Former principal calls Iceland’s education system an emergency

Jón Pétur Zimsen, a member of parliament for the Independence Party and former principal, says Iceland’s education system is in an emergency, mbl.is reports. He says schools cannot offer children an acceptable education when only 2 to 3 percent demonstrate exceptional ability and 46 percent lack basic skills.

Zimsen made the comments during the Dagmál programme, where he appeared with Magnús Þór Jónsson, chairman of the Icelandic Teachers’ Association. They discussed the state of education following the publication of the latest PISA results.

Zimsen said PISA results had previously encouraged people working in schools, but school leaders have not received the results since 2012. As principal of Réttarholtsskóli, he pushed to obtain the data in 2015. Although the data was encrypted, he could see that several schools had significantly improved between assessments, including his own.

He said access to the detailed results made it possible to identify what needed to be improved. In 2012, around 23 percent of students at his school were in the highest proficiency levels in reading comprehension, compared with around 2 percent now. The corresponding figures in mathematics were 24 percent then and around 3 percent now, while the figure for science had fallen from around 14 percent.

Zimsen said education authorities should have examined the characteristics of schools that achieved positive changes and compared them with schools where results declined. He said this had not been done and called for politicians, local authorities and others to work together on the issue.