This building houses the Skärgårdshavet school with curriculum in Swedish, Ulkosaaristo school with curriculum in Finnish and Korpo day care centre. In the day care centre, both native languages (Finnish and Swedish) are used in parallel. There are seven schools in the Archipelago Sea Biosphere Reserve: two schools with Finnish as the working language and five schools with Swedish as the working language. The schools in the biosphere reserve are small, and most have composite classes, meaning that two or more grades are in the same classroom and follow alternating curricula. Students study mathematics and languages according to their own grade level. In Skärgårdshavet school and in Kyrkbacken school, pupils have the subject Archipelago Knowledge, where they learn more about the archipelago’s past and present.
The pupils travel to and from the schools in different ways. In the biosphere reserve, the means of transport to and from the school can include boat, ferry, school taxi, bus, bicycle and, if necessary, even hydrocopter. In the archipelago, the journey to school can be long, and therefore the schools adapt the lesson times according to the timetables of the ferries and public transport. Pupils from Träsk school and pupils from Utö school come to Skärgårdshavet school and Ulkosaaristo school for grades 7–9. For pupils from the school on Utö, accommodation is arranged during the school week with families on the main island of Korpo, and accommodation costs are covered by the municipality. The local school for pupils from the islands of Kimitoön within the biosphere reserve is usually Dalsbruk school. The schools regularly arrange trips to Turku for swimming, theatre visits and other activities. When pupils have completed basic education, it is common for them to move away from home at the age of 15–16 to study elsewhere.
Can you balance like this?
Did you know? Utö folk school was founded in 1884, as the first folk school in what was then the municipality of Korpo. The reason was that at the end of the 19th century, within the pilotage institution, future pilots began to be expected to be able to read and write.
The Archipelago Sea Biosphere Reserve’s educational programme The Biosphere Academy centres around sustainability education and archipelago culture and nature and is aimed at children and young people.