The next edition of the Estonian Human Development Report, to be published in February, is about education in Estonia, and you are its editor. But you are not an education scholar, you are an economist. Do I have that right?
More precisely, I am a management scholar. At the same time, I also work at the Foresight Center, where I focus on future studies. There we use data to track emerging trends and signals. At one point, we had a good opportunity to study education, specifically the future supply of teachers. That allowed us to carry out a thorough, data-driven analysis, which is how I arrived at the subject of education. My perspective is more on the level of education management and the economics of education. I don’t intervene in areas that belong to teachers’ professional expertise.
In any case, that makes you the right person to ask a very simple question: What is the current state of Estonia’s schools today?
The greatest legacy of Estonia’s schools comes from our past. If you think about it, we have even changed our system of government in the meantime, but the school network still largely dates back to the Soviet era. Many school buildings — their location, size and student numbers — were shaped by the population distribution of that time. We are still dealing with this legacy today.
The issue of the school network has been a painful one for decades. It is not only about whether villages or teaching jobs survive, but rather about children’s futures: whether children growing up across Estonia have equal opportunities. The key question is what kind of quality our schools provide.
Today, we can see an increasingly clear educational divide in general education, because school quality is uneven. This directly affects young people’s opportunities for further study. University admission is more common among graduates of schools in Tallinn, Tartu or the stronger high schools. But the ideal would be that a young person from any corner of Estonia could move forward — whether to a university or a strong vocational school.
Is it not possible for young people from every part of Estonia to make it to university?
Even the Ministry of Education and Research has pointed out that free higher education has not increased the number of young people from rural areas entering university. This suggests that money still plays a role, but exam results are certainly a factor as well. When we look at university admissions, it is often the math and Estonian language exams that determine whether a young person gets in.
In other words, are you saying that the quality of education in Estonia is not as good as we generally like to think?
Yes, exactly. If we look at the data, the problem is real and hasn’t just appeared in recent years. Nearly one in four students fails the basic school math exam. That is a serious concern, because this exam largely determines what and where a young person can study next.
The data also shows that math exam results strongly correlate with parents’ income — both the father’s and the mother’s. This means that if a student has learning gaps, a wealthier family can afford to hire a private tutor. In this way, a kind of shadow education emerges, giving an advantage to those with more resources.
It is not a good sign for Estonia’s education system when we see a boom in private tutoring.
Let’s definitely come back to that, but returning now to the question of education quality — and specifically the math you mentioned. I don’t have the expertise or experience to rank European or global countries by who has the best general math education and who doesn’t. But still, in talking widely with people, meeting others and hearing from those who have lived abroad and enrolled their children in schools elsewhere, it seems to me that the overall level of education in Estonia is much better than, say, here next door in Latvia or even in Finland. Or am I mistaken? After all, the PISA test shows that our education is very strong.
But children with severe special educational needs are not included in the PISA test, which already skews the picture somewhat, because in Estonia all children attend school. In reality, PISA reflects only a very small segment of Estonia’s education system.
But isn’t it the same with PISA in other countries as well?
Of course, it is the same in other countries as well.
Then the math level in Latvia must be even worse, right?
I haven’t studied the level of math in Latvia specifically, but in the PISA tests Latvia ranks behind Estonia. Estonia is still a top country in math. But my concern is more with those who struggle within Estonia itself — the young people who cannot cope with further studies. Just because we rank high internationally doesn’t mean that all Estonian children are receiving equally good education.
Our principle is that every school in Estonia should provide the same quality of education. It seems to me that they do. Or do they not?
If we look at university admissions, it’s usually the same high schools that stand out. That raises the question: are students from other high schools not even applying or are they simply not getting in?
So where does the gap lie then?
When I look at exam results and school averages, the variation is quite large. There are schools where the results are close to the maximum and others where the averages are very, very low. If the entrance criterion for university is, for example, the national math exam, many students simply cannot meet even the minimum threshold.
Eneli Kindsiko. Source: Siim Lõvi /ERR
When you say that in some high schools almost everyone gets admitted, while in others no one does — and that 25 percent of students fail the math exam — then I assume there must be some schools where half the class fails.
