This made me curious, how common are English schools in Finland? Have any immigrants had issues with getting your kids to school? I’m surprised Lappeenranta doesn’t have one yet for example considering how international the unis there are + city near Russia
by SufficientlyInfo
4 comments
>city near Russia
Irrelevant.
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>Have any immigrants had issues with getting your kids to school?
Kids are learning Finnish and can speak it. Kids from the University area are studying at Sammonlahti School, located at LUT University.
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>I’m surprised Lappeenranta doesn’t have one yet
There are English language groups in Kesämäen koulu.
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>considering how international the unis there are
Not so much international. Population by native language: Finnish 95.9% (official), Swedish 0.1%, Others 4%.
Below is my own speculation.
Nothing wrong with Finnish public schools, hence international schools are not too much in need.
Do you know how many babies are born each year in a city? Take Espoo for example, about 3k. Out of 3k, about 1/5 are foreign descendent. That is 600. And only certain percent of these parents want to put their kids to international school, which makes it perhaps 20% (I made this up, but normally people who don’t see themselves staying for good would do this.). That’s just 120 kids a year. And the Espoo international school today has 720 pupils for 1-9 grades. Consider some put their children in bilingual and some other in another language schools, so that’s about right.
We have quite a few IB schools.
What does the distance to Russia have to do with it? The overwhelming majority of people speak Finnish, there are hardly any (native) Swedish speakers, kids learn Finnish just fine and the uni is small and the majority of students are Finns.
ETA: Personally I think it rich that LUT and LAB “recommend” that, while they are the ones recruiting foreign students with no Finnish skills, charge them thousands in tuition every year, promise them that they are totally fine with only English and fail to mention that the students will have significant trouble finding internship placements with no or basic Finnish, making it almost impossible for them to do the mandatory internships they need in order to graduate. “Greedy” is the word that comes to mind.