Author: Henry Hepburn

Henry is a Senior reporter at the Times Educational Supplement Scotland, Scotland’s leading weekly publication for teachers and other education professionals. He took part to the Foreign Correspondence Programme in 2001 and has visited Finland also in 2008 with the aim of getting to know the Finnish education system better. After this visit, Times Educational Supplement Scotland published a five-part series of articles on the Finnish education system and schools. Henry has been awarded the Best Feature Writer (business/professional magazines) at the Scottish Magazine Awards in 2014 and 2015. Hepburn also writes about politics, sports and food. In 2012 he published the book The Beautiful Games: Scotland’s Hidden Sports. “I would arrive in Finland with an open mind about what I might find, but I would guarantee writing about it afterwards in what I consider my typical style: detail-rich, vivid, empathetic and crammed with insight.”

Education and equity: twin pillars of Finnish culture

Platitudes about education are not hard to find. Education is “the key to success in life”. It is lauded as “our greatest natural resource” and proclaimed to be “the single most important job of the human race”.

But all this implies that education is a uniform, unchanging force for good. Far from it: education is shape-shifting and can serve myriad purposes, whether indoctrination or ...  (continue reading)

Henry Hepburn starts the series of blog posts by FCP Alumni participants!

My first visit to Finland in 2001 is one of the highlights of my career in journalism – but there’s a lingering guilt about it.

I arrived in Helsinki that summer straight out of a postgraduate journalism degree, and still unsure of where my first job would take me. The Foreign Correspondents Programme provided me with many eye-opening issues and vivid characters to write about, but I was still ...  (continue reading)