It seems like a paradox: the educational achievements of Dutch children must increase. And the pressure to perform must be reduced. From the annual report of the Education Inspectoratethe State of Educationturned out this week, again, the first.
The amendment to the law proposed on Tuesday by Education Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf (D66) shows the second – he wants to relax the binding study advice for first-year students, because it causes too much stress.
But it’s not a paradox. Rather a sign that the differences between pupils in the Netherlands have grown rapidly.
On the one hand, the number of children who do not even reach the minimum reading level to get by with, say, a toaster manual is increasing. More than a third of fifteen-year-olds in the third grade of VMBO basic and senior secondary education and 11 percent of pupils in MAVO 3 cannot read well enough to survive in society. If they are not two reading levels higher (reference level 2) by the age of sixteen, they are officially regarded as ‘low literate’. From the State of Education It also turned out that on average one in five HAVO and VWO students failed the Dutch exam last year.
On the other hand, there is a growing group of pupils and students who rush from one test to the next and consider every (potential) fail as an unmitigated disaster. More often than ever, they report to their GP or student psychologist with stress, heart palpitations, sleeping problems or panic attacks. There the pressure to perform must be reduced.
Teachers
And then there are the teachers, who try to steer all this in the right direction. They are less and less. At secondary schools, 23 percent of vacancies were not filled this year. Last year this was 17 percent, the year before 10 percent. Especially for the subjects Dutch, French, German and the science subjects.
In deprived areas of large cities, almost a quarter of secondary school lessons are now taught by unqualified teachers. Nationally, it is 10 percent.
Hundreds of primary schools in the five major cities only teach four days a week because there are not enough staff for five days: 31 school boards in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and Almere have been granted dispensation from early 2021 to the summer of 2024 for the legal rule that primary schools must teach five days a week.
Inspector General Alida Oppers of the Education Inspectorate said about this on Thursday NRC: “I find it distressing that it is precisely the children who are most dependent on teachers for their general development that have the fewest teachers.”
To make the work more attractive, teachers who work at the 1,300 schools (15 percent) with many children from low-income groups have been receiving a salary allowance of 5 to 8 percent since 2022.
In order to make the subject even more attractive to novice teachers, Dennis Wiersma (VVD), Minister for Primary and Secondary Education, announced this week that he wants more teachers, his aim being 80 percent, to receive a permanent contract.
The question is whether that will quickly get results. It’s more like a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. The teacher shortage will continue to grow in the coming years, due to an aging population and competition from other sectors.
The differences in the income level of parents exacerbate the differences between their children, the Education Inspectorate points out in the State of Education 2023: students of parents from a lower income class are on average more likely to fail than students from parents from a higher income class. They are also less likely to enter havo or vwo.
Homework support
The increased number of pupils who still go to homework support after school (a quarter) is an important factor here. Parents who can afford it are more likely to send their children to tutoring. Tutoring costs 10 to 40 euros per hour. At the same time, the pressure that many, often highly educated parents themselves, exert on their children to achieve high grades keeps those children on their toes. That they have to go to pre-university education (VWO) against the odds, while HAVO or VMBO might suit them better.
The cause of this increasing pressure to perform has a deep social cause: the urge to obtain the highest possible diploma. A high education gives much more chance of a high income, social status, a house to buy, travel opportunities.
Moreover, the idea seems to have arisen that societal ‘failure’ – becoming addicted or unemployed or surviving on a low income or benefits – is entirely your own fault. Success is a choice and so is failure.
At the beginning of this century it was a strategic choice of the government to allow as many young people as possible to obtain a high diploma. As a ‘knowledge country’, the Netherlands had to compete with the strongly emerging Asian countries.
The result: never before have so many young people studied at a university or college as now: their number has doubled in the past twenty years.
But the tide turned: a growing group of young people are achieving a lower level of education than their parents, according to research by Maarten Wolbers, professor of education research at Radboud University Nijmegen, at the end of last year. Logical, he said in an interview with NRC. After all, there is a ceiling on the level of education. If so many people are higher educated, the chances are greater that their children will no longer reach the same level. It explains, he says, the pressure some parents put on their children.
Read
For the time being, the biggest concern seems to be the average decline in the reading and math achievements of Dutch youth. Even in HAVO 3 last year, 3 percent of 15-year-olds did not yet have the minimum reading level – which in theory every 12-year-old in the country should have. Only 26 percent of havo 3 “can independently read a wide variety of texts on topics from (vocational) training and social issues,” according to research by the Education Inspectorate.
The ‘Basic Skills Master Plan’ that Wiersma announced a year ago cannot be expanded fast enough. Although there must be enough teachers.
And the performance pressure? Ideally, each child follows the education they can handle. Not too high, not too low. Not too theoretical, not too practical. Ideally, every school gets the best out of every student. And there will be slightly more pressure to perform in Rotterdam-Zuid or Heerlen-Noord and slightly less in Het Gooi and Haarlem.
Correction (May 13, 2023): An earlier version of this article stated that 23 percent of high school vacancies were open last year. However, that percentage concerns this year, and that has been adjusted above.
A version of this article also appeared in the May 13, 2023 newspaper.