Yes, there are such cases, especially in basic education. At the end of ninth grade, many students fail.
But what does that distribution look like? I understand the top end — it’s well known, the central schools in Tallinn and Tartu — but what about the bottom end?
Surprisingly, the stratification is actually the greatest in Tallinn. Both Estonia’s top schools and those at the bottom are located there. Of course, Tallinn also has the largest number of schools in the country.
If I think about international research, it often shows that the teacher labor market tends to stratify along school lines. It is hardest to recruit teachers for schools where classrooms are more challenging — for example, where there are many children with special needs, weaker socioeconomic backgrounds or regional disadvantages. The question is whether the teacher labor market can really adapt to what is happening inside classrooms.
But in Tallinn, it could very well be that we have elite schools where students get good results in the basic school math exam, and then just a few kilometers away there’s another school where half the class fails. What schools are these?
I won’t name names here.
But what type are they — how would you describe them?
I’d point to one main difference. If we think about selective-admission schools — the so-called elite schools — both parents and children want to get in. Students there are usually more motivated and eager to learn. It’s much easier to teach them than students whose motivation has to be built up from scratch and who need daily convincing about why they are even in school. The workload for teachers is therefore very different.
On the other hand, in schools where competition is weaker and places are freely available, the question arises: why are those seats not being filled? We do have such schools in Estonia and they need attention.
So are these Russian-language schools, smaller schools or linked to a particular type of settlement?
Here I can only rely on past data. Exam results in Russian schools tended to be weaker, especially on the state exams. But there is no recent data, so it’s unclear whether the situation has changed over time.
Am I right in saying that students there take the math exam in Russian?
Yes, they do.
Then language differences shouldn’t play that significant a role.
In that case, it comes down to pedagogical differences, which education scholars could explain better, including possible linguistic factors. I’m relying here on reports from the Ministry of Education, which summarize past data: averages in Russian schools have been somewhat weaker.
But as of this year, there aren’t really Russian-language schools in Estonia anymore.
I believe the coming decades will show that the situation will gradually even out. The process is still in its early stages, so it’s very difficult to predict exactly what the future will bring.
So this tells us that in reality, the idea of a uniform school system — where you can go to your neighborhood school and receive the same quality of education as at the French Lyceum in Tallinn — doesn’t work.
In theory, it’s a very good idea. But in practice, I’m afraid it doesn’t work today. We would like it to, but if we look honestly at the data, the disparities between schools and regions are very big.
To “quote” the education minister — if you were the education minister and you had a ton of money, where would you put it to solve this problem?
I would start where the pain is likely the greatest today. If we look at most of the education debates, they are largely adult quarrels. But we must not forget that the school system, especially general education, is about children’s futures.
Quality is important, but today we see that one in four fails the basic school math exam. I would put that large sum of money toward supporting high-quality math education. Why do I say that? Because when I look at studies from the United States and the United Kingdom, conducted in disadvantaged neighborhoods with children from low socioeconomic backgrounds who usually do not choose STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math), the experiments show that if you bring in the best math teachers through competition and pay them very high salaries, those children are much more likely to pursue STEM in the future.
In Estonia, when we see a shortage of engineers and industry in need of them, the root cause actually lies in basic school-level math, physics and chemistry. So what would I do with the money? I would differentiate teacher salaries.
But that can’t be done so easily. There has been talk of a teacher career model and how to differentiate pay by seniority, education and other factors. But it is not so simple for a principal to pay a math teacher in Tallinn or Kuressaare more than their colleague teaching physical education.
I think it can be done. I understand it might be an unpopular decision, but I’m relying on the data. The teacher labor market competes with the wider labor market and we have concrete figures. When the Foresight Center asks Statistics Estonia how much people trained as math teachers earn if they don’t work in schools, then in Harju County, in Tallinn, a person trained as a math teacher who is not teaching will earn about €2,800 gross in 2024. That’s about 1.6 times the teacher minimum salary — today we’re talking more about a 1.2 times difference. That’s the amount you’d need to offer to attract a math teacher to work in Tallinn.
