ROTTERDAM – I spent a year at the front of a classroom, from 2019 to 2020. Barely had I started as a teacher when the pandemic turned education inside out. Families lost loved ones. Students, suddenly stuck at home, grew isolated. Exams were rewritten or scrapped, and many pupils graduated without ever sitting a full national exam. It was a brutal time for everyone, and for young people most of all.
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Six years on, two Rotterdam schools are shaking up education again. Albeda, with some 21,000 students, and Zadkine, with about 17,000, have announced plans to merge, just as they tried in 2013. That attempt, which aimed to carve the new education giant into five to eight thematic colleges, collapsed. Now they are going for one single vocational institution (MBO, the Dutch senior secondary vocational track).
If the merger goes ahead, it would create one of the largest vocational institutions in the Netherlands and, in effect, a monopoly on vocational education in the region. The Ministry of Education has yet to sign off, but the announcement has already stirred strong reactions.
Supporters point to economies of scale and a stronger hand in dealing with government and industry. Critics fear a narrower range of programmes, less closely matched to the labour market. A monopolist, after all, has nothing to fear from competition: teachers, parents, students and employers would simply have nowhere else to go.
A wave of mergers
To understand how we got here, it helps to look back. In 1996, the Netherlands introduced lump-sum funding. Schools could no longer bill the Ministry of Education for individual costs. Instead, they received a fixed budget, free to spend it largely as they saw fit and to keep any surplus.
The effect was a shift in focus from education to business operations. Schools came to be run by business economists rather than educators, and began to prize capital, property and profit above teachers, students and good results. Subject specialists were pushed out. In their place came people like me, asked to teach both Economics and Dutch. Economics was my training. Dutch was added because I happened to run a literary café and a second-hand bookshop. To this day, many teachers stand in front of classes for subjects they were never trained to teach.
Fewer lessons
Alongside consolidation and cost-cutting, many schools sharply reduced teaching time. Fewer lessons means higher profits. After lump-sum funding arrived, the cuts went so deep that in 2006 the education minister set a statutory minimum of 1,040 hours a year, roughly 20 hours a week. In 2015 it was lowered to 1,000 hours. Today, because summer holiday dates vary, the effective figure is 988 hours, or 19 per week.
That figure even includes the time it takes to change classrooms. Since 2013, the five to ten minutes students need to walk from one room to the next have counted towards the minimum, up to four room changes a day. Schools responded by scheduling no more than four blocks of two lessons a day. That alone wiped out around 65 hours of teaching per student.
It did not stop there. Schools also introduced test weeks en masse. For a day with two tests and one lesson, a school may log 350 minutes while it actually uses only 150. That strips students of another 66 hours a year. Meanwhile, since 2012, self-study periods in which pupils work alone on assignments under a teacher’s watchful eye have counted as teaching time too.
The consequences are damaging. Students get less and less classroom teaching. Well-off parents cut back their working hours to shuttle children between ballet, riding, singing lessons and homework tutoring. Low-income parents watch their children drift around the streets all day.
A growing bureaucracy
Greater autonomy gave school boards more room to organise education as they pleased. At the same time, the administrative burden has grown sharply. Schools that once gained freedom must now report at length on quality systems, procedures, finances and results. Teachers and school leaders complain bitterly about the paperwork.
This is the backdrop to the proposed Albeda–Zadkine merger. Supporters expect the new institution to be better equipped for the challenges ahead. Opponents warn that a monopolist will widen the gap between supply and demand, and, with no competition, will see no need to invest in innovation, or in its most valuable assets: its teachers and students. Why would it? Parents, students, teachers and, ultimately, employers would have no alternative.
So the question is not just whether the merger makes financial and organisational sense. It is what it would mean for the quality of education in the Rijnmond region, and for the well-being and prosperity of the region as a whole, if the ministry gives it the green light.
Whatever the ministry decides, I urge our readers to press their elected representatives and employers to do everything in their power to stop this merger.