Icelandic students lag up to 18 months behind, former minister says

According to mbl.is, Icelandic students may be one to one and a half years behind their peers, particularly in science, Lilja Dögg Alfreðsdóttir, chairwoman of the Progressive Party and a former education minister, says.

She said Icelandic schools needed to address more advanced material earlier and strengthen science teaching so students could keep pace with their peers in comparable countries.

Alfreðsdóttir called for a comparative study of Icelandic and Estonian education systems in cooperation with the OECD. She pointed to the particularly strong performance of Estonian children in the PISA assessment.

She said more information was needed to identify the problem, adding that several factors had left Icelandic children at a disadvantage compared with students in the countries used for comparison.

Icelandic children achieved their weakest-ever result in PISA, and no other country has declined as sharply as Iceland since 2015. Results deteriorated significantly between the 2018 and 2022 assessments.

Alfreðsdóttir was education minister from 2017 to 2021. Asked whether she felt responsible for the decline during her time in office, she said it was difficult to measure the impact of education reforms shortly after they were introduced.

“I am convinced that increased assessments, such as the assessment process, will deliver a great deal for the Icelandic education system,” she said.

During her time as minister, an education policy was introduced through 2030, with a particular focus on literacy, in cooperation with the OECD. Work also began on the assessment process, which was implemented last spring.

An effort was made to attract more people to teacher training, resulting in a substantial increase in the number of teacher-training students. Early support measures were also introduced.

“A great deal was done and launched, but to achieve better results we need to look more deeply at what is happening and what we could have done better,” Alfreðsdóttir said. She added that she would have liked teaching materials to have received more attention, but that funding had not been available at the time. She said she had secured funding for major changes to teacher training and several other measures.

“My theory is that Icelandic children are one to one and a half years behind, for example in science,” she said.

Alfreðsdóttir said the next step in education reform should be a comparative study of the Estonian and Irish education systems, where good results had been achieved. Curricula, teaching materials and the difficulty of the material should be compared to establish the real reasons for the difference.

She said the subject-specific vocabulary of Icelandic children in the tenth grade was not as rich as that of children of the same age in Finland.