There are a handful of things people usually know about Finland. That is, if they know we exist at all. Nokia, northern lights, sauna, northern lights, Santa Claus and, of course, northern lights, somehow always find their way into the conversation. If you are a true connoisseur, you might even bring up the Air Guitar Championships. No joke, they exist.

Air guitars aside, there is one topic that almost always comes up: the Finnish education system.

Throughout the years, Finnish students have excelled in international assessments like the PISA test that aim to evaluate education systems worldwide.

The question is, what makes this little-known Nordic country’s education so special?

One of the system’s secrets for success is that children are actually allowed to be children. We start school only when we turn seven. When we do start school, we have relatively short school days and not a great deal of homework. We also have long holidays. In primary school and mostly through secondary school, our lessons are 45 minutes long and we have a 15 minute break to go outside and play games in between every class. I distinctly remember having to go outside even when it was -19 degrees Celsius. The cap in my primary school was -20 degrees Celsius. If it went under that, you were allowed to stay inside for the duration of the break.

Unlike in many countries, the teaching profession is highly respected in Finland. Teachers are required to have a Master’s degree to be able to teach in a primary school. Even after extensive education and experience in the field, the training never stops: teachers are required to attend vesopäivät –a teachers’ training day – three times every year to keep their skills up to date.

I come from a long line of teachers: my grandfather, my mother, aunts, uncles – you name it. To further illustrate the incredible amount of training that teachers undergo, one of my aunts, who is a teacher in a primary school, is working on her PhD in primary education.

Partly due to their extensive education, there is a culture of trust towards teachers. They have the liberty to design their classes as they want. Forget about rigid structures with one class per topic: they can keep teaching a topic for many lessons until they feel the students have grasped it and move on when they deem appropriate. Teachers are not constantly being evaluated on their performance and their ability to produce high test scores.

The students are not constantly assessed either. Growing up in Finland, I have never taken a national exam. Ever. I did my schooling there up to the first year of high school (upper secondary school, senior high school, take your pick). Those who choose to go to high school have to complete one of the only national exams in Finland, a matriculation exam, in the end of their third year in high school.

We were allowed to learn in peace without having the pressure of constantly being compared to every individual in the country.

If this education system has been so successful, what would happen if the Finnish system was adopted in a country like the UAE?

There might be a temptation to simply copy and paste a Finnish “wonder-curriculum” into the context of the UAE. The content, however, is created to serve the specific local context of Finland and should be shaped and moulded accordingly to serve the students in the UAE, so that the cultural language speaks to the specific environment of the UAE.

Over and above that, the solution is not found in simply sending Finnish teachers to the UAE. The key is to transform the entire mentality behind schooling (small feat, right?). There are elements from the Finnish framework that could be incorporated in the UAE; for example, incremental changes could be made to improve teachers’ training, while letting go of the continuous evaluation of both students and teachers, in order to create an environment that takes the focus from a performance-based approach to a learning-based one. The latter takes the individual’s learning style into consideration. Needless to say, a complete transformation of a schooling system could not happen overnight.

As a final attempt to simplify the adoption of a Finnish system into other countries, I tried to come up with one neatly condensed reason behind the success of the Finnish education system. I referred to the most reliable, scientific source of information: “Mommy, in your opinion, what’s the single most important thing that makes the Finnish system work?”

Being the good teacher that she is, she gave me an answer by challenging the foundations of my question: “You can’t attribute its success to a single thing. It’s such a holistic organism.”

This organism underwent dramatic transformation two years ago in. The Finnish education system was transformed to include Phenomenon Based Learning (PBL), which blurs the boundaries between specific disciplines and is meant to prepare students for real world phenomena.

“The success of the Finnish school lies in its courage to reach for excellence by doing things differently,” wrote Pasi Sahlberg, a famous Finnish educator, wrote in 2013. I hope this courageous overhaul will prove to be of value in years to come for the advancement of effective learning worldwide.