The interview's main points are summarized below:

• Estonia has had a parallel Russian education system for 30 year
• Education outcomes in Russian schools lag behind Estonian schools
• 40 percent of children in Russian schools leave school without passing the B1 Estonian exam
• The reform aims to close the gap between children
• 15 percent of teachers were replaced after failing to meet language requirements
• Results will be seen in six-10 years time

Read a short overview of the reform here.

ERR News: Is it fair to say that there has been a parallel Russian education system in Estonia for the last 30 years?

Minister of Education Kristina Kallas: Yes, the two-language education system that was created during the Soviet time by the Soviet regime has continued for 30 years.

During the Soviet time – to remind the outside audience that doesn't know about the Russian schools – they were run under the Russian Federation's curricula. Estonian schools were under the supervision of the Estonian ministry, and the Russian schools were under the Russian ministry.

So in 1992, the Russian schools were transformed under the supervision of the Estonian Ministry of Education and the curriculum was changed to an Estonian curriculum, but the language of instruction and, of course, the teachers were not changed.

So this remained for 30 years. There have been attempts every decade to integrate those schools much more strongly with the Estonian education system but, of course, there has never been full integration.

So what we are starting now from September 1 is a much more forceful full integration of the Russian schools into the Estonian system, so that all the children that go to school in Estonia and graduate in Estonia have the same curriculum, the same level of possibilities.

What outcomes do Russian language schools have? Is there much difference with Estonian language schools?

Nobody can actually argue that Russian schools do not give them good education because if you look at the PISA results, Estonian Russian schools are getting the best results among all Russian schools in the world.

Whether we compare Estonian Russian schools to the Russian Russian schools or the Latvian Russian schools or any other Russian-speaking schools in the world, Estonian Russian schools are still getting the best results.

But, of course, they are not doing as well as Estonian language schools and that puts the Russian children in a disadvantaged position when it comes to competing for the chance to continue their education.

We see that the number of children from Russian families who reach higher education is lower than the number in the Estonian community and we need to deal with this.

So that's one of the aims of the reform – to give equal opportunities to all minority groups.

How many children from study in Russian-language schools leave school without passing the B1 Estonian exam?

It's usually a little bit more than 40 percent of the graduates after year nine who do not still pass B1 level.

A little bit less than 60 percent pass and the 40 percent do not pass and that really has been a concern for years because that means they [...] can't find a job because they don't speak the language, they can't continue their education.

Why is this the right time for this reform? Is it connected to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine? Has it changed society's attitude towards a reform like this?

Well, I don't think that this is the right time for this reform. I think the right time for this reform would have been maybe a decade ago, but it's better now than never.

Of course, the war has helped. It has helped in the way that the public's demand for integration issues to finally be taken care of has increased significantly because there is an external threat that forces society to look for strength inside.

This kind of segregation that we have had ethnically or linguistically in Estonia is our weakness and there has been a demand for strength.

But there is another trend which is much less talked about: There's a constant increase among the Russian-speaking community to get their children into Estonian schools, into Estonian language schools, because the generation of the parents of the kids now is the first generation that grew up completely from birth in independent Estonia.

So they were born in independent Estonia, they went to school in independent Estonia. So this is a generation of parents that want their children to be successful in Estonia. They don't have any connections to Russia, whether identity-wise or linguistically or any other way. So the parents' generation among the Russian speakers has changed as well. And that also has had an impact.

Why now? Because the parents themselves are rather looking for Estonian language education for their children.

The majority of this reform was agreed in 2021 by a previous minister of education, would you have preferred to do anything differently?

Well, I have made minor adjustments in the reform plan, and it mostly connects to the multilingualism of the children that come from Russian families. As a researcher myself, as a person with an academic background, who has been studying and researching this area for several decades, I know that in order for the child to acquire a second language – for them, Estonian is a second language – the child needs to be able to use also their first language.

It's not that you just cancel the first language and assume that only exposure to the second language alone is enough to progress. So that's what the scientists say. No, both languages need to be used effectively for the child to develop cognitively and also have academic achievements.

So what we have adjusted in the program is to bring the Russian language as a first language back into the school curricula so that children – and that's what we have asked the schools to do – will have two hours per week of mother tongue instruction from the first grade in order to support the development of the first language.

The development of the first language also helps the development of the second language and also helps the development of the third language which is English which they start in grade three.

So the children in these former Russian schools will have a multilingual program approach and their linguistic capacities will develop into multilingualism. That's also, of course, what we expect from Estonian children, but they are more bilingual because they study English in the school curriculum.

