In the office building of the Oxford Academy on an industrial estate in The Hague, several intermediate spaces have been created with glass walls and doors. Almost everywhere there are students during the weekend who receive classroom or one-on-one guidance from their tutor. 19-year-old Taha Erol is preparing for his HAVO final exams. “My vocabulary is not that good, so I need extra language lessons. I am okay with math and physics, but I just prefer to get extra help with that.”
Erol has registered himself for extra lessons in preparation for his final exams. “Of course I want to succeed, but my parents want that too. I do feel a bit of pressure.”
Gürkan Sogut has worked as a secondary school teacher for thirteen years, including eight years as a tutor. He notices performance pressure among many students. “We see real growth in registrations for tutoring and homework support, starting from primary school. Parents want to get involved early and, due to busy jobs, often do not have time to provide the extra educational support that their children need outside of school.”
In the Netherlands, households spent around 472 million euros on educational support in 2022, such as tutoring and homework guidance, it turns out from the most recent figures from Statistics Netherlands. In 1995, these expenses were still 26 million euros.
“Students also feel the pressure to perform from school. When a student falls behind, a teacher quickly tells them that they need extra guidance. But a teacher with thirty students in a class is often unable to provide extra support,” says Sogut. “Parents then quickly seek help, because they think of the worst, that their child will not succeed. And the child can therefore feel very weak or get the feeling that he or she does not belong.”
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Against expectations
According to educational sociologist Iliass El Hadioui, in the Netherlands it is determined very early whether a student fits well into the educational system or whether he or she deviates too much from it. At times of transition to the next phase of school life, i.e. from primary to secondary education and from secondary education to higher or secondary vocational education, he sees the pressure to perform increasing and with it the demand for tutoring also increases.
Parents also note that the quality of education is deteriorating, says El Hadioui. For example, they see that their children’s basic skills, such as language and arithmetic, are not doing well, which has also been confirmed by the Education Inspectorate.
Black swan schools are schools that, against all odds, succeed in providing children from often capital-poor backgrounds with significant learning development.
In have recently been published book ‘Black Swan Schools: Me, us and the culture of high expectations’ El Hadioui describes how education in the Netherlands can be organized in a different way so that, in his view, it remains accessible to everyone. The educational sociologist followed in the context of the program The Transformative School seven hundred schools in primary and secondary education, and at secondary vocational education, and observed more than twenty thousand lessons. Also in the NRC Today podcast he told about it.
“’Black swan schools’ are schools that, against all odds, succeed in providing children from often capital-poor backgrounds with great learning development,” he explains. In most cases, these are schools that have little funding and often have a school population of students with a migration background. These are schools that deviate positively from the majority.
These black swan schools focus on a combination of academic performance and developing the personality and social skills of their students. This takes away the pressure to achieve the highest school performance. “It is not a choice between getting high grades or working on social skills and interests, but both,” says El Hadioui.
The teaching staff does this together in professional, close-knit teams, so that the responsibility is not only placed on individual teachers, but on the school as a collective. In this way, students have all their educational needs met by the collective, meaning that after-school tutoring does not become a necessity, he believes.
More self-confidence
Yet students like Taha Erol see the value of tutoring. He says: “I really get the help and explanation I need here. At school I get less of that, because teachers don’t have all the time for you.”
The picture is indeed nuanced, explains Iliass El Hadioui. “It is good that individual students sometimes follow private education or tutoring for specific reasons. But the problem arises when tutoring becomes a standard reflex.” As an example, he mentions a school where all students from 4-havo classes receive tutoring outside of school hours. “The risk of this is that teachers at school have to compete with tutors to keep their students’ attention. This can give teachers the feeling that they are on their own, which also affects the quality of education offered at school.”
That is why the educational sociologist sees more opportunities in improving the quality of education by providing support in schools. “Since 2024, the government has already spent more than 50 billion euros invested in education,” says El Hadioui. “That is sufficient to ensure that all students in the Netherlands can enjoy good quality education at school, without having to resort to all kinds of private alternatives.”
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