My Path

Public description of the goals at the beginning of the project

This project develops novel approaches to prevent social exclusion. We take the full advantage of Finland’s remarkable data infrastructure to identify the mechanisms behind social exclusion and to evaluate the long-term impacts of past policy reforms. Furthermore, we will combine the expertise of economists, psychologists, educational researchers and caseworkers of an innovative NGO to design new research-based interventions. Importantly, we will test the efficiency of these interventions by conducting largescale randomised field experiments. Particular emphasis is given to easing the transition from compulsory to secondary education among the most vulnerable population groups (such as children coming from diverse ethnic backgrounds). The interventions will be designed in a way that, if found efficient, they can be adopted to become part of the basic public services.

Public description of the results at the end of the project

This project has examined the mechanisms underlying social exclusion in Finnish schools and the effects of policies that aim at reducing the risk of social exclusion. In addition, one of the main goals of the project has been to develop new tools to tackle social exclusion in school environment. As a part of the project, we have designed an intervention to support student guidance counselling and this intervention has been implemented in randomly selected schools in Finland. We have analysed the effects of this intervention and this analysis will also continue after the funding period when we have sufficient data on the medium and long-term outcomes of the pupils in treatment and control schools. During the project we also developed a version of the intervention that can be implemented as a part of general student guidance counselling. This version is now being implemented in one Finnish urban municipality. The project has produced results on the regional and socioeconomic learning differences in Finland and their trends. Furthermore, we have analysed the effects of the Finnish youth guarantee, the immigrant integration plan, and the access to secondary education on various socioeconomic outcomes. We have also examined the effects of the intervention that was developed in the project on the self-efficacy motivation of students. The analysis of the effect of the intervention on register data outcomes will continue after the funding period.