Primary schools are continuing to discriminate against children from migrant backgrounds when deciding what level of secondary school they should go to, an education watchdog has said.

Research by Kennisplatform Inclusief Samenwerken (KIS), which campaigns for equality in education, said parents had virtually no opportunity to challenge teachers’ recommendations.

Being placed in a lower stream in the stratified Dutch system could hold back children’s development by years and severely damage their self-esteem, KIS researcher Suzan de Winter-Koçak told Nu.nl.

“Teachers are more likely to say to children with a migrant background: ‘Take it easy, don’t be on edge’,” she said. “They mean well, but they’re often not aware of the effect of a lack of incentive in their pupils.

“If the school places you too low you you have to ‘pile up’ training modules to get where you want to be. It costs years of extra learning.”

Schools ‘untouchable’

De Winter-Koçak said part of the problem was that schools had too much power to decide children’s fates. One in three schools never or rarely changed their minds when parents complained about their children’s secondary school destination, previous studies found.

“There isn’t a single objective party that can give a binding ruling over a school’s advice if there is a dispute about it,” she said. “The schools are completely untouchable when it comes to issuing advisories. And parents can’t do anything about it.”

De Winter-Koçak called for the whole system of streaming children when they leave primary school, typically around the age of 12, to be abolished to give teenagers a fairer chance.

“Placing children too low affects their trust in the education system in the long term and probably their trust in institutions in general,” she said. “That’s why the whole advice system needs to be scrapped.”

The PO-Raad, the advisory body for primary schools, has also called for the system to be overhauled. In a letter to parliament in May, the council said the current system had “mostly negative effects on pupils with a migrant background and from less favourable social-economic environments.”