The Finland-Swedes are essentially Finns anyway, so you are talking about 99% homogenous population.

I moved to Finland a couple of years ago and have two kids at school. The key differences I see (compared to Aus) are:

  - later start (7 years old grade 1)
  - hot lunches
  - every kid gets the same education, almost no private schools,  no advantage in going to a different school 
  - multiple languages are taught
  - teaching is quite a prestigious and reasonably well paid occupation
  - lots of small schools (they scale wide, not high, from a hardware perspective)

Of course these are basic observations, not a study. I have no idea how they get such good results, but they do.

>teaching is quite a prestigious and reasonably well paid occupation

I'd put money on this being at least an order of magnitude more important than all the other factors put together.

If I recall correctly, that doesn't hold up within the US. Dollars spent on education don't correlate all that closely with regional performance IIRC.

Yes, I think that there are significant cultural and economic differences and it is quite complex, and of course dollars spent on eduction doesn't equal dollars spent on teachers.

A hypothesis: In a social democracy like Finland, you will probably join the large middle class. So when you choose your desired vocation before university you may be more likely to apply your excellent skillset to teaching rather than something else, as that's what you want to do and are suited for, and you'll probably earn close to everyone else anyway.

In some other countries, you may try to get in to law/medicine/business first, and use teaching as a fallback as it is much lower paid. The net result is that teaching can be seen as a second choice profession and not valued as highly socially. Saying "I'm a teacher" at the barbeque sends a signal that you maybe didn't do so well at school as you wanted, and got your second choice at uni.

I know of a couple of data points where this is true in Aus (and also where it is not), but I don't know if it is really widespread. Just a thought.

I don't think dollars spent correlates with the prestige of teaching - perhaps not even with compensation, given the bureaucracy inherent in the system, though that's pure speculation.

A few more:

  Teachers are given freedom to design curriculum and choose textbooks, i.e. quite entrepreneurial approach
  No national tests of learning outcomes
  No school league tables or rankings
  Plenty of (early) attention focused on individual support for the struggling learners

The best students could be underserved, because they advance at the pace of the average (or worst) students.

The prevailing social norms have some drawbacks. Equal opportunities is a good starting point, but too often we like to punish success as a way of keeping the perceived inequalities at minimum. In some way, we can't handle success. There's not enough competition to reach the top. Quite the opposite, envy and such emotions are often not agents for activating people (as in the American dream). More often they create passivity. We're only too happy to be all middle class.

You lived there for a couple of years and you haven't seen any blacks or asians in Helsinki?

Because every time I travel north I notice quite a lot of them compared to here in Tallinn where there's virtually nil of both.

There's certainly enough of them there that I keep hearing angry anti-immigrant sentiment from finns.

Edit some examples:

http://hs.fi/english/article/South+Asian+population+grows+sh...

http://finlandforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=39892

No, I didn't say that - what gave you that impression? Did you read the grandparent?

Finland is also not just Helsinki, you know.

oh, you didn't indeed. I just thought we were arguing here whether Finland had enough immigrants for them to make a dent in education statistics. And the answer is resounding yes.

also, Helsinki clearly isn't the whole Finland, but most African and Asian immigrants do live in Helsinki.