Finance Minister Riikka Purra (Finns Party) announced on Wednesday as part of her draft budget proposal plans to dismantle the Finnish National Agency for Education (Opetushallitus, OPH). The move escalated significant attention and debate particularly because it would involve transferring the agency’s responsibilities to the Ministry of Education and Culture.
Published: 08/08/25 | 17:14
Currently OPH operates independently with the authority to design and prepare Finland’s school curricula. If the proposal is implemented its operations could come under direct political oversight which is a change OPH’s Director General Minna Kelhä warns may influence curriculum planning.
“This was entirely unexpected and frankly a bit of a shock,” Kelhä told Yle. She also pointed out that the timing is unusual given that Finland is already in the process of reducing the number of education administration agencies from ten to five, which is a reform Parliament approved just before the summer break.
Kelhä cautioned that if legislation, its implementation and other educational development tasks were handled under the same ministry it would be difficult to avoid political impact.
The Finns Party has been openly critical of OPH in recent months. In June seven party MPs including deputy chair Teemu Keskisarja accused the agency of promoting “woke ideology.”
The term “woke” generally refers to an awareness of social and political inequalities especially relating to race, gender, sexual orientation and other forms of discrimination.
In their statement the MPs objected to OPH’s promotion of topics such as “anti-racism,” “microaggressions,” “white normativity,” and “cisnormativity,” calling them “intersectional pseudo-information.” They argued that such content “underestimates the intelligence of teachers” and undermines OPH’s credibility as an expert body.
Joakim Vigelius, another Finns Party deputy chair, told Yle’s Ykkösaamu program on Thursday that OPH has interfered excessively with teachers’ freedom to determine lesson content though he did not specify which guidelines or regulations he was referring to. He also criticized the agency for failing to adapt Finland’s education system to match other countries citing falling PISA scores and the widespread use of smartphones in classrooms.
“OPH should be ensuring that all schools have a high-quality learning environment but over the past 10-20 years those environments have actually declined,” Vigelius said.
Kelhä did not comment on whether the plan to close OPH has political or ideological motives. However, she noted that dismantling the agency is unlikely to generate significant savings, particularly if its broad range of services continues under the Ministry of Education.
“When we’re already in the middle of merging agencies, a reform that will take effect next year and is meant to reduce administrative costs it doesn’t seem reasonable to initiate another restructuring so soon,” she said.
Kelhä added that OPH has not yet received detailed information about the reasons for the proposal or the scale of potential savings making it difficult to assess its full impact.
