Parents, pupils and students need to have a choice of education institutions. This is one of the strengths of the Dutch system. Mergers between schools and colleges sometimes lead to an undesirable limitation of this freedom of choice. The minister should assess proposed mergers to prevent this from happening.
10 October 2005
Introduce a duty to report proposed mergers
The Education Council believes that there should be a duty on schools and colleges to report proposed mergers to the Minister. The Minister could then assess whether or not the proposed merger would lead to an undesirable limitation of the freedom of choice in a given area. This merger check would be particularly important for higher education, the vocational and adult education sector and for secondary education.
There is a concern that increased scale leads to poorer quality and increased bureaucracy in education. Neither of these has been proven, however. What is true, though, is that attention to quality and bureaucracy can contribute to managing scale. Attention to freedom of choice has the same effect.
Organise smaller learning environments
A sense of belonging among all parties is crucially important in creating a good environment at school. Not just among pupils and students themselves, but also between staff and pupils. Teachers feel more comfortable in small-scale environments than in large-scale schools. The Education Council calls for small-scale learning environments: a school can be large, but the environment where children are taught should be small.
Governance culture of modesty
There is also a cultural aspect to scale. The Education Council believes that management in all sectors of education should be in keeping with its role as a service to the primary process: learning and teaching. This demands a culture of modesty.