Curriculum reform 2016 was intended to ensure that the knowledge and skills of Finnish children and youths will remain strong in the future, both nationally and internationally. In addition, pedagogical guidelines were defined to help schools develop their operating methods in order to increase the pupils' interest in and motivation for learning.
Some of the key goals of the reform include enhancing pupil participation, increasing the meaningfulness of learning and enable every pupil to feel successful. Children and young people are encouraged to take more responsibility for their schoolwork and are given more support in their studies. The pupils set goals, solve problems and assess their learning based on set targets. The pupils' experiences, feelings, areas of interest and interaction with others lay the foundation for learning. The teacher's task is to instruct and guide the pupils into becoming lifelong learners, by taking the individual learning approaches of each pupil into consideration.
