Terve everyone
I am en elementary school teacher from France. I am currently seeing how French Educational System is collapsing, and would like to escape as soon as possible.
It would also be the occasion to achieve a dream of living in your country !
I have an appointment with a counselor in career soon, she can help me to find a new formations.
In addition of the teaching skills, what would be the skills I should learn to be the more likely to be able to help Finnish society ?
Thanks in advance and have a good day.
Moomin for a little touch of cuteness
by Inner-Muffin2592
7 comments
Yeah as an adult almost 0 chance you get good enough Finnish to teach kids, even after getting recertified. I would look into Quebec in Canada or an English speaking Country elsewhere . I had teachers from France in Canada growing up for what it’s worth.
Finnish job market isn’t great would not suggest coming unless you work in IT or healthcare already. Liking Finland and working/living in Finland are totally different things.
https://hrsk.fi/
check out the french speaking school or international school here
There are at least three schools in Helsinki with varying degrees of French as the teaching language. Jules Verne school, The European School of Helsinki and Lycée franco-finlandais d’Helsinki – Helsingin ranskalais-suomalainen koulu. At least HSE and LFF have preschool, which I think would match your current education. There a more options in English, but I don’t know about those much.
If I understood correctly you are only qualified to teach 4-5 year olds, I would really recommend trying to get primary school( classteacher’s) qualification in France and transferring that qualification to Finland as you would have way better wage, benefits and better opportunities in education. I’ve understood that getting classteacher’s qualification in France is much easier and would probably be almost impossible for an adult with no fluency in Finnish to get in Finland.
You might want to avoid ending up in Finland working those jobs unqualified and then realising your only option to get the correct qualifications is to move back to France for a while.
> I am currently seeing how French Educational System is collapsing
People in Finland are saying the exact same thing about our educational system, and to some degree they are right. There’s the obvious funding cuts, but the people in charge of the national curriculum also banked heavily on “self-guided learning” and “inclusion” (as in, getting rid of special needs groups and merging them with regular classes), which turned out to be completely dysfunctional ideas in practice.
It’s morbidly interesting to hear that other countries are also having issues. What’s going wrong with the French education system?
Speak Finnish. You can try French/international schools, but your options in the job market are much more limited. This should be very obvious for anyone who’s not even in your field.
Not trying to take the wind off your sails, but as a plan B: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian are (like French) Indo-European languages, that imo are much easier to learn. Their societies are culturally very much like ours, yet they manage to integrate people better socially. Not in small part because their languages are more doable.
If you want to be a preschool (ages 1-6) or elementary (ages 7-12) school teacher in Finland you need level B2 language profiency, which is the Finnish YKI4 qualification. If you start studying Finnish from scratch it will take some years to reach that level, depending on your motivation and learning skills ofc. You may want to look into French speaking schools in Helsinki area as others have mentioned.
If you want some mentoring or counseling the Finnish universities have a free-of-charge program for highly educated immigrants (SIMHE) to answer questions, recognize the degrees and teach the language. [Heres a link to one of them](https://www.utu.fi/fi/yliopisto/SIMHE). You can contact them even if you are only thinking about moving to Finland.