72 comprehensive schools closed down in 2017

A total of 72 comprehensive schools or comprehensive school-level special education schools were closed down or merged with other educational institutions in 2017, according to Statistics Finland.

Four of the schools were educational institutions with less than 20 students, 23 of them had 20 to 49 pupils, while 45 had at least 50 students. The number of closures was the highest in the region of Uusimaa.

According to Statistics Finland’s register of providers of education and register of educational institutions, there were 728 active providers of education and 3,315 educational institutions where 1.85 million students pursued studies at the end of 2017.

A total of 2,276 comprehensive schools were in operation, 19 per cent of which were joint schools comprising grades 1 to 9. The share of joint schools in the field of comprehensive schooling has risen by 10 percentage points over the last 10 years.

Over that decade, the number of primary schools comprising grades 1 to 6 has gone down by 31 per cent, while the number of joint schools has grown by 56 per cent. In 2008, there were 2,300 primary schools, while in 2017 the corresponding figure stood at 1,589.