The summer holidays are no guarantee of relaxation. For example, working parents seem to suffer from stress because their children may no longer be able to go to school five days a week in September.
According to a poll by Radboud University in Nijmegen, it is so difficult for half of the schools to find teachers that it is obvious to cancel teaching hours.
Schools have had to do art and flying work for years to get the timetables in order. Primary education is short of nearly ten thousand teachers, while more than half of the vacancies are not filled in secondary education. Add to that the fact that the workload for some lecturers is so high that they drop out for a shorter or longer period of time. And then there is the prognosis that around 2030 a large group of teachers will retire.
At the end of June, the Education Council predicted painful and hard choices. The council foresees structurally fewer lessons in the future, in some cases it is impossible to avoid a four-day school week. In addition, it is advised to take a more critical look at the increasingly broad range of education on offer and to deploy staff more intelligently, for example by making teachers available for different schools.
A crucial question is how to deal with the hours released. Do parents have to take children to work, or can childcare be arranged? Will students be forced to spend even more time behind their phone screens? If the phenomenon of the damned pay classes suddenly turns out to be a solution, only families with money will benefit from it, with all the consequences for inequality of opportunity.
All in all, the prospects for education are not very cheerful. Not only parents can expect an exciting new school year, that also applies to the schools and their students. And because the chance is very small that someone will come up with a solution in the coming weeks, there is little choice but to accept this decline as reality.