Politician's 'bearded second-grader' claim stirs controversy

A heated debate has erupted over claims by a Helsinki city councillor that teenagers and very young children are mixed in the same classroom. The controversy was sparked when Otto Meri, a member of the NCP party, tweeted that a student in the second grade at a Helsinki primary school appeared to be much older than his stated age of eight.

Meri claimed to have received the information from the school's principal. The principal confirmed that a new student had joined the second grade, describing the child as a 180-centimeter tall man with a beard who appeared to be at least 15 years old. However, independent verification of the incident has proven challenging, as there is no authority in place to investigate the situation without the parents' consent.

Meri has proposed that schools should have the ability to order a thorough age assessment for a child if there are credible suspicions about their actual age. Despite his post garnering almost 200,000 views on X, the head of Basic Education at the City of Helsinki, Ville Raatikainen, maintains that he is unaware of any similar cases in the city.

He emphasized that schools operate based on information from official registers and do not make judgments about a pupil's age based on appearance or personal impressions.