I think it's obvious why the transition starts with class one [age 7], but why class four [age 10-11]?

 It starts at class four because it's the second level of primary school.

The first level is one to three, the second level is four to six, and the third level of primary school is seven to nine. Then that's the end of the primary school year nine and then the upper secondary or high school starts at grade ten. But grade ten is when they start fully 100 percent [learning] in the Estonian language.

So if you start in the Estonian language at grade four, you still have six years of school. That's quite a long time to acquire it, so that you have the capacity to acquire spoken Estonian and also academic Estonian.

If you started grade seven, that's three years and that's a very short time and usually within that time it's much more difficult to acquire Estonian on an academic level. You can acquire it on a spoken level, but you don't usually acquire it on an academic level.

But if you start at grade four, that's enough time to acquire it on a communicative and academic level.

That's why we chose also grade four so that the children who are in grade four today will not lose six years of their schooling because after six years they would have to switch anyway to fully understand the language of instruction.

What are the ministry's plans or schools' plans to monitor student progress and adjust things if necessary?

We will monitor at the end of each level. Every three years, children have to sit the national level tests – at the end of grades three, six and nine.

We will do those tests and we will have a control group in Estonian language schools and then all the transition schools also have to do the tests. So we will compare those going to grade one now at the end of grade three.

Then we will compare them to the Estonian control group cohort of the same age to see whether there is an academic gap still or not. Hopefully, there is not.

Are you expecting there to be a gap?

Well, we will be level testing them on four subjects which are Estonian as a second language, mathematics, science – that's usually nature – and also Russian as a mother tongue.

We will be comparing them with Estonians for math and science, but of course, not in the Estonian language and not in the Russian language. These are not comparable test levels.

In math and science, we do anticipate that there could still be an academic achievement gap after grade three, but they should be closing this gap after grade six, for sure.

Enough teachers have been found for the first year of the reform, but what about in the coming years?

Yes, we have enough teachers for this first year for grade one and grade four, but next year, of course, we have to find another set of teachers for another grade one and grade four, and then after the next year, another set of teachers and then it will be fully set. So it takes three years to find all the necessary teachers.

So the Russian schools will be in this teacher transition for the next three years because every year you need a new set of teachers who speak Estonian.

 It doesn't mean that they are new teachers. They might be the teachers who already teach at school, but they will acquire Estonian at the C1 level and will be trained to teach in Estonian, but it's a new set of teachers.

Of course, teacher shortages play a significant role here, and I'm fully aware that these schools are very stressed about whether they will make it. But the effort I see that the school leadership is making and the teachers themselves are making is actually encouraging.

Throughout the whole of last year, I have had the feeling that we would not make it because there was so much stress about the lack of teachers. But now September 1 is here and we are ready.

That's a very positive outcome of a very stressful year for everybody and I hope that next year we will be also ready. It's not easy. I mean if you have to replace 15 percent of the teachers in your education system – that's a challenge for any country. But I don't see that we can do it any other way, that there is no alternative to that process, if we want to be achieving our goals in ten years' time.

We are very much aware that it's not going to happen in two years or three years or maybe not even in five years. Six to ten years is when we will start seeing the results.

Are you planning to increase the number of teacher study places at universities or continue to offer grants to attract teachers to Russian-speaking areas in the future?

Yes, we have increased the number of places at the teacher training programs at the universities already for the second year. Last year [there were an additional] 455 places, this year [an extra] 455 places and next year as well. So it's close to 1,500 more than in previous decades. Teacher professions have become very attractive to young people.

So we have an ever-increasing competition in the teacher training programs at the universities. This year was especially successful.

We have scholarship programs for the students, 80 percent of the students who choose teacher training programs at the universities receive scholarships. In most of the other programs, you don't have scholarships, but the teacher training programs have scholarships.

Also the salaries [are higher] for the teachers that go to teach in Estonian at the transition schools, especially those teachers that go to the eastern part of Estonia, which is a dominantly Russian-speaking area. They have a very significant salary coefficient of 1.5, so they have a 50 percent higher salary and this has played a role in attracting teachers to work in those transition schools.

How many teachers have been granted a temporary one-year contract?

I think that it's close to 400 teachers all over Estonia who have been granted temporary contracts for one year because they don't meet the qualification requirements yet.

Over the past year, you've met a lot of parents who are probably quite worried about the reform. What concerns have they raised?

The parents' concerns are mainly related to the teachers. Whether the teachers that have to start teaching in Estonian actually speak Estonian well enough, and whether they are methodologically trained on how to teach the children who don't speak Estonian yet.

