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| Students from Bochum, Germay getting aquainted with Brusaby horses. |
Axxell is – by Finnish measures - a fairly large vocational school, providing upper secondary vocational education in Southern Finland. Axxell has about 3 500 students and a personnel of 400 – of which about 250 are teachers – working at 9 units.
Education concerning natural resources and the environment are centered here at the Brusaby unit in Kimito and that is where you are now.
To summarize: Axxell is the name of the school and Brusaby the name of this unit for natural resources. The name Brusaby originates from the geographical location and the name of the farm that nowadays is part of our school.
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As you probably have heard, here in Finland, after 9 years of basic education you can choose between general upper secondary education or vocational upper secondary education. That is the choice your fellow students here in Kimito will face next spring, whether to apply to a “gymnasium” providing general education or a vocational school. In Finland both types of upper secondary education makes you eligible for further studies, even at university level.
For your fellow students Axxell offer four study programs here in Brusaby. You can study for a qualification in
- Agriculture
- Forestry
- Horse caretaking
- Animal caretaking
At the moment we have approximately 120 youth students here in Brusaby studying for a vocational qualification.
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What you may not know, is that in Finland we have a strong belief in lifelong learning and have a rather extensive system for further education for adults. Axxell also provides further vocational education for people who want to develop their working skills or even learn a new craft and change career. In Brusaby we offer about 20 different vocational education programs for adults, all in the field of natural resources and the environment. We have about 350 adults studying for a further or special qualification here in Brusaby, most of them on one- or two-year programs.
In vocational education learning (/ teaching) is very much “hands-on” and learning by doing. It means that, for education in the field of natural resources and the environment, we need a lot of different resources. In Brusaby we have a farm with 185 hectares of fields and an additional 120 hectares of forest. Our students participate in the work both on the farm and in the forest. At the farm we also have 50 milk cows and a herd of about 50 sheep for meat production.
We have two stables and the school owns 25 horses. Students take care of the horses and stables as part of their studies – also during weekends and vacations and are also allowed to bring their own horses here during their studies.
In order for students to learn animal caretaking we have to animal houses; one for smaller “production” animals like chickens and rabbits, one for more exotic animals like rodents, lizards, aquariums et cetera. Also the animal houses are mainly taken care of by students.
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While there is only one unit for vocational education in the field of natural resources in Southern Finland, it means that many of our students come from fairly far away. Therefore most of our students, especially youth students, stay at our dorms. We have 160 accommodations in Brusaby that are almost fully booked during the semester. In the summer when there are fewer students on campus the dorms are used as a hostel, providing accommodation e.g. for competitors during Jumping Kemiö, one of the biggest horse jumping competitions in Finland.
