Finland and Professional Development

In Finland, they spend six times more every year on teacher professional development than on student assessment and testing.

In his book Finnish Lessons, Pasi Sahlberg writes:

The Finnish state budget allocates normally about 30 million U.S. dollars each year to professional development of teachers and school principals through various forms of university courses and in-service training (compared with 5 million U.S. dollars for student assessment and testing!). The main purpose of this investment in human development is to ensure equal access to further training, particularly for teachers working in more disadvantaged schools. This professional development support is contracted to service providers on a competitive basis. The government initially determines to the focus of the desired training, based on current national educational-developments needs. Local education authorities that own the schools and also employ all the teachers make an investment of similar scale in professional development of their education personnel each year. The Ministry of Education, in collaboration with municipalities, plans to double public funding for teacher professional development by 2016.