I would encourage Estonia, as a small country, to experiment more in education policy. Why not differentiate salaries where the problem is the greatest? For example, if tomorrow Estonia faced a serious shortage of oncologists, would we raise the salaries of all doctors by €5 or would we focus on the pay and working conditions of that specific specialty?
In math, it’s not only a question of raising pay. Research clearly shows that working conditions, including class size, are very important. Classes should be smaller, as they are in language learning, because math is also an extremely difficult subject. So class size and salary are the two key factors that have produced very good results in math education elsewhere in the world.
Eneli Kindsiko. Source: Siim Lõvi /ERR
In bigger cities, class sizes tend to be quite large: there are limits, of course, but we know of cases where a high school class can have 35 or even more students and where a basic school class can be well above the minimum of 24. What class size would be needed for math learning, for example, to improve?
U.S. studies have shown that when a class has 16–18 students, the teacher attrition rate starts to decline — in other words, teachers stay in the profession longer if class sizes are smaller. Many studies confirm this.
Here, however, classes are large, especially in Tallinn and Tartu, and particularly in high schools. On one hand, this is affected by the shortage of space in school buildings; on the other, by the shortage of teachers — so schools put as many students as possible into one class per teacher. From an economic perspective, it would make sense to split those into two smaller classes and pay teachers more. In the long run, this keeps teachers in the profession longer and reduces attrition.
I was very alarmed to learn who is actually leaving teaching while still of working age. It’s not just retirees leaving; young and middle-aged teachers are also quitting. That shows problems in the work environment — it’s not just a matter of natural attrition as people retire.
Teachers who reach retirement age don’t usually leave right away.
Exactly. In fact, what’s interesting is that just today I looked at how many high school math teachers are 65 and older. The number is 17 percent — so nearly one-fifth of math teachers at that level are already of retirement age.
Studies from England have shown that teaching provides a great deal of social connection and the loss of that social aspect is very hard for older people. If you are a top-level specialist, you want to feel needed and active.
Take universities, for example. There are many academics working past 80. At the University of Tartu, there are 41 academic staff members over the age of 80.
Would it also help if in Tallinn and Tartu, where there are selective-admission elite schools, we simply dismantled the system? If we said, “There’s no other option — you go to your neighborhood school.”
Here it would actually make sense to sketch out a game theory model: if admissions were no longer selective, where would those schools be located in Tallinn and who can afford property in the city center?
That tends to be wealthier people, so the stratification wouldn’t disappear. And because the legacy is so strong, we wouldn’t change the perception that certain schools are better. Plus, in Estonia it’s remarkably easy to manipulate residency registration to gain admission.
So, in short, that wouldn’t be a solution.
It wouldn’t solve the problem, because human behavior is more complicated than that. People will always find clever ways to get their children back into those schools.
We see the same thing next door in Finland. In Helsinki, formally there are no elite schools, but everyone knows there are certain schools where you get a better education. Not coincidentally, those are in wealthier neighborhoods with fewer immigrants. Families maneuver with their addresses to get their kids into those schools, even though officially they aren’t “elite.”
I think one problem in today’s education debates is that the blame game has become the norm. We try to pin the blame on so-called elite schools and in doing so distract from the real issue. The real problem is why the rest of the schools cannot provide the same level of quality. The focus should be on schools at the lower end, not the upper end.
So what should be done about those schools at the lower end?
A strong recommendation from research is that we must start thinking about differentiated pay — based on subject difficulty, class difficulty and the effort needed to spark learning motivation. The work is very demanding and requires high-level skills, which is why we should be attracting the best teachers to weaker schools.
It’s not just about money, though — working conditions matter too. Smaller classes and higher pay both help. At the same time, we could think more boldly and outside the box: why not bring in private funding? It doesn’t have to be the state covering the entire teacher salary; maybe the state ensures the minimum and the rest comes from private sources. For example, if industry needs engineers, why couldn’t industry also support math teachers’ salaries?
I just don’t believe that any industrial company would hand out money in the form of a blank check, hoping it might someday produce engineers. In reality, private money in Estonia usually looks more like it does in extracurricular education: a child’s hobby class costs €100 a month and is offered by a private school. But we could talk about that separately later. Let me ask this: for the second year now, Estonia has had a differentiated teacher salary system, where in Ida-Viru County teachers are paid one-third more than elsewhere. Has anyone studied this and do we see results as hoped?
