Union minister of education and skill development, Dharmendra Pradhan held a meeting with Finnish minister of education, science and culture, Petri Honkonen to discuss challenges in the educational sector post-pandemic.

Both leaders discussed the current education reforms in India and making knowledge a pillar in bilateral cooperation to deepen engagements in areas including education, skill development and frontier research.

Pradhan said "Finland has evinced interest to collaborate with India on the knowledge front, especially as a result of the possibilities arising out of NEP. Both India and Finland can benefit from each other’s best practices in ECEC (early childhood education and care), teacher training, digital education among others".

He further added, "Finnish Universities are welcome to collaborate with Indian Higher Education Institutions through joint and dual degrees and twinning programmes".

They both noted that a determined approach is needed to bridge the learning gap of the most vulnerable children, officials said.

The ministers also discussed the path-breaking educational reforms currently underway in India, they said.

Minister Honkonen pointed out similarities between the National Education Policy (NEP 2020) and Finnish pedagogical thinking. He notes how both have a student-oriented approach and activity-based teaching methods as their core elements. “This makes it easier than ever before for our countries to collaborate in the domain of education,” he said.

To push the initiative, the ministry of education and culture of Finland has allocated funds of up to one million Euros a year to a cluster of Finnish universities as a core source of funding. Global Innovation Network of Teaching and Learning (GINTL,) started its function to tackle the crisis in the pandemic and co-create joint activities between Finnish and Indian educational institutions.

The Finnish National Agency of Education (EDUFI) has signed an agreement with the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to promote educational collaboration and sharing information and content in different areas of school education. These include childhood care and education, vocational education, teacher education and training, school leadership and management, application of ICT in education, curriculum research design and development among others.

Finnish Indian Consortia for Research and Education (FICORE), a university network, will be giving another one million euros a year in funds to the Indo-Finnish collaboration, focusing on higher education and research. FICORE includes all academic universities in Finland and all Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) in India. The scheme is coordinated by Aalto University and IIT Bombay.

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