This concern of the parents is, I think, very legitimate because this is something that has never been done before and this is something new. So it's unknown territory and it's understandable that the parents are concerned about how will it actually work.

As a result of this concern, what we have seen is that many parents choose Estonian schools where the teachers are Estonians and the kids are Estonians, instead of a Russian school where the teacher might be Russian and teaching in Estonian.

So especially in Tallinn, but also in Ida-Viru County in the eastern part of the country, Estonian schools are very crowded this academic year because the parents have chosen Estonian language schools already from grade one for their children.

So this has been a process, for example, in the Kuristiku High School, which is an Estonian school in the middle of the Tallinn district that is dominantly Russian speaking. This Estonian school is opening six first-year classes – six! They usually have three but this year it's double and they had to open a new temporary building. The doubling of the classes is because Russian[-speaking] children want to attend Estonian language school.

Estonian-speaking parents have also complained the reform may compromise Estonian language education. Are these concerns legitimate or does there need to be more tolerance and understanding?

No, this is also a very legitimate concern and indeed if the teaching process is constructed in a way that the children who don't speak Estonian are in the same class doing the same exercises as Estonian children then there will be problems.

We have given schools a recommendation that Russian[-speaking] children who don't speak Estonian at all should be taught separately at first in a separate class with a separate methodology. It's called language immersion methodology because that's much more appropriate for Russian[-speaking] kids and it doesn't interfere with the methodology for Estonian[-speaking] kids.

So this language immersion methodology in a separate class or in a separate learning group for the children who don't speak Estonian at all is a much more appropriate approach and usually takes a maximum of six years for them to go through the language immersion program. Then they fully acquire Estonian at communicative and academic levels and can join with Estonians in the same classes, in the same learning environment.

But it doesn't mean that in some subjects that are less language demanding [children need to be taught separately]. You don't have to separate them in English language classes, you don't have to separate them in music or in art or in sports classes. So the children can learn together there, but the classes, the subjects that are language intensive need to be taught separately.

What would a positive outcome look like for this reform?

That after grade nine, the children who come from Russian-speaking families speak Estonian at B2 level. Not B1, but level B2, because that's the level that you need to study at high school.

Also, a positive outcome is that they are culturally and information-wise integrated into the same information and cultural space as Estonian children so you don't see this big difference between Russian and Estonian kids when it comes to understanding Estonia, life around them, and also of course their academic achievements.

We are aiming with this reform to close the gap in academic achievement between Russian and Estonian children, which is currently according to PISA, around three-quarters of an academic year. Russian schools are lagging behind.

Negotiations for 2025's state budget are underway. Cuts are expected, will this affect the reform or finding teachers?

No, the cuts do not concern teachers, they do not concern the transition either so we are not cutting these costs of the budget. Definitely not.

You're currently negotiating over salaries with the teaching unions, is it likely that the teachers will get the requested salary that they're asking for?

When it comes to the request of a salary increase for next year, I'm not so optimistic about it. Considering that we have to cut a significant part of the budget, it's a 10 percent cut that we have to make in the budget.

In this reality, finding resources for teacher salary increases... I'm not very optimistic about it.

The language requirements for international schools were dropped. Why was this?

The language requirements have to apply, according to EU law, to jobs that require this language to be used for work purposes, and because, internationally, Estonian language is not needed for work purposes, we have no kind of right to demand the skills of those languages because that puts other EU citizens at a disadvantage in the EU labor market.

So this is EU regulation and based on that we'll limit them to the B1 level which is a level for any permanent resident irrespective of where in the labor market they work.

More and more foreigners are moving to Estonia from around the world, should they also put their children into Estonian-speaking schools?

I would encourage the international community living in Estonia to put their children into Estonian schools.

First of all, the Estonian education system is of top European quality. You don't have to be worried about the fact that your child will not get good academic results. They will in mathematics, reading and English.

Plus you get Estonian language skills and even if you might think 'what would I do with the Estonian language skills?' it's not about the Estonian language specifically. It's about developing a multilingual brain. Developing a multilingual brain is something that gives you a lot of advantages in future life. For example, acquiring any extra third or fourth language always becomes easier. Or, for example, a multilingual brain has a lot of cognitive advantages. Some of the cognitive capacities are much stronger for multilingual people than for monolingual people.

So I would definitely, as the Estonian minister of education, encourage parents to put their kids in Estonian schools because I don't see any negative consequences of that.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and Twitter and never miss an update!