A Parental Perspective on Educational Support for High-Ability Children in Finland

Abstract

Collaboration between early childhood education, the school, and home is an important part of any child’s educational path. The Finnish national curriculum for early childhood education and basic education requires teachers to cultivate high-ability children’s talents but this should be done in collaboration with parents. However, students who are highly achieving are statistically uncommon. For this reason, there is very little research literature available on how this group of children is supported during their educational path. From these premises, ten parents of high-ability children were interviewed. A closer look at which type of support high-ability children receive in Finland was conducted, in order to identify what kind of support they are receiving. Content analysis was used as the method. The parental perspectives on support measures were divided into four elements of provided support. These were structural level operations of received support and the lack of the received support, interpretation and implementation operations of that support and the lack of received support. As a summary, the educational support children received was described as weak in its content, and collaboration in multi-professional networks was not highlighted.