Education of language and cultural groups

Pupils who don't speak Finnish begin their school-going in preparatory education. Preparatory education groups are found in many schools. If the pupil speaks some Finnish and needs support in strengthening one's Finnish language skills, the pupil will receive preparatory education in one's own class in the local school.   

The language of preparatory education is Finnish. In addition to the Finnish language, the pupils study other subjects of comprehensive education according to their own syllabus.

Preparatory education lasts one school year. After preparatory education, the pupil moves on to comprehensive education in which he/she will receive intensified support for studying when necessary.

A multilingual pupil can study Finnish as a second language through the entire comprehensive education in the Mother tongue and literature subject.

Enrolment in preparatory education takes place by contacting the Multicultural Education Services of the Espoo Finnish Education Unit.

Multilingual pupils whose parents or one parent speaks other than Finnish or Swedish as their mother tongue can study their own mother tongue two hours weekly.  The instruction is for pupils in basic education (grades 1-9) and takes place in the afternoon after the lesson hours. The instruction given is free of charge. Guardians are responsible for the possible transportation and travel costs.

Enrollment to own mother tongue lessons is every year from January to April thru Wilma.

There are own mother tongue groups for example in the following languages: Albanian,  Arabic, Bengali, Bosnia/Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, English, Spanish, Farsi/Dari, Filipino, Hindi, Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, Greek, Kurdish, Kurmandji, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Mandarin Chinese, Nepalese, Norwegian, Pashto, Portuguese, Polish, French, Romanian, German, Somali, Swahili, Danish, Tamil, Thai, Tigrinja, Czech, Turkish, Hungarian, Urdu, Russian, Vietnamese and Estonian.

The city of Espoo arranges instruction in the following religion and ethics subjects:

• Evangelical-Lutheral religion
• Orthodox religion
• ethics studies
• Islam
• Catholic religion
• Krishna religion
• Jewish religion
• Buddhism

Each religion and ethic subject have been prepared a municipal curriculum. Instruction is carried out according to the goals and contents of the curriculum.

The materials not only encourage enriched moments between guardians and pupils while reading and enjoying the text together, but also could be used by the teacher as part of classes or homework. For those children who do not yet read independently, their guardians can read for them and initiate the activities.

With these books, our goal is to provide an encouraging and fun way to improve mother tongue language skills of our enthusiastic readers. 

The packages don’t meet the Finnish or English accessibility criteria, and based on this they need to have the marking inaccessible. Nevertheless, they are fully usable for children and parents alike.