Early childhood education and care

We in Finland believe that good quality early education and care should be the universal right of every child regardless of the country they grow up in.That is why we offer a number of solutions for consulting, development and training that combine the excellence of the proven and successful Finnish early education concepts and skilled education professionals, to improve the pre-primary and primary school experience for children all over the world.

Many terms are used interchangeably for this early childhood development and care: daycare, nursery school and kindergarten being some of them.

Much of the early childhood education and care in Finland centers around play, free discovery, collaboration, interaction, own initiative, concentration, and learning to take responsibility for one’s own actions. ECEC in Finland emphasizes the so-called soft skills of balanced growth and taking others into account, over quantifiable metrics.

An early years teacher in Finland must hold a degree from a university or a university of applied sciences, and all other care-givers and instructors at a day-care center must have at least an upper secondary level qualification in social welfare and healthcare. Family daycare givers, who provide care in a domestic setting, must have a vocational qualification in family daycare.

All pre-primary schools and daycare centers in Finland have an action plan in place, based on the national core curriculum on ECEC. Furthermore, an individual early childhood education and care plan is drawn up for each child, in collaboration with the child’s parents, and it is reviewed at regular intervals. Strong emphasis is also placed on the informal sharing of the child’s daily activities with the parents. The relationship between parents and the carer or educator is an essential part of the child´s well-being. When children participate in meaningful and relevant activities, they experience feelings of success and the joy of learning.

The right mix of care, tacit education and specific teaching promotes children's positive self-image, expressive and interactive skills, and develops their thinking. As an example, kindergarten teachers or carers read out loud to the children every day. This develops children’s imagination, verbal and cognitive skills, without the explicit objective of teaching them to read.

We believe that this unique combination of learning through play and informal education in our early childhood development and care, gives Finnish companies and organizations great credentials to extend their know-how to other countries as well.