Marco Pastors of the National Program Rotterdam-South is held up as an example for Groningen by national politicians. He is critical: “Poor Groningers. I worry that your administrators are focusing more on what The Hague is doing wrong than what they need to change themselves. They only prey on money when it should be about youth.”
The backwardness of East Groningen, the northern urban districts and the Veenkoloniën is on the national political agenda. According to researchers and politicians such as Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Rotterdam South’s approach is a good example of how an area can be boosted with extra money and attention. Newspaper of the North therefore took a look at Marco Pastors, former Liveable Rotterdam politician and now director of the National Program Rotterdam South.
At first sight a world of difference: South Rotterdam versus East Groningen and the Drents-Groningse Veenkoloniën. In Rotterdam, the ports and construction cranes stand out, the high buildings, the metro line above our heads and especially the crowds.
If you look closer, you will see similarities. Streets full of small rental houses, half-empty shops full of rubbish next to telephone shops, snack bars and care consultants. Elderly people who take all the time for a walk to the supermarket. A big difference is the skin color: in Rotterdam you mainly see people of foreign origin.
Agreement with poor areas of Groningen
The National Program Rotterdam South is located on the ground floor of an apartment building near Maashaven metro station. Here we speak to Marco Pastors, who has been director there since 2012.
,,I think that the similarity between poor areas in Groningen and poor areas here in South Rotterdam is that children do not get through their school career well enough if you compare it with children in the rest of the country”, Pastors starts off. “That adults are working much less, have many more benefits, low-paid work, often also a temporary contract.”
He describes South Rotterdam: “This is an urban area that did not exist 120 years ago. Stomped out of the ground in one go and therefore also out of time in one go. Very little has been renewed for 100 years. Rotterdam started to develop its ports. Then workers had to be found. They were found in Zeeland and Brabant. But that work has slowly disappeared. And then people here become unemployed.”
That is quite comparable to, for example, the Veenkoloniën, where people came from far and wide to reclaim the peat. Later, work continued in agriculture and factories such as Philips in Stadskanaal and Akzo in Emmen were built.
People with purchasing power are leaving
Pastors: ,,The houses have not been further renovated. Those who do continue to work and can afford a better home, then move away. Because yes, there is no better home here. If a house becomes available here, who will still want to live there? Only people who haven’t found their way up yet. Then you see that such an area is slowly deteriorating.”
The future mayor of Amsterdam Eberhard van der Laan was Minister of Housing, Neighborhoods and Integration for a year and a half in 2008-2010 when the National Program started in Rotterdam. Pastors: ,,He said ‘in fact, South Rotterdam is also a shrinking area’. Because promising people leave. Basic amenities are also disappearing. The shopping streets are getting poorer, cheaper. So the people with purchasing power can’t buy anything there. They go shopping elsewhere, which makes it even more difficult for those entrepreneurs. That has similarities with a shrinking area.”
But it’s not just the homes and shops. It is also the lack of work.
Schools not involved
“When looking for an answer to the question of what to do about it, schools and employers are often not involved,” notes Pastors. “Then a municipality will decide for itself what is going on, and in the case of Groningen, each municipality for itself. The municipal administrators and municipal officials often do not have the awareness to say: ‘Yes, but wait a minute: we as a municipality do not train people, the schools do that’.”
“So if we want people to be better educated, we have to involve the schools. And the employers. In construction, in healthcare, and there asking the question: ‘How is it possible that you don’t get your employees from these areas yourself? How is it possible that you don’t find them there and that so many people are on benefits?
One of the most striking examples from South Rotterdam: all schoolchildren receive 10 extra hours of lessons at school. And then, from group 6 of primary school, they are given extra encouragement to do a course in care or technology. The employers in healthcare and technology have made a deal for this: everyone who completes such a promising MBO course is guaranteed a job.
It appears to work in practice: unemployment falls, the level of education rises; Rotterdam South will become more like the rest of the four major cities. But the recovery is fragile. The corona crisis has hit the district hard. “These kinds of vulnerable areas feel the crisis the hardest and the recovery the last,” says Pastors.
‘What do you want to be when you’ve grown up’
The school plan did not go smoothly, Pastors remembers. “It was the joint answer to the question of what it takes for our children to achieve higher school results. It’s not just that extra class time. Other children in the Netherlands continue their development after regular school hours. Then in their free time they go to the sports club with their parents, do something with music or dance or something like that. If they have a bit of trouble with a certain subject, they get help from their parents or real tutoring. Those families also often talk about ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’. Then you will also be stimulated a little. That is a continuous process. And our children very often don’t have that.”
,,So that’s why the schools said: ‘If we just teach 10 hours extra every week. Instead of 26 hours it will be 36 hours. But there is also often a lot going on at home, for example with older brothers going off the rails or a mother who should actually be receiving mental health treatment. Or there are debts and bailiffs come. Or a neighbor who terrorizes the entire gallery. If all that is going on, then it doesn’t matter what we do in school. If nothing happens at home, then the child is of little use.”
“So the care and assistance must also do much more. Debt assistance, language assistance, neighborhood team assistance, social neighborhood teams. If the school says that there may be something wrong with the child, then that assistance should not be until six weeks later.
But aren’t there too few teachers?
,,No no no. If you look at the macro figures, you say the Netherlands has a teacher shortage. Nobody would have blamed us if we had said, there is a teacher shortage, we can’t do it. We asked the question here, what does it take to make it work? Well, you can’t do that with pabo teachers, because there are too few of them. But if we ask the music school and all kinds of foundations that were already there in the field of sports: can you also provide a classical offer? So that you don’t just offer a program to one child or five children in a community center, but that you simply do something for a school class. We always ask the question: ‘How is it possible?’”
,,You have here in the SKVR, the Foundation for Artistic Education Rotterdam. They now teach a lot at our primary school. And those professionals like that, the hourly rates are also a bit more generous than if you just teach 1 or 2 children outside school hours. So they do that classically. And that’s why all our schools, despite the teacher shortage, just get their schedule full. They can also choose from the providers. That kind of thing is possible everywhere.”
“Think of practitioners from the business community as well. They just know something about their sector, they have a nice story to go with it, they can do fun experiments. They can fill their hours that way.”
Why does something like this not get off the ground in Groningen?
Pastors has studied it a bit and he recently visited the council committee of the municipality of Groningen, together with former SP leader Ron Meyer, who leads a National Program in South Limburg.
,,I am really a bit worried that your administrators are focusing much more on what The Hague is doing wrong instead of what they themselves have to change to do it right,” says Pastors.
Administratively things are also not well organized in Groningen, he thinks. “The National Program there is not a joint project of those joint municipalities. A bag of money has been sent to Groningen, much more money than we have ever had here. And each municipality has taken that money to its hole. They are now secretly eating it. Instead of saying: ‘What should we do, where in this region, to create a good perspective for our inhabitants again?’
Education is a very sensitive point
“I thought: those poor Groningen people! What is it about? Children better performance at school, adults more at work. This is important. The foundation of your life. But if the municipality sets to work on its own, you often end up on such a bridge, a cycle path or a playground. When the municipality starts talking to residents, people are really nice. That’s a nice little bridge, they say. But before a resident bangs his fist on the table and says: ‘Why do children achieve much lower school performance here at school than in the rest of the Netherlands? Can’t we even do something about education?’ That’s a very sensitive point.”