As far as I understand, the higher pay did attract a lot of teachers there. The question is whether they will stay. Pay is important, but the work environment matters a great deal too.
Still, there was significant interest — that has been clearly documented — and teachers came from Tallinn and other parts of Estonia. Given the local salary level of €2,600, a math teacher’s salary in Tallinn would need to be competitive with the wider labor market, around €2,800. In practice, this shows that the salary effect does work.
You mentioned wealth-based stratification and I understand your research found a direct correlation between math exam results and the income of a child’s mother and father.
Exactly. The higher the parents’ annual income, the better the school’s average math results.
But how does that happen?
On one hand, if we think about where wealthier people live — in Tallinn, for example, it’s the city center — that shapes the location and accessibility of top schools. On the other hand, as I mentioned before, there’s the private tutoring market: some gaps can be bridged that way, but it’s not a simple formula, because many factors play a role.
The divide arises mainly because of the shortage of teachers, especially good teachers. Inevitably, certain schools start losing teachers, particularly in the hardest-to-fill positions. These are mainly math teachers, but also language teachers — Estonian and English. The statistics show that the highest number of job postings and the highest attrition rates are indeed for math, Estonian and sometimes English teachers.
Eneli Kindsiko. Source: Siim Lõvi /ERR
This wealth divide should presumably also be visible in Estonia’s overall income scale. If we look, for example, at average wage data — perhaps the easiest income figures to access — then in the second quarter of 2025 the gap is still very large. In Tallinn, Harju County and Tartu, the monthly average gross salary is around €2,400, but in Valga County, Ida-Viru County and other peripheral areas it is €1,000 lower. Does this show up in education as well?
It shows up especially sharply when we think about what happens after high school.
If a young person wants to go to university, then coming from, say, Valga or Saaremaa, their family has to consider how much it costs to send them. If the regional median wage is €1,300–1,400, is it even possible to pay for dormitory rent, food and other living expenses? If the family has two children who want to go to university, it becomes practically impossible.
Money plays a very big role here. When I think about my own university years — back in 2005 — I didn’t perceive this problem as strongly as I do now. The relationship between real estate prices and rural wages is such that it is very difficult for families to afford housing for their children in Tallinn or Tartu.
It was already very difficult back then, but the housing market has shifted in such a way that prices in Tallinn have grown faster.
Our big advantage in Estonia is that higher education is free. That does help with many issues today. But still, access to higher education is somewhat tied to money.
In general education, exam results clearly reflect socioeconomic differences. Can the state do something here? Could officials or politicians take steps to solve this existentially difficult problem for us?
One thing I mentioned earlier is that we have extremely good long-term datasets. When we look at school and student performance, we can see that where exam results are consistently poor and satisfaction is low, salaries should be differentiated and competition created to attract teachers into those weaker schools to support them.
Today, we try to distribute money equally to everyone. Yes, we have coefficients that take into account whether a school is in a peripheral area, but I think class difficulty and socioeconomic background should play a bigger role.
Inevitably, when we think about rural areas, older teachers will eventually retire. Who will replace them? That’s the big issue for the next five to ten years: many teachers in rural areas will leave and fewer young people will step in to take their place.
Both Tallinn University and the University of Tartu have seen remarkably high demand for teacher training programs in recent years.
There’s a catch, though: many of those students are already working teachers earning their master’s degrees.
On the other hand, the statistics show that many people who study to become teachers never actually go on to work in schools — or they leave after one, two or three years. Today, the issue is not increasing admissions, but improving retention.
That depends on both pay and working conditions. Management research clearly shows that people are ten times more likely to leave a job because of working conditions than because of pay. Salary is important, but if the work culture is toxic or classes are too large to handle, even €5,000 a month won’t help. If there are 40 children in the class and the work is extremely hard, I also wouldn’t stay.
This may be an impolite and unpopular question, but I’ll ask it anyway: have you looked into inclusive education? To explain to listeners, inclusive education means that all children — those with special needs, those who struggle with learning and those who do very well — are in the same class. Often, these wide-spectrum classes are more common 200 kilometers from Tallinn than in the city center. Could it be that teachers don’t want to work in such classes, where they may have 10 very strong students but also four children who require a completely different kind of attention every single lesson?
