TAF PUBLISHING

Teacher autonomy has been one of the most increasingly popular research areas in education since the turn of the 21st century. As one of the main components of teacher professionalism, it has gained increased significance in public discourse reflecting wider global and local education policies. Finnish schooling system, lauded as one of the top-performing education systems thanks to its consistent success in PISA rankings, attaches huge significance to teacher autonomy as one of the main pillars of its “educational miracle”. While there are sufficient studies that have researched teacher autonomy in the Finnish education context, there has been little systematic research on the critical analysis of teacher autonomy from educational policy perspective. This paper conducts a systematic literature review of existing studies and policy documents to construct a holistic analysis of the concept of teacher autonomy in Finnish education system from a public policy perspective and sheds light on its unintended consequences.