Finnish Education in Latvia: What Play-Based Pedagogy Could Offer

Latvia and Finland sit across the Gulf of Riga from each other, yet their classrooms have long felt worlds apart. As Latvia works through its own curriculum reform, Finnish K-5 pedagogy, built on play, teacher autonomy and low-stakes assessment, offers a tested model for what comes after the reform paperwork is signed.

Two neighbours, two philosophies

Latvia and Finland are close in geography and, in some structural respects, in school design. Both start compulsory education around age 7, and Latvia's sākumskola stage runs from grades 1 to 6, almost exactly the K-5 age band Oppi focuses on. But the philosophies guiding those classrooms have historically diverged. Latvian schooling has leaned on centralised exams, formal grading and a content-heavy curriculum inherited from earlier decades, while Finland built a system around a national curriculum framework that gives teachers wide autonomy, keeps standardised testing to a minimum, and treats play as serious pedagogical work rather than a break from it.

Neither approach is static. Latvia has spent the past several years trying to close that gap, and Finland's results, while still strong, have also softened somewhat in recent international assessments, a reminder that no system stands still or is beyond scrutiny.

Skola2030: Latvia's own reform

The most significant recent change in Latvian education is Skola2030, a project that introduced a competence-based curriculum across the system, from early childhood settings through to grade 12. Rather than organising learning purely around fixed subjects, the reform groups content into broader fields such as languages, natural sciences, mathematics and engineering, and health and physical activity, with teachers encouraged to design interdisciplinary lessons around real-world problems. The new content was fully introduced across general education by 2023.

This is a genuine and ambitious shift, and it moves Latvian classrooms conceptually closer to the kind of competence-focused, real-life problem solving that has long been a feature of Finnish pedagogy compared with rote learning and exam-focused systems. Writing a competence-based curriculum on paper and building the daily classroom habits, teacher training and assessment culture to match it are, however, two different challenges. That second challenge is where decades of Finnish classroom practice has something concrete to offer.

What Finnish K-5 pedagogy could add

For children aged 7 to 12, Finnish pedagogy rests on a few consistent habits: short lessons broken up with genuine outdoor breaks, learning through play and hands-on activity well into the primary years, phenomenon-based projects that cross subject boundaries, and teachers trusted to adapt lessons to the children in front of them rather than teach to an upcoming test. Formal grading and high-stakes exams are largely absent from the early primary years in Finland, with the emphasis instead on formative feedback and catching learning gaps early.

For Latvian schools implementing Skola2030, this offers a practical companion to the policy shift already under way. Where the new curriculum asks teachers to move away from content recall towards competence, Finnish classroom methods show what that looks like day to day, in lesson pacing, in how children are grouped, and in how progress is tracked without leaning on frequent formal tests.

Exams, testing and student wellbeing

Latvia's exam culture remains one of the clearest points of contrast. Students face state exams at the end of grade 9 and again in grade 12, with compulsory papers in Latvian language, mathematics and a foreign language, and the minimum passing threshold for these centralised exams has been rising in recent years. Finland, by comparison, has no national standardised tests during the primary years and only a single matriculation examination at the end of upper secondary school.

This does not mean Latvia's results are weak. In PISA 2022, Latvian 15-year-olds performed above the OECD average in mathematics and science and close to average in reading, alongside creative thinking scores above the OECD average. The comparison with Finland, whose scores were also above average across all three subjects, is less about one system failing and another succeeding, and more about two different routes to strong outcomes, one built on earlier and more frequent formal assessment, the other on delaying testing in favour of low-stakes, play-rich learning in the early years.

Skola2030 set out to make competence, not memorisation, the goal of a Latvian classroom. The daily practice of getting there is where Finnish pedagogy has decades of experience.

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