning results with relative equality – the differences between schools and pupils' performance are small (Sulkunen et. al. 2010). Yet, since 1990's Finland has, among many other countries in Europe, adapted a new neoliberal educational policy, which challenges the grounds of the comprehensive school ideology (Rinne 2000). This presentation focuses on one of the consequences of the new educational policy, school choice.

School choice was enabled in Finland with the new educational legislation in 1990s and it was ratifiedin the 1998 basic education act. According to the new legislation a child had now the right to apply other than the allocated school. Even though school choice can be connected to wider international policy reforms, in Finland it has its own unique characteristics. School choice is possible in Finland at three points: at the beginning of the comprehensive school and at the beginning of the 3^rd and 7^th grades.The choice is usually made within the public school-system since there are only few private schools in Finland (Seppänen 2004; 2006). Choice is also more restricted than in the open enrolment-countries and used in addition to other allocation criterions (i.e. length of the school path etc.) (Varjo & Kalalahti 2011). One of the central features of the Finnish school choice is the emphasized teaching (Seppänen 2004; 2006). The new school legislation allowed schools to specialize their teaching and form so called “emphasized” classes which have more lessons on the emphasized subject (e.g. music, languages etc.) and the right to select their pupils with entrance exams. The amount of these kinds of classes has increased continuously, especially in big cities. Also the scope of the subjects emphasized has widened and includes both academic and non-academic subjects. Nowadays an increasing number of students attend emphasized classes (Seppänen, Rinne & Riipinen 2012).

The emphasized teaching and school choice were justified mostly by the idea of increasing pupil’s learning motivation (Seppänen 2006). However, school choice has been seen to be related to the social class (e.g. Lauder et al. 1999; Raveaud & van Zanten 2007). Also choosing the emphasized class seems to be more common to highly educated families (Seppänen 2006; Koivuhovi 2012). Therefore school choice has been seen to threaten the equality of Finnish comprehensive school (Seppänen, Rinne & Riipinen 2012). Yet, the number of studies concerning pupils learning in relation to school choice is limited in Finland and it is not empirically studied how the choices actually affect on pupils learning and motivation.

Research questions:

Do children who study in emphasized classes differ from those in “general” classes in cognitive competence, learning motivation and attitudes?

How do the cognitive competence, learning motivation and attitudes develop from 3^rd grade to 6^th grade in these two groups? Are there gender differences in this development?

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