The focus of this analysis is on the prerequisites for a more integrated educational structure within four educational institutions supervised by the Ministry of the Interior – the Police University College, the Emergency Services College, the Border and Coast Guard Academy and the Crisis Management Centre Finland. An increasingly integrated educational structure implies an analysis of the possibilities to integrate the educational tasks and provisions in a new, more shared manner in order to achieve positive impacts. The analysis is built on a pre-evaluation model of organisational mergers aiming firstly to identify the strategic benefits of the merger, secondly, the organisational similarities and differences relevant from the viewpoint of the merger, and, thirdly, the amount and nature of work required to actually integrate the organisations. However, it turned out that an increasingly integrated educational structure would not provide significant strategic benefits in the short run, and the last two phases of evaluation were left aside. Instead, the outlines were drawn for an ideal higher education institution in the field of internal security that could be used as a point of reference in the development and evaluation of the current educational arrangements within the administrative sector. The possible strategic benefits were sought by comparing the educational profiles of the educational institutions and the similarities and differences in their curricula. An integrated educational model of the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences was studied as well as the structural development of regionally distributed universities of applied sciences in Finland in terms of their internal service organisation. As to the educational profiles, the four institutes studied differ from each other in terms of the level of the degrees they offer, the close relations to their respective stakeholders as well as the professions the students are expected to enter after their graduation, the military nature of the Border and Coast Guard Academy and that the qualification for the senior positions in the Finnish Border Guard which is served by the education offered by the National Defence University. The comparison of the curricula showed a strong, pedagogically grounded endeavour to integrate the learning contents to work-related units instead of a subject-based model. Differences exceed similarities in terms of learning contents, objectives and qualification levels. The dissimilarities were more distinctive in vocational education and training than in officer and higher education, in which contents related to administrative responsibilities and leadership in general were common to all fields. An increasingly integrated educational structure in the field of internal security would require upgrading all the degrees to the level of higher education, unifying salary and fringe benefits, operating in one physical location, increasing the length of education in the fields of the border guard and emergency services, creating encompassing conceptual framework for different services in the field of security and dividing roles, responsibilities and training costs anew. In the short term, the autonomy of each of the institutions will provide the best conditions for developing their qualifications and education towards a more unified direction. This effort can be best supported by increasing the co-operation between the institutions supervised by the Ministry of the Interior and with other educational institutions, instead of forcing the integration of institutions which differ from each other as regards their tasks and operative logics. 3 Although the prerequisites for an increasingly integrated educational structure within the field of the Ministry of the Interior are currently non-existent, in the long term a vision of an “Academy for Safety and Security” might be worth pursuing. However, we are a long way from this goal, and getting there would imply significant changes to the current situation.