Studies show that if the class is small, teachers can manage.
With inclusive education, class size is crucial — it must be much smaller. Even subject by subject, class size should be considered, because the level of difficulty varies. Student backgrounds also matter, which makes the equation more complex for school leaders.
Research in Estonia shows that when inclusive education was introduced, many teachers lacked preparation. It came before they had training or the necessary strategies. When the skills come only later, it can really burn teachers out.
Recently there was a case at a school outside Tallinn, where students in basic school were split between two classes — those doing better and those doing worse. That doesn’t exactly align with Estonia’s education policy, but I understand that many parents, the school and the municipality were all satisfied with the arrangement.
Yes, because in one group you don’t have to deal with motivation, while in the other you do. But my question would be: why were some not doing well in the first place? What were the causes? That’s what I would want to study.
Of course, socioeconomic backgrounds vary a great deal between families and that’s where it starts. No matter how good the teachers or their motivation, schools probably can’t change those factors.
I would still look at the root causes, because it’s very easy to always blame the children. But really, if a child comes to school hungry or is experiencing domestic violence at home, how can they possibly concentrate on learning math? Inevitably, they can’t. Our society today carries all of its problems into the classroom and we can’t escape that. We would all prefer to teach the brightest, most motivated students who always raise their hands and never complain. But that is not reality.
But does splitting students into groups like that seem right to you? Or is the solution simply to make three classes instead of two and distribute students evenly? How should it be from your perspective?
That’s really more of a pedagogical question and better answered by education specialists.
I look at it from a bit of a meta level. If such practices emerge, it means people are dissatisfied with the quality of education and want change. The question is how we intervene: do we simply ban it or do we look for solutions?
I’m less concerned about the advanced class and more about the students placed in the weaker class. What will happen to them? Will they get the support they need to actually progress? I’ve seen excellent teachers who deliberately take the weakest class group and bring them up to a much higher level.
Here, teacher mastery is critical. If something could be changed, I would put the best teachers where the need is greatest — that is, in classes where motivation must be built and learning gaps must be addressed, which requires very high-level skills. We often think we have to choose between focusing on the strongest or the weakest, but we don’t. We should think about how to support both ends.
You’ve also studied education mobility. This may surprise many listeners, but very roughly speaking, half of Estonia’s students do not attend the school closest to their home — even at the basic school level.
In primary school, 45 percent of students do not attend their nearest school. That’s the Estonian average, but the differences are large depending on the education level. At the high school level, this grows to 59 percent.
The regional differences are striking. In Tallinn, especially in the “golden circle” municipalities around the city, 80–90 percent of high school students attend a school outside their home area. They travel into central Tallinn.
That’s a figure where it can’t all just be one-way traffic. Surely some of that movement is from one good school to another good school.
Absolutely. Tallinn’s education mobility is the most interesting to me, because even at the primary level, the lowest numbers are still high compared with the Estonian average. At the high school level, as I said, it’s 70–90 percent.
This shows that in Harju County, the search for quality and the best future prospects is extremely intense. The key factor here is parents — children themselves may not want to go through entrance tests, but parents, especially at the primary and basic levels, are the ones driving education mobility in the Tallinn area.
Looking at this from a central policy perspective, one could say: let’s ban it. Everyone must attend their neighborhood school, no exceptions.
If only it were that simple… The Tartu case is very telling. Statistics Estonia looked at where the parents of first-graders lived one year before school entry and what happened afterward.
And what happened? Registrations started moving within that year. You could argue this was because of new housing developments, but in reality, people were changing their official registrations. Our registries are phenomenal in that sense, and in Estonia we could use this data-driven approach to see how people behave and make education policy accordingly.
If we did a similar study in Tallinn, we’d see the same thing: registrations shifting before first grade and where they go. That would be very valuable information for understanding mobility patterns.
But we actually do have that data, don’t we?
We do have it in the registries, but we haven’t analyzed it. The Tartu case was a great example and I’ve wondered why we haven’t repeated it for Tallinn.
