Dutch secondary schools are to look again at the capabilities of all pupils before they enter the third year to assess whether or not they should switch to a different level of education, Trouw reports on Wednesday.

The secondary education council VO-raad hopes the measure will help eradicate inequality in access to education.

Currently, children are assessed at the end of their last year of primary school and the choice of secondary school level – vocational training (vmbo), pre-college (havo) or pre-university (vwo)  – tends to be set in stone. But several recent reports say this system is disadvantaging late developers and children who get little support at home.

By reassessing children when they are 14, late developers will be able to jump to a higher school stream, the council says.

However, the new system will only work if schools operate mixed ability classes for the first two years and if they have different streams within the same school. An increasing number of schools, particularly in the cities, only offer one type of education.

Council chairman Paul Roosenmoller told Trouw that many schools are prepared to adapt to allow children to move more easily between streams. ‘Some schools can do this easily but others will take a few years,’ he said.

Tutors

Meanwhile, trade union CBV has published research showing that teachers are becoming increasingly worried about the number of commercial tuition bureaus that are springing up.

Some charge up to €70 an hour to tutor children and this is only widening the gap between rich and poor pupils, RTL news quotes the union as saying.