Browsing by Author "Elovaara, Tuomas"

Goals. Education has a major role to play as a factor in increasing and sustaining the well-being of society. Within the decades there has been a wide range of student welfare services designed to promote equal education. The history of student welfare is part of the history of the Finnish welfare state, and regardless of the age, student welfare services have been geared to meeting the social challenges that characterize the era. Student welfare services can be seen as a welfare policy targeting children and young people. The new student welfare law came into effect in 2014. In the absence of previous research into this law, it was appropriate to study how the law and the discourse that supports it integrates student welfare into the whole of the Finnish welfare policy. Methods. The research material was the government's proposal for parliament as a student welfare law and some related laws (HE 67/2013). No new material was collected for the study. The analysis has applied the three-phase critical discourse analysis initially proposed by Fairclough, first examining the themes and rhetoric of the government's proposal. In the third stage of the analysis the results of the previous steps were analyzed in the contexts related to the production of the government's proposal. Based on the results of these three phases, conclusions have been drawn as to why the government's proposal was formed as it was. Results and Conclusions. The themes of the government's proposal focused on the organization of student welfare strategies and regulations on organizing responsibility. Much attention was also given to themes of well-being and equality. The economic aspects were not as much quantified, but the economic argumentation was strong. The rhetoric of the proposal was mainly factualizing and no options were given in the proposal. There was also a lot of commonly-accepted value themes in the proposal. In the social context, there was concerns about the diversity of the problems of children and young people and the burden on national economy. The purpose of student welfare is to ensure that as many students as possible become part of working life. According to the study, student welfare seems to be an integral part of a welfare policy in which pupils' well-being and education have been made a tool to increase the economic well-being of society.