Wealthier parents' spending on tutors, extra lessons increasing inequalit in education

The ever-growing private tutoring industry is increasing inequality among rich and poor children, and that has to stop, experts told AD. The government is aware of this, and the Education Minister has called on schools to only offer tutoring at school so that it is “accessible to everyone.”

New figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) again showed that kids from richer families also enjoy better education, according to AD. Schoolchildren in richer municipalities perform much better than children from poorer families. In Pekela, less than 30 percent of primary school pupils reach the target level in arithmetic. In the much richer municipality of Wassenaar, that is almost 65 percent.

The list of places where children score well in their maths tests includes a striking number of wealthy municipalities - Bloemendaal, Wassenaar, Oegstgeest, and Gooise Meren, among others. That’s not surprising, PO-Raad, the sector association for primary education, told the newspaper. “In the poorer neighborhoods of the big cities, you have schools with a structural staff shortage of 25 percent, so that picture fits the conclusion you draw,” a spokesperson said.

Schools in more disadvantaged areas are known to have a harder time filling their vacancies. The increasing spending on private tutoring, mostly only affordable to wealthier parents, adds to that inequality.

In 2017, households invested 320 million euros in extracurricular tutoring. That increased to 472 million euros in 2022, according to CBS. According to the Chamber of Commerce, hundreds of new tutoring businesses open every year.

“In my dream world, there is no extracurricular tutoring,” Hans Spekman, director of the Youth Education Fund, told AD. “It increases inequality, and it damages children.” Spekman points out that there is hardly any supervision on this type of education, which raises questions about its quality.

The government needs to intervene, Spekman said. “The government must now infest fully unequally for equal opportunities. That means not spreading all the finances across all schools but looking exactly at which schools need something extra. This way, you ensure that your best teachers stay at school and that parents don’t move to an agency.”

Education Minister Marielle Paul has drawn up guidelines for the tutoring industry, stating that schools can no longer advertise commercial tutoring agencies and must arrange additional education with non-profit parties as much as possible. She hopes this will reduce the number of tutoring agencies and make additional lessons accessible to more kids. “It should not depend on your parents’ wallet whether you can get extra help,” Paul said.