So banning or forcing families to use their local school wouldn’t help?
Well, how would you even do that?
Eneli Kindsiko. Source: Siim Lõvi /ERR
At the same time, we have half the country where parents and children are in a situation where the child has to attend the neighborhood school. If a family lives in Kiviõli, they won’t be sending their child to school in Tartu.
If we think about Tartu or Tallinn, how many schools are there within a 20-kilometer radius? But if you go to a rural area, how many schools are there within a 20-kilometer radius?
One.
Exactly. You don’t have choices.
But that’s inequality.
It wouldn’t be inequality if the school were very high quality. It is inequality when a child wants a better education but cannot go to a school farther away.
Is it possible to study how much of this education mobility is, so to speak, just for fashion’s sake? If the neighborhood school is actually a very good school, but a parent assumes a central Tallinn school is better simply because it’s in the city center and headed by Ms. or Mr. X?
It would often be very interesting to look at which schools the parents themselves attended. I believe there’s a strong correlation: if you went to Hugo Treffner High School or Tallinn English College, that may strongly influence where your child goes.
I know parents who are themselves from a small town — or even a rural settlement — who didn’t get to “school-hop” in their own childhood and who, based on that experience, have said: the high school in Municipality X near Tallinn suits us just fine and that’s where I’ll enroll my child. And it turns out it’s a perfectly good high school.
A very positive finding from a study of Tallinn’s schools and preschools is that a new generation of parents has changed somewhat. They prefer a calm and healthy environment for children. I’d like to think competition and selectiveness will at least partly fade.
Today, parents look at school satisfaction indicators on the Haridusilm portal. In my view that’s a good sign: they want their child’s mental health — and staying well at school — to matter more than whether the school carries an “elite” label.
Have state-run high schools — which in principle should be a whole new level in both quality and school environment — changed education mobility in any way?
I believe so. Looking at the state high schools, I’d want to study there myself — the range of electives and the way they broaden a young person’s worldview are phenomenal. Students are active and engaged. In a sense, quality there has become very interesting and good — different.
I very much hope our state high schools set a good example for the old elite schools, especially when it comes to electives. Interesting, practical and meaningful electives broaden young people’s horizons.
I also think the school culture there is different, particularly in terms of teachers. It would be interesting to compare teacher retention in state high schools with other high schools.
As a journalist visiting various state high schools and some so-called traditional municipal schools, I’ve noticed that teachers in the state schools are much younger. That’s great in itself, of course.
This is a clear case of management psychology: people tend to recruit those similar to themselves. If a principal is older than average, they may prefer to hire older people — you see the same thing in management theory.
But the demographic angle is interesting: do rural high schools even have young teachers to recruit? Often they don’t. State high schools in cities attract younger teachers in their twenties because there’s something new there. The state high school model pulls some teachers in: it’s novel, teachers think differently, the work culture is different and — to be frank — the buildings are quite beautiful.
Estonia has one big city, another much smaller city, then many small settlements and some places on the map are practically empty. If we zoom in, we see one schoolhouse in the center of that small settlement. And if that schoolhouse is still operating, but now has 50 students instead of the 400 it had 35 years ago, that in itself is a value — and the local government clings to it tooth and nail. Did I describe the picture more or less correctly?
Quite accurately. A large part of the school network was built when 25,000 children were born each year; now it’s under 10,000. Our school network was created for roughly twice as many children.
Of course, many schools are already gone.
Indeed, those collective-farm-sized school buildings are disappearing from rural areas. I’ve said before that outside Tallinn and Tartu there’s a strong Soviet-era legacy in the school network — single-purpose buildings. It’s also a bit of a regional-policy issue.
We have to save the library, the school, the cultural center and the gym all at once. You can’t save just one institution, because that’d be enough for the whole village to vanish anyway. The OECD has studied this in an interesting way — one report shows how much of the time school buildings sit idle.
Classes end at two or three in the afternoon and the building is closed. But why couldn’t hobby groups, adult education or library services run in parallel? That would bring significant cost savings, bring people together and, for example, a librarian could take on other tasks in the same building. The OECD strongly recommends this kind of community-house model for small countries.
