Whizzy notions Michael Gove and co like to import from abroad won’t work in the UK because we don’t get the full story

So, as the first needles drop from the Christmas tree, we return to gritty reality, a grotty new year – and resolutions. Here’s one for the coalition: stop picking up whizzy governmental notions from round the globe, pretending that such ideas travel well. Health service reform? Try the Dutch model. Immigration reform? Australia shows the way. Arts funding and university tuition? God bless America! Snow-covered runways? Welcome to Geneva. And then – before you can say Michael Gove – there is education.

First, Gove went to Sweden, where he saw a few “free” schools set up by parents using state cash. Super. Wrap them up and bring them to Britain. After which he crossed Sweden’s border to Finland, observing how high Helsinki stood internationally in graduate attainment league tables. What, only the top third of graduates each year even allowed to become teachers? Splendid, I’ll have that one, too – or at least a pale little echo, making sure that fewer third-class UK graduates make it in front of a class.

Examine some of the things the education secretary doesn’t factor into his Finnish prescription. Nine years mandatory schooling from seven to 16 (yes, much delayed start at seven). No primaries, no secondaries, just one all-encompassing comprehensive – same teachers start to finish. No setting or streaming: one classroom houses all abilities. But at 16 the paths divide; some go to a more academic school, the gateway to university, the rest go to vocational schools, training to build, plumb, rewire and serve the basic needs of society. Call it “grammar school” and “secondary modern”? Perhaps nothing quite so crude. But transplant this parting of the ways to UK 2011 and you know what the inevitable criticism would be – sheep, goats; failures, successes; fair, unfair.

In short, we put in our ministerial thumbs and pull out a plum that suits us. But we don’t dream of including the whole story as we pinch this or that magical wheeze. Least of all do we attempt to learn the basic lessons of overseas success. Finland is a small, rich country. It doesn’t have a migrant population of a size to trouble the scorers. Finnish schools can root themselves in homogenous communities, speaking the same language, reaching for the same goals. The contrast with Bradford, Bolton or Bristol couldn’t be starker. Of course it’s good to recruit some of the best minds into teaching (and to pay them well). But would mixed-ability classes work in Huddersfield as well as they do in Helsinki? Of course not. You have to take the whole, impossible package to provide the same incredible results.

And that lesson is (sometimes depressingly) constant. Consider Nick Clegg’s mercifully brief attachment to an Australian-style work-visa system for immigrants, which required foreign labour to serve particular firms in particular regions, and get permission to move elsewhere. OK if the move was from Perth to Brisbane, idiotic if it involved going from Preston to Blackpool.

When we motor back from a French holiday hymning French medicine’s wonder treatment of broken toes, do we see the world of difference in payment, subsidy and responsibility that lies behind? As you journey across the EU, let alone America, examining education, health, local government and legal systems, the magic doesn’t lie in what’s the same, but in what’s wholly different and impossible to replicate in isolation.

We cry for a new world order. We dispatch study tours to show us the path. But the surest guide to what needs to be done is usually much more mundane. Make that resolution not to go roving to lands where, among other things, they don’t even have new year resolutions.

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