The draw among prospective first graders for a spot at their favorite secondary school in Groningen went badly this year. Parents speak of chaos. The lottery system is as leaky as a basket, they say.
“As a result of an unreliable registration system and parents who cheat, there is a group of children who are disadvantaged at home and have no idea of a suitable place in secondary education. It is completely unfair and unacceptable that students are the victims of this,” says mother Elvira van Bolhuis.
Martine Kruize also says that the lottery system is worthless. Her daughter has been excluded from two schools and has to go to a school she doesn’t want to go to.
“It is chaos now that parents have discovered the loopholes in the law,” says Barbara de Brui, mother of 4 children. Her oldest two are at the Harens Lyceum, number three wanted to go to the Stadslyceum. “We had the Stadslyceum as first choice, Harens as second choice, but even before the draw we received an email from Harens that they were full of first-choice students.” When her son was drawn for the Stadslyceum and she talked to other parents about this, she heard that several schools had filled in as first choice.
Central registration system has been released
How is that possible? Until two years ago, there was a central registration system for prospective secondary school students. It was called Integrip and regulated that each student could indicate one preferred school and two other schools. In this way, each student had an equal chance of ending up at his favorite school.
The central registration system was abandoned because of its high costs and because it did not comply with privacy legislation. Instead, the individual schools organizations now have their own registration system. In practice, this means that parents can specify several schools as preferred schools: a favorite school within the public school umbrella, a favorite with the Catholic, Christian and free schools.
‘Parents do not fill in the system truthfully’
It has been kept quiet that the central registration has been discontinued, but more and more parents heard about it and made use of the flawed system. As a result, some prospective juniors can attend three of their favorite high schools (public, Christian, and Waldorf). Other prospective first graders, whose parents had no idea of the abolished central registration system, cannot go to the school of their first choice. Nor at their second or third choice school.
,,Parents do not fill in the system truthfully”, says Erik de Graaf of Het Collaboration for Secondary Education Groningen. According to him, the central registration system was not only sold for privacy and cost reasons, but also because 40 percent of the students at secondary schools in Groningen come from the province. “Those schools no longer do Integrip.”
De Graaf does not know how many affected students there are. It seems that there will be a new central registration system. Alderman Carine Bloemhoff of education says in a response to the cheating that the municipality has no involvement in the lottery. “The application procedure is an agreement between the schools themselves. We find the signals of cheating so important that we will discuss them with the school boards.”