Think about the school building: evenings, weekends and summers are often idle. Is that sensible? A municipality has to decide whether to close the library, the school or the cultural center. I would combine those services and create new models. If you save only one service, the others will wither anyway. In rural areas, children are important — but older people also need services: a library, a cultural center. We should take the OECD’s research seriously here: the community-house model and integrating other public services are very important for us.
In fact, schools get stronger that way: a school can be smaller because the space is in use. You can also give teachers additional roles — for instance, a physical education teacher could also run an after-school club or a literature teacher could host seminars in the library for other village residents.
We need to think more broadly. The old system and its legacy are what are weighing down our education system today. We’re clinging to an old model. I’m proposing this kind of solution because we too often think in binary terms: school closed or school open. A third option is to think more broadly about public services.
How does decline usually happen in a small village-sized place? Does a major employer disappear first, then the pharmacy and post office close and is the school the last to go? Or does it often happen that because there are few children, the school is closed — and then the employer, the post office and the pharmacy quickly disappear? Which way round is it usually?
Household income shapes the future most. If a major employer leaves, that largely determines families’ futures. Education mobility is strong in this context as well: if parents work far away, they pack up the kids and move. Employers are often the decisive factor, and when employers — both private and public — disappear from rural areas, it’s fatal for the school network.
So if we want to maintain the school network or public services outside Tallinn and Tartu, we first have to make sure employers don’t flee. But the school is a crucial component of that process: people don’t want to live where there’s no school and won’t come there to work. That’s why we need arguments to attract employees; otherwise, it may be cheaper for a company to relocate.
I don’t think an entrepreneur is really looking at the school network when deciding where to build the next factory or office. That’s more of a parent’s concern.
Entrepreneurs often look at connectivity: can they bring electricity to the site? Is there a highway or a railway? For certain kinds of businesses, there may be other infrastructure conditions. But then they also look at the labor force, of course.
Infrastructure really is crucial. Ireland offers a good example: after Covid, they started setting up community houses so people could work remotely. It’s very expensive to run fiber to every home, but if a rural area has one building with co-working rooms and excellent internet, that enables video calls to Tallinn and makes rural living far more attractive.
A good study a few years ago asked under what conditions families would move to the countryside. One of the main conditions was internet connectivity and the ability to work remotely. People also wanted a calm and healthy environment for their children. If the school is small, the environment is good and children are mentally healthy and happy, the state could support that kind of infrastructure a bit.
Maybe not just infrastructure? Perhaps it would be a good idea to relocate, say, the Ministry of Justice to Narva and move a part of the Health Insurance Fund to Räpina?
That would certainly bring more highly educated people and their families to rural areas, which is a big plus. But at the same time, when institutions have been moved out of rural areas, bringing them back is much harder.
Let’s return to the wealth divide. How much have recent years affected our education level — what we’ve all seen: high inflation, a stagnant economy? Are those immediate economic conditions already visible in our education indicators?
What’s interesting is that the situation has certainly exacerbated the teacher shortage. If teachers have to take second jobs or move to better-paid work, that’s a problem — especially for young teachers who, for example, would like to take out a home loan. As [Auditor General] Janar Holm noted on ETV, it’s a problem if a firefighter can’t get a mortgage. A young teacher can’t get a loan either, because saving up the 10–15 percent down payment is very hard.
This is where the state could step in. In England, for example, the government has created preferential-terms mortgages for key workers. A similar solution would help young teachers stay in the labor market.
That’s an administrative measure, but maybe it would simply be better if the economy grew and people’s wages rose.
If only it could be done with a snap of the fingers — but it can’t.
Yes, the economic backdrop certainly plays a big role. If we look at four years of results on parents’ incomes and math outcomes, we see that the results at lower-performing schools have been trending downward. To me, that’s a strong sign that socioeconomic background heavily influences the school environment — as reflected in a school’s average results.
It also points to very severe impoverishment. If we consider how high the relative poverty rate is in Estonia today, it’s quite alarming.
To conclude, we might say that what would help Estonian education most is economic growth.
Exactly.
Anvar Samost and Eneli Kindsiko. Source: Siim Lõvi /ERR
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