Dharmendra Pradhan meets Finnish minister to discuss post-covid-19 challenges in education sector

NEW DELHI: 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 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.

Minister Honkonen pointed similarities between the National Education Policy (NEP 2020) and the Finnish pedagogical thinking. He notes how both have a student-oriented approach and activity based teaching methods as their core elements. Such similarities will make collaborations in the educational domain between Finland and India easier.

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To push the initiative, the ministry of education and culture of Finland has allocated funds of upto one million Euros a year into 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 education institutions.

The Finnish National Agency of Education (EDUFI) has signed an agreement with 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 euro 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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Speaking on the occasion, Pradhan expressed his happiness that “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 & Finland can benefit from each other's best practices in ECCE, teacher training, digital education among others.” The minister added that the Finnish universities are welcome to collaborate with Indian higher education institutions (HEIs) through joint or dual degrees and twinning programmes. In addition, the government is coming up with a policy to allow foreign universities to set up campuses in India soon.

Ambassador of Finland to India, Ritva Koukku-Ronde said: “We aim at long-standing collaboration in the field of education, bearing in mind that education is not a sprint but rather a long-distance run, where teacher professionalism, school culture and deep learning evolve gradually, drawing on previous